[Foundation-l] New projects opened

Sun Aug 23 17:08:46 UTC 2009

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 3:36 AM, 오현성<chamdarae at gmail.com> wrote:
> The only language that has become a world lingua franca to date is English,
> and although British colonialism was clearly the original reason for this,
> the dominant form of English over much of the world now is American English.
> The U.S. has never had a vast colonial empire, so surely the supremacy of
> U.S. English owes more to the economic and cultural dominance of the U.S.
> than any other factor. If, in the future, China becomes the dominant
> economic power in the world, then I don't think there's any doubt that
> Chinese will supplant English as the most widely used language in business
> and many other domains.

"Much of the world" is not very specific. In India and Pakistan, home
to a very large population, the dominant form of English is closely
related to British English. It was the combination of many factors -
the earlier political and continuing economic power of Britain and the
later political and economic power of the US - that brought about the
current situation. American foreign policy since World War II has also
played a major part in cementing the status of English as the first
foreign language in most of the world.

Anyhow as I said before, language shift is very much related to
attitudes and perceived language prestige. When doing business abroad,
English is often the language of communication between Chinese
companies and local employees and businesses. The day the Chinese
begin to insist on doing business with only Chinese speakers is the
day the world decides to learn Chinese. It is essentially a (bad)
attitude of "We are better than you and so we do not need to learn
your language, you should learn ours" that has resulted, I think, in
the dominance of English.

Mark