How likely is it that Mandarin Chinese will become an international language?
What are the reasons that it may and the obstacles that prevent it?
Would it be truly international or just regional?
How quickly could this happen?
Would the writing system have to change for this to happen?
Any views our there?
The first obstacle that comes to my mind is all the keyboards that would have to be changed.
The main determining factor will be the influence of those who already speak the language in the world. China is a big country and its influence is growing, so it's a definite possibility, although perhaps not for a while.
However, some societies, particularly in Asia, prefer to keep their own languages for themselves. If this is true for the Chinese, they might prefer to learn the languages of others rather than have others learn their language.
The major practical obstacle is the language's use of ideograms in place of an alphabet. From an IT standpoint, this is unbelievably inefficient. Systems like Unicode and its recent extensions were made necessary mainly by the absence of an alphabet in languages like Chinese, and today most of the Unicode space is taken up by such languages. It's just a massively illogical system from a data-processing standpoint, and it will continue to be so forever.
In other respects, I don't see too many disadvantages. Chinese isn't fundamentally more difficult than any other language—disregarding the inefficient written language, that is. The pronunciation is very different from what people in the West are accustomed to, but anything can be learned in time … if the price is right.
The way around the difficult writing system would be, I would guess, making Pinyin more widespread. Speaking Mandarin doesn't seem like a very daunting task to me, but learning how to write and read certainly does. That would be the biggest obstacle to the spread of Mandarin as a global language. But I do think Mandarin will become an increasingly large presence in the world, if not just because China is such a large presence with over 1 billion people.
But I can't see it becoming a language with a widespread use such as English. That's because it's a non-Western language with no relation at all to the Indo-European languages that are found throughout most of the industrialized world. It is much easier and less daunting for a Westerner or speaker of a Western language to learn English, for example, than to learn a totally unrelated language.
So basically I think within the region and for all affairs with China, Mandarin will become incredibly important, for business, foreign relations, etc. However I don't think it would reach the level of an adopted lingua franca that English seems to enjoy.
Dear Steve,
According to a newspaper article I read recently in the "Tacoma News Tribune", the Chinese are intensifying their efforts to spread Mandarin to parts of China where other languages and dialects are spoken: Sinjang, Shanghai, even Hong Kong. However, it is unlikely that Mandarin Chinese will ever become an international language or that the Chinese will try to make it so. During the years that they were close friends with Albania(1960's & 1970's) for instance, they used languages like Esperanto and English to communicate with the Albanians and it doesn't seem to have been a problem for them. I've known many Chinese students and immigrants from South East Asia who speak at least one South East Asian language in addition to Chinese and some English and it doesn't bother them. On the contrary, they have all been proud to be multilinguists.
The chinese in general (like the japanese) dislike the foreigners speak their language, they prefer keep it for them like a treasure. Of course i could be wrong but i've already heard that sort of opinion in some chinese mouths.
Th overwhelming majority of Chinese or Japanese are delighted to hear foreigners speaking their language. I know, I speak their languages and the reaction is almost always very positive.
The Chinese are now going to put more effort into spreading their language abroad, which they feel befits their status as a coming superpower. I wonder to what extent they will succeed.
Brennus,
I'm sure that Vencenc and Steve are both telling the truth as they see it though I lean a little closer to Vincenc.
I've thought about the numerous Chinese and Japanese immigrants I've known to see if any of them are like Steve describes. Yes, there have been some that were generous about answering any questions I had about these languages. I still appreciate them to this day. For example, there was Dr. Lai who spent many hours discussing Cantonese and Chinese calligraphy with me; there was even Mrs. Kodama who tried to teach me Japanese songs one night from beautifully illustrated books that she had in her collection.
However, I think that there is also a strong pragmatist streak that runs through these people and that most of them know that foreigners are not going to bother to learn their languages. I still remember a girl from the Phillipines, Nimfa, who told me once that "Chinese and Japanese were such difficult languages!" and she spoke Tagalog, not all that easy either.
Furthermore, the Orientals aslo seem to be intelligent enough to learn other languages and this makes a difference too but I'd better not get into that any further. I opened up a can of worms on another language site once when I suggested that the Russians weren't as stupid as many Westerners thought.
>>However, I think that there is also a strong pragmatist streak that runs through these people and that most of them know that foreigners are not going to bother to learn their languages.<<
I don't think you could get on well in China or Japan for a longer time if you didn't learn the language at all. On the other hand, I also agree that East Asians seem to be more adaptable to Western culture than vice versa, which may be one reason why they learn the language of the country they happen to live in (not only English - almost all East Asians I have met in Hungary have been quite fluent in Hungarian, which may be more difficult to learn for them than English). Same goes for Africans, whichever part of the continent they come from.
>>I opened up a can of worms on another language site once when I suggested that the Russians weren't as stupid as many Westerners thought.<<
Who says Russians are stupid? The few of them I have known personally have been very refined and cultured. I think the reason why they are seen as stupid is the stereotyped ways of presenting Russians, mostly in American movies (there are exceptions, of course, both ways).
"Oriental - Usage Note: Asian is now strongly preferred in place of Oriental for persons native to Asia or descended from an Asian people. The usual objection to Oriental meaning "eastern" is that it identifies Asian countries and peoples in terms of their location relative to Europe. However, this objection is not generally made of other Eurocentric terms such as Near and Middle Eastern. The real problem with Oriental is more likely its connotations stemming from an earlier era when Europeans viewed the regions east of the Mediterranean as exotic lands full of romance and intrigue, the home of despotic empires and inscrutable customs. At the least these associations can give Oriental a dated feel, and as a noun in contemporary contexts (as in "the first Oriental to be elected from the district") it is now widely taken to be offensive. However, Oriental should not be thought of as an ethnic slur to be avoided in all situations. As with Asiatic, its use other than as an ethnonym, in phrases such as Oriental cuisine or Oriental medicine, is not usually considered objectionable."
>>How likely is it that Mandarin Chinese will become an international language?
When we look back into history the answer to this question should be quite straightforward, based on a very simple formula that has been effective until now:
The more powerful a nation the more widespread/ international a language has become / will be - be it eg. the Roman Empire that helped Latin to become an international language, or be it the British/American Empire that has contributed to the present global "success" of English.
So, taking China's tremendously growing economical power and technological successes (eg. their spaceflight projects) it "normally" should be just a matter of years or decades before Mandarin will spread to many other countries and will finally be accepted internationally:
No matter how difficult a language is, people have and will always be willing to learn a language if there is enough motivation - and making business has always been a thriving factor.
However, in today's world of globalization and High Tech I am not sure whether/how much of all these rules still apply. In particular since the advent of the Internet the world has grown into a global village - and it has become so much easier to communicate worldwide:
You don't even have to learn another language because machine translations will do the hard work for you. Of course these tools are still in their infancy and are still far from being perfect...
To sum it up, in my view the world has become much less predictible as a whole.
Who can predict whether China as the last remaining communist superpower won't face the same destiny as the Sowjets with their collapse?
Who can say for sure how India, another nation with immense potential and motivation, will really progress?
Who really knows how fast these machine translation tools will progress in today's high-speed advancement in technology, so that learning Mandarin might become obsolete?
Who can really say for sure whether international governments won't agree on a common international/global language but which might not be Mandarin?
I believe that everyone who really "knows" the answer to the initial question especially in today's world is more like a fortuneteller: Of course, it is quite easy and you can't go wrong now to predict the future as it hasn't happened yet. However, the world has simply become too complex to make any reliable predictions. At least, that's how I see the truth...