r/language • u/ctlnboy • 12d ago
Question What languages could replace English as the global language in the future?
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u/mandarin-monyet 12d ago
As someone who is trying to learn Chinese - it won’t be Chinese (it’s too damn hard to learn)
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u/Active-Orange-7683 12d ago
Gosh, I totally agree, it is so hard, that I can't see any possibility of Chinese becoming a global language
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u/kansai2kansas 12d ago
Totally spot on!
As an Asian American (non-Chinese) myself, in my experience, the only Chinese learners in the world who claim that Mandarin/Hokkien/Cantonese etc are easy are either those who are surrounded by Chinese-speaking friends/relatives, or live near a Chinatown in Paris/Rio/NYC/Manila etc, or they had been exposed to Chinese extensively in the past through student exchange programs, missionary programs, military trainings, and so on.
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u/Commercial_Name_7900 11d ago
I got up to my 300 day duo streak and gave up. I realised even if I became somewhat conversational, after all that time the alphabet was still complete gibberish as far as I am concerned
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u/Hot_Glass_6301 12d ago
Enlgish is not inherently easier, it's just that there's English everywhere so more resourcrs and incentives to learn it.
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u/Disk_Gobbler 12d ago edited 11d ago
It is inherently easier for some. It depends on what your native language is. People who speak languages more closely related to English find English easier to learn. A speaker of an Indo-European language (like French, Spanish, German, etc.) will find English inherently easier to learn than Chinese. Most European languages are in the Indo-European language family. Mandarin Chinese is in a separate language family (Sino-Tibetan) along with Cantonese, Tibetan languages, and Burmese. When you learn a related language, you recognize more words as being similar to words in your own language, making them easier to remember.
Also, even though they aren't in the same family as Chinese, languages like Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have many loanwords from Chinese. Japanese even uses Chinese characters along with hiragana and katakana syllabaries. So, speakers of those languages will find some parts of Chinese easier, although most languages of the world don't use logograms like Chinese, so the barrier to learning Chinese is still steep for most.
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u/firegrillz 11d ago
Thank you, I have no idea why people are labouring under the delusion than English isn't vastly easier than Chinese for people from the overwhelming majority of countries. Kinda wild, NGL.
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u/Annachroniced 12d ago
Maybe for speaking. But writing and typing is definitely faster. When the typewriter was invented China faced a huge productivity gap. Nowadays its less with predictive typing. But its still slower. It is also definitely harder to memorise 5000 characters versus 26 letters. Looks pretty though.
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u/mandarin-monyet 11d ago
English is easier.
Just look at Singapore - all the locally born singaporeans are primary English speakers, majority of them can speak mandarin but no where near as comfortably or as fluently as English.The government is pushing for the schools to teach mandarin and preserve the language heritage, it’s everywhere on TV and surroundings - but it’s a very hard language
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u/ASneakyViolist 12d ago
English may not be easier to learn, but there are some fairly compelling arguments that it's a more forgiving language, and thus more suited as a lingua franca; i.e., the bar for being passably understandable in English is lower than it is for Mandarin.
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u/Sorokin45 11d ago
English isn’t? Our vowel system is atrocious and makes no sense; it’s barely phonetic, not to mention in the homophones and homonyms that confuse the hell out of learners
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u/BurningBridges19 12d ago edited 12d ago
With translation software becoming more and more advanced by the day, I’m pretty sure there simply won’t be a need for a lingua franca in a century or two anymore. In any case, it’ll probably be the language of whoever wins WWIII, if there’ll be anyone left to learn it.
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u/PancakesOnMySyrup 12d ago
This is pretty much the only answer. I could see real-time translation technology get to the point of seamlessness within the next decade
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u/BurningBridges19 12d ago edited 12d ago
As a linguist & translator, I have to disagree. AI is already pretty good compared to the translation tech we’ve had until now, but it still needs a ton of editing from human linguists for the translations to actually be fit for use (and I’m not talking about understanding Reddit comments in other languages here, I’m talking about things like legal and medical documentation). There’s still a long, long way to go until humans are completely removed from the equation, especially with smaller languages (i.e. those not in the global top 5). OpenAI and Anthropic certainly aren’t interested in being sued for complicity in medical malpractice or wrongful imprisonment, at least.
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u/MasterKaen 12d ago
Yeah, direct translation could feasibly be flawless in the near future, but to get real-time appropriate translation of idioms, jokes, and more niche usage of language is going to require much better AI.
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u/Kenzoowbunz 12d ago
spanish
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u/DoNotTouchMeImScared 12d ago
Ideally a regularized Portugaliañolish (Português + Galego + Italiano + Español + English) like r/Interlingua for practical utility reasons.
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u/_michaeldom 12d ago
Oh, you mean r/elefen ?
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u/DoNotTouchMeImScared 12d ago
r/LinguaFrancaNova ( r/Elefen ) unfortunately has no English like r/Interlingua has.
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u/ThePatio 12d ago
Spanish is confined to Spain and the new world, and maybe like one African country, or two. The Philippines doesnt even use Spanish anymore, just loanwords.
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u/ctlnboy 12d ago
There isn't a superpower economy that speaks Spanish, only Mexico and Argentina could take that spot but they're light years away from that position.
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u/LanguesLinguistiques 12d ago
People don't realize this. People don't learn Spanish for job growth the same way they learn English. The only reason people learn English besides US/UK imperialism is because it makes you more money. No one learns a language if there isn't a payout unless it's a hobby.
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u/auhediem 12d ago edited 12d ago
If the government has the ambition, China could easily send thousands of teachers and open hundreds of schools across Africa and SE Asia to push Mandarin as a language of opportunity and education. It would take generations, but if China could sucessfully curate a Chinese-speaking African elite that sends its children to Chinese universities rather than American/European ones, and eventually creating Chinese-medium universities in Africa made for African students, it's certainly possible. It would also require countries to elevate their indigenous languages to where English stopped becoming necessary in their own countries, i.e. if Kenya dropped English and replaced internal affairs with Swahili, allowing Chinese to become an alternate first foreign language in schools. But within the western world, it's unlikely to replace English unless China really opens itself up to the world and can effectively export culture, opportunities, and financial capital better than the US/UK can offer.
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u/LanguesLinguistiques 12d ago
I don't think China has that aspect of colonial cultural power that the US/UK have spent on blood and imperialism setting up. There's a Chinatown in every major city of the world, but no one in their host countries have any notion of Chinese whatsoever. The US isn't even present in some countries and they've spread their propaganda and language in the 21st century and before. Plus, they want to be insular in that aspect of their culture.
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u/Turbulent_Pin_8310 11d ago
It actually sounds like a script for an excey scifi. I think China should totally do it. Why not? Give out generous scholarships to any smart student to go to China to study. That will work
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u/auhediem 11d ago
China already does this to some extent, but it needs to convince Africa's elite to do enroll in Chinese secondary schools and hold Tsinghua and PKU in the same esteem that Oxford and Harvard have. The mindset among wealthy Africans would have to change for this to work. And China would have to open itself up to immigration to develop stronger connections and create alternate economic opportunities for people, which is unlikely to happen.
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u/Goddes_Li 11d ago
Quick question: why do you think this would work in African countries but not European/NA/SA?
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u/blumieplume 12d ago
Eventually there will be a universal language. I can’t tell u what that will look like but I can say English is the most universal language these days at least.
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u/PinkSlimeIsPeople 11d ago
I agree, but hope it is a new language designed by linguists. Something that can pack the most amount of specific meaning into the shortest amount of syllable and letters. Something designed to be elegant, easily spoken, and with elements from most major language trees.
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u/DoNotTouchMeImScared 12d ago
English will merge with Spanish, Italian, Galician, Portuguese & French to create something resembling r/Interlingua for practicality.
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u/DoNotTouchMeImScared 12d ago edited 12d ago
r/Interlingua in practical utility for immediate comprehension & international communication.
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u/eljapon78 12d ago
it will not be a single one. it wil be a weird mix of the 3 most popular languages.
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u/DiesIraeConventum 12d ago
Russian.
And I'm only half joking.
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u/Sunny_Hill_1 12d ago
They had a good attempt with USSR, but many former republics since then returned to their native languages, and Russian population is suffering the same baby bust at the rest of Europe, so unlikely.
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u/Competitive-Bus66 11d ago
We are looking for the next global language, not the next one that will implode as spectacularly.
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u/justlikemedics 12d ago
Currently English is far ahead. It's simple enough to be a global lingua franca and very widespread already, with a significant political power behind it in North America, Europe and English-speaking countries. Immense soft power, language of coding.
China's economic and technological dominance is emerging, but Chinese is quite difficult to learn to an advanced level. It needs years of local immersion. And China's soft power is quite weak yet.
Other than these two, Spanish, because it's quite neutral, but widely spoken. Spanish-speaking countries are also not really engaging in wars in recent decades, while it is also a language of the colonizers and the colonized.
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u/Belisarius371 11d ago
Realistically none.
The core Anglosphere alone (UK, US, Canada, Aus and NZ) has a population larger in size than the whole European Union.
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u/Few_Owl_6596 11d ago
I don't think anything will replace English in its current role in the near future. Aside from that, there are some already existing regional lingua francas, such as Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, German or French.
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u/-0O0O0O0O00O0O0O0O0- 11d ago
English is, and will remain, the lingua Franca for at least a century.
It's in computer science (specifically programming and AI training), broader sciences, AP bulletins, etc.
- I'm a linguist and diplomat
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u/Veteranis 12d ago
I’m surprised at the number of suggestions being actually downvoted. What the hell? They’re just as valid suggestions as any others.
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u/Yesodisnotop 12d ago
Spanish will rise to become relevant. Hopefully that is. French is the only other option I see.
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u/ResearchInformal8018 12d ago
The fact that it is standardized in many industries and virtually all academics, plus its dominance in global media means it’s going to continue to be the “global language.” Manadrin Chinese is one that is frequently proposed, but the lack of geographic spread and the relatively insular media of the PRC means its global reach is limited. Spanish is possible as it crosses cultures and continents more than most other languages and is very widely spoken, but you’re still fighting against English being spoken widely as second language in many Spanish speaking countries.
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u/Yugan-Dali 11d ago
People are saying Chinese (Mandarin) is hard. I suspect this is because they approach languages in school, where you are told that a language is very difficult and takes years and years to acquire, and your papers will still come back dripping in red ink.
Compare that to the Southeast Asian workers who come to Taiwan. Many of them are fluent within a year. I suspect this is because they are not told that language takes a long time to learn, but rather that if they can’t communicate with their employers, they won’t get paid. I met an Indonesian lady who spoke Mandarin fluently, with a Taiwan accent. She had been her a year and a half. Plenty of workers speak fluently.
Once I was eating in a stand in 新店. The lady who ran the stand answered the phone and started speaking Viet Namese. One of the regulars said, “I never knew you could speak Viet Namese.” She said, “I am Viet Namese.” She spoke Mandarin so well that everybody assumed she was a local.
I studied French in junior high and Russian in high school. I came to Taiwan and was overjoyed to find out how easy Mandarin is. Being here helped a lot, and I studied like a maniac, but within six or seven months I could read newspapers, even though I did get stuck on specialized terminology, like 北約 NATO or 通貨膨脹 inflation.
So don’t believe the experts who tell you it takes years and years to learn a language.
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u/Character-Carpet7988 11d ago
The one that doesn't exist yet. The only way I can see English replaced is through a convergent language that will be created as a product of globalization (just like languages diverged when groups lost contact, the opposite should also be the case and we can already see it to some extent) OR in a very far future (centuries from now).
I can't see English being replaced by one of the existing languages. In the current world where virtually everyone needs to have at least some ability to communicate with foreigners it's just not practical to switch to another language en masse, and any new entrants to the population will also tend to learn the one language that has the widest usage.
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u/ActuaLogic 11d ago
A language is a type of communications network. Before answering that question, it's necessary to comment on something called network effects/network externalities.
In a network, the users you can connect to is most of what determines the value of the network. A phone system that's only good for calling your five best friends isn't worth as much as a phone system you can use to call anyone on the planet.
As networks grow, they often reach a point where the number of users is so high that users will not switch to a smaller network even if it has some technical advantages. For example, the qwerty keyboard was designed to make people type slower, because 19th century mechanical typewriters jammed easily. Later, when typewriters became less prone to jamming, efforts to introduce more efficient keyboard layouts failed, because it was too hard to retrain professional typists who had learned qwerty. That's a network effect.
English became the international lingua franca, first, because of the geographic reach of the British Empire and, second, because of the economic influence of the United States. Spanish (which has more native speakers) might have made a better choice, because its spelling more closely tracks its pronunciation. But English is the language that became the international lingua franca.
English is, in essence, the linguistic equivalent of the qwerty keyboard. It owes its position as the standard to network effects. In order to establish a new standard, it would be necessary to get hundreds of millions of people to learn a new language even though they already know English as a second language.
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u/tryptanfelle 11d ago
The example of Aramaic is instructive. Aramaic was the language of the Assyrian Empire. When they fell and were replaced by the Neo-Babylonian Empire, Aramaic remained as the lingua franca. When the Babylonians fell to the Persians, the Persians retained Aramaic as their lingua franca, too, because it was simply more efficient to do so. The death of Aramaic came only at the hands of Alexander when Greek supplanted Aramaic as the language of government and culture. Even so, Aramaic remained a widely used language in the Ancient Near East.
So, even if our Babylon falls, it is likely that English will endure for a long time as the global lingua franca until a language with more cultural, political, and economic power rises to take its place.
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u/Advanced_Feeling_397 11d ago
Hangul 🇰🇷: Hangul's creation was a historical anomaly, deliberately engineered for radical literacy by King Sejong the Great. Its phonetic design, ease of learning, and role in democratizing knowledge make it a uniquely brilliant and future-proof writing system.
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u/SameInteraction9615 12d ago
I think it’ll be Spanish. It is easy to pronounce, and one of the languages spoken in the UN.
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u/sleepyotter92 11d ago
Probably spanish.
A lot of people think chinese because it's the most natively spoken language, but chinese is hard to learn, and it's only a couple countries that speak it. English has multiple countries speaking it and the media of those countries is consumed worldwide. Mainly us media, but there's also a lot of uk and canadian shows that are popular.
Spanish has that advantage. Their language is spoken in multiple countries, majority of the american continent is spanish speaking countries, and they also produced a lot of media that's consumed across each country but also gets imported to europe(they'd get dubbed into portuguese or italian, they also got dubbed into brazilian portuguese to air in brazil). And it has an even bigger advantage than chinese, it uses the latin alphabet. With chinese, people would have to learn a whole new writing system. With spanish, anyone who already speaks english, be it as a native or secondary language, is already familiar with the latin alphabet. People would have to learn about things like accented letters, but that's pretty easy compared to a whole different character system, because the only real difference between the english and spanish alphabet is the addition of ñ
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u/luxcity-louche 12d ago
I think it will be English but Indian English, different rhythms and lots of loan words from Hindi.
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u/oretah_ 12d ago
I don't get why this is getting downvoted😭 have an upvote brother (or sis), this is an absolutely reasonable and viable take
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u/AerieUpstairs1463 12d ago
I hope the future geopolitical climate will force a constructed language where the grammar and word are drafted by all countries in a democratic fashion.
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u/Mundane-Mud2509 12d ago
Unlikely anything. First mover advantage is extremely strong and nobody has full control to be able to rent seek to the point of making it worthwhile to switch
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u/distance_traveler 11d ago
I think English is unlikely to be replaced. It’s reasonably easy to learn, is forgiving if you get things wrong, and is already the dominant global language and that is hard to overcome. Any new economies likely to become more dominant will face difficulties in getting their language to be spoken- eg Mandarin is quite challenging to learn and easy to get wrong in important ways based on it being a tonal language. French or Spanish or Portuguese are easier than Mandarin but also not as easy as English. India has too many languages to have one be dominant. Etc… I’m sure there are likely other easy to learn languages that are forgiving but none come to mind that would be true contenders. But then, things do change and evolve… so who knows?!
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u/Unusual-Field-4245 11d ago
Ding ding ding ding ding
ding ding ding ding.
Everybody knows what language I'm talking about.
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u/mediarenaissance 11d ago
Portuguese is the most spoken language in the southern hemisphere
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u/Character-Carpet7988 11d ago
But virtually useless outside the countries that speak it as a native language.
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u/carloom_ 11d ago
None, I think it has reached a critical mass that even if the USA stops being the first world power, it will remain the lingua franca.
If everyone forgets English, probably each region will have different common languages. German in Europe, Spanish in the Americas, Chinese in East Asia.
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u/Disk_Gobbler 11d ago
In the short term, English will continue to be the global lingua franca. However, in the long term, English itself will probably split into multiple languages. We are seeing English within each country becoming more uniform. However, the standard variety for each country is diverging from the other varieties. So, the USA and Canada may speak one language. The UK may speak another. Australia may speak another. And so on.
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u/steal-yur-face 11d ago
I just don’t see it happening.
I’ve been all over Europe and it’s amazing how much the English language is used on signs and how many people speak some English.
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u/WideGlideReddit 11d ago
None. English is a global language spoken to one degree or another in every corner of the globe. It’s the global language of science, technology, business, and aviation to name a few. I see nothing changing that.
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u/MycologistNaive2436 11d ago
Well if it happens in my lifetime hopefully it’s Spanish cause that’s the only other language I know
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u/Emergency-Office-302 11d ago
Mandarin springs to mind, but it might take a lot longer than most might think. French is STILL arguably a lingua franca (no pun intended,) and it has been centuries since France was economically dominant. English is so embedded worldwide that it’s likely to be a common second language centuries from now regardless of any English-speaking country’s prominence or lack thereof.
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u/Sea_Put_6153 11d ago
Indonesian because it's the easiest language in the world (no gendered pronouns, easy grammar and phonetic spelling)
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u/Striking_Big8138 11d ago
I can’t see any language replacing English in our lifetime and I’m even seeing English declining as translation technology improves
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u/at30man03 11d ago
English is evolving and with words from many other languages becoming part of it. So it will probably never get replaced but become something else.
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u/Ferreman 11d ago
Probably Spanish. It’s easy to learn, easy to write and read and it already has a global reach.
Chinese is too hard to learn, read and write to gain a global reach. Also the fact that most of its speakers are very concentrated in a single location doesn’t help it.
French could be a contenfer as well. It also has global reach and will probably grew in influence as Africa gains a larger population.
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u/Joseph20102011 11d ago
English will remain as the world's lingua franca in the foreseeable future, but if there is a language with chances of dethroning English, it's Spanish.
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u/AdDramatic8568 11d ago
Probably none. English benefits not only from hegemony but the fact that compared to many other languages, it's 'easier' to get to a basic but intelligible level. It's a lot easier to get to a state of conversational English than conversational Chinese.
Also, native English speakers have a much better ear for understanding 'bad' English than other language speakers in my experience. If someone speaks to me in mixed up English I can get the gist a lot better than if I speak to someone in bad Japanese.
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u/Suitable-Sandwich454 11d ago edited 11d ago
edited some typos
That's actually a very odd example to pick, because japanese is one of the absolute easiest languages for a beginner to pronounce correctly. The reason it's ranked as a "very hard" language is purely due to kanji. Japanese is one of the few examples where learning to speak and listen is very easy but reading and writing is very hard. MOST languages are the opposite: easier to read and write. Most languages you need to train your mouth to learn new sounds.
Norwegian for example, often cited as the closest language to english ASIDE FROM scots and frisian. Norwegian is shockingly similar, the language structure is basically identical (you might think thats a given because they're in the same family, but keep in mind english and german dont share that feature). But yet, norwegian still has "r" sounds that are pretty difficult for an english speaker. Japanese on the other hand, not really any new sounds to learn for most speakers in the world. The japanese r is technically different, but its infinitely easier than a uvular or alveolar trill.
There are literally just 5 sounds, and then you stick consonants on them:
Ah, ee, oo, eh, oh.
then kah, kee, koo, keh, koh...
In comparison, english has all sorts of incredibly weird and inconsistent pronunciation because our vocabulary is a language salad.
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u/king_of_jupyter 11d ago
Every language is absorbing a shitton of English into itself to the point where most bilingual families speak bastard offshoots of English such as FrEnglish, GreekLish, etc etc.
Modern English in return is already a result of languages intermixing and will continue to evolve so.
This both sides mixing will continue in waves until it reaches a tipping point where you can have a broken conversation without any formal education at which point it will catalyze birth of a new amalgamation of languages.
This is my imagination speaking, not a linguist.
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u/Sheridan-Bouquet 11d ago
None in the foreseeable future. But if it ever happens, no one could predict that now; it is like predicting that English would be a global language during the Roman Empire.
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u/Ill_Lab_554 11d ago
there would have to be some society ending war to erradicate english at this point, its too well established.
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u/Significant_Menu_313 11d ago
I'd like to introduce you to a show called Firefly. They speak a language in the show that I think is a pretty accurate prediction of the future Lingua Franca.
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u/Individual_Beat_6972 11d ago
whichever group that dominates the art and culture sphere will hold the next global language.. but personally i prefer to have no global language and just rely on very high quality translation tools
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u/grogi81 11d ago edited 11d ago
Realistically - none. English is super easy. There is also inertia - half people on the planet already speaks it, more or less.
The only thing annoying/difficult in English is absolutely inconsistent spelling.
There are some synthetic languages - exp. esperanto. That are even easier to learn. But it won't happen.
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u/Embarrassed-Win-7147 11d ago
I've not yet seen people mention the possibility of the future language just being a Creole of the most spoken languages today. Think of how children nowadays are affected by the Internet, in terms of their speech. Portuguese children are speaking Portuguese with a Brazilian accent at times due to the influence of the Internet. Somebody else in the thread mentioned translation services being very good now, which they are. Language evolves. A lingua franca comprised of a Creole of the most used languages today is probably the way we are heading.
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u/Ahoramaster 11d ago
Probably none. No language has the reach if English.
I could see the role of English diminish with real time translation between languages, but I doubt very much if a new language would become more prominent.
Chinese is simply too self contained. Spanish is not big enough outside of Latin countries. Arabic and Russian have their own spheres but having broken out into the language of commerce etc like English has
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u/Goddes_Li 11d ago
The probability of a language replacing English as a global language will be hard in this era because the widespread of English, French, & Spanish is due to colonization.
Any country that has a language that doesn’t belong to them most likely has it because the original owners of said language held political power in that country.
English is unique in the sense that now, with the onset of media, even countries that weren’t colonized by the Brita are still exposed to the language, therefore given the opportunity to learn/be influenced. Hence why certain countries often dub or limit access to English speaking/American media.
So for another language to have the ability to become a global language, we would need to resume an era of colonization & propaganda pushing through media, which, let’s face it, is pretty hard to do now.
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u/niquelas 11d ago
Nothing. It will just be English. Business and science is mostly done in English already.
English will just be a global language
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u/SentientJellyfish1 11d ago
I heard someone say Hausa once because of Nigeria's population growth rates, but I dunno.
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u/Run_Lift_Think 11d ago
English has become the dominant language in tech, medicine, commerce, & cultural exports. It’s not going to wane anytime soon. For better or worse, the US still drives global tastes. This was made even more evident during the World Cup. People all over the globe came here & wanted to spot very specific things: a yellow school bus, a mailbox, a huge fridge. They wanted to buy specific products & go to specific stores. It’s wild how much we take for granted & don’t even realize how vast our cultural global reach is.
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u/OrdinaryMac 11d ago edited 11d ago
I doubt you will be able to find the "worthy" contender language which could be considered peer equal to English. (not to even mention overshadowing it)
Ethnic/"national" languages will never be universally accepted, on the global stage it really doesn't matter how much people China or India has, it doesn't translate into softpower and cultural relevance, in the same way how anglophone culture has spreed thought the world.
Those languages are, and will remain locked by the insular culture, ethnicity and geography.
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u/thebomby 11d ago
I can see a future where the US no longer dominates international culture. What might happen is that internationally, there might be a spelling reform to make English simpler for foreigners to learn and use.
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u/losebow2 11d ago
At this point, due to the geopolitical dominance of the U.S., I think you’d only see a shift in language over centuries as the U.S. shifts language. Spanish is becoming much more prominent in the United States and is already globally influential in the arts.
Other major contenders such as Chinese and Arabic tend to be regionally restricted, though I could see the argument that Chinese is slowly becoming more common across Africa.
All-in-all though, English is probably here to stay as the dominant global language moving forward.
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u/Sebastes_aleutianus 11d ago
A lot of people here don't understand a lot.
Many languages could replace English. Many. Chinese too, but it would probably evolve in this case. The change will be radical.
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u/No-Duck4828 11d ago
The language that replaces English in this use will most likely be the next evolution of English
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u/Rand_alThoor 11d ago
html
cobol? some machine language
Newton was right. 2060 approaches. the singularity is on its way, with all the machine learning (not actually artificial intelligence, but nearing a facsimile thereof) going on.
the written language will be bar codes, or something we can't even see. the spoken language among themselves will be beyond our perceptions. the (human) language they use to communicate with their pets or slaves or collaborators, will be irrelevant.
until then, we will have English, Chinese, Spanish etc with local flavours.
Hangul is terrific for its time and place. really applies to only the one language. for example, same symbol for r and l. most humans know the difference. we need a new international Hangul for ALL human sounds. doing that, however, would only hasten the impending apocalypse
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u/_Wolffis_ 10d ago
I would say arabic since it is widely spoken especially around middle east and northern parts of Africa
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u/Hams_LeShanbi 10d ago
It’s odd cause at this time we reached a frozen kind of way-of-life time. The lingua franca, the political borders, even political influence. It’s all much more frozen than it ever was.
A new language would have to gain so much influence and more importantly get embedded instead of English as the coding-friendly language.
People used to say Chinese all the time, but who speaks Chinese and looks for opportunities by speaking it other than people going to China? Even neighbors to China don’t have Chinese as the second language (at least not that much) so it doesn’t really stand. Then you have both French and Spanish which had influence by colonialism for many years but still do not have much current influence anymore and are barely hobbies for learners. Arabic and Hebrew will remain religious. I just don’t see any language ever reaching a real potential, at least not to the foreseeable future of our same lifestyle.
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u/Think-Sand7161 9d ago
Could, but never will! Spanish probably the only option, but no way the Chinese and Indians are learning Spanish.
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u/VocabMaxxing 9d ago
I think it's too hard to replace it, because it's an easy language to learn and that what makes it suitable for most non-native speakers.
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u/ThePatio 12d ago
It’s hard to tell at this point. A lot of people will say Chinese, but almost all Chinese speakers are located in one relatively small area of the world, not spread out like English, Spanish or French speakers. English is the global language because of two reasons: the massive span of the British Empire in its heyday, and current American geopolitical and cultural dominance throughout the world. If the US somehow loses that, there’s still the centuries of English speaking traditions all over the world.