Allow me to chime in, I see there are 4 retorts to your post.
I had to do a study about 6 mos ago about whether it was cost effective for a UK company to do business in Quebec. It is a software company- to sell in the francophone markets you need to localize everything to a point that can mind-boggling (ie try to determine the french word for "kludge" or "software breakpoint") or else face hefty fines. This was a new research project for me, I had never thought about the worldwide penetration of linguistics and language before, but in the back of my mind I assumed some asian language would eventually dominate world speech as english fell out of favor, just due to the population issue.
Anyway what I discovered is that the people who really study linguistics (who are in Japan for the most part) look at one primary differentiator as to which language is likely to gain in usage and dominate- and that is the language where the most new words are being created. That language for now is english by far (no differentiation between US and UK english)- because the technical words are the new words and those are almost all in english. Ex- words/phrases like kludge, bang (meaning "alert"), gui etc are on this watchlist and if they hang around for a while, they get added to the global list of words and the new words tend to migrate to the other languages in their native form, so there might be a chinese term "gui" pronounced gui in chinese, but it is unlikely that a word for Gui will emerge in native Cantonese, for example.
So your post #2 agrees completely with my research.
Now, if the US loses the new industries to china/india, which may well happen especially if Bush hangs around, then those countries will drive innovation and then all bets are off. But for now, with US companies leading in innovation, english looks to dominate. |
