ge might reach. In the future will the term “westernisation” be replace by “chinanisation”? And will we live under the Beijing influence with Chinese as our global language?A language is created from different cultures but will follow the steps from its own country. Let’s take English in Great Britain. In the 17th C during the age of colonization, Great Britain was the world leader, and that lead to English being the world’s language. Due to its large domination, an efficient proliferation of their language was happening through trade. Also, Great Britain ruled all commercial activities so for any one to participate in the dailies activities, they had to be able to communicate in English. However, Great Britain’s power is a shadow of what it used to be, but the language itself still remained as powerful and popular through out the whole world. Today, English is considered as the world’s global language or the first global lingua franca with its 480 million speakers.
Even though the outburst of the Chinese economy, Chinese itself is still regarded as a mysterious language. With its alphabet that consists of 6000 letters and its tones and variations, it still stays very foreign to a large number of the world’s population. Chinese is a descendant from the Sino-Tibetan and has now spread into several dialects which are not understandable within each other, for example Cantonese, Mandarin and Hakka. In main land China, the official language is Mandarin which took words from the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. All these facts give an image of difficulty and complexity to the Chinese language, but none the less, it is still the most spoken language in the world today with its 1,3 billion speakers.
It is commonly known that China’s future is very unpredictable, but it is becoming a very powerful country that throws out threats to today’s world leaders. So could Chinese replace English as a global language?
Chinese might indeed be a difficult language for Latin based speakers, but that does not stop the driving force in future economy to start negotiating and working in Chinese with international companies. With its massive population of 1.3 billion which represents more then 20% of the world population (1 person in 5 lives in China today), China clearly states that there is no clear reason why should such a strong country should live the consequences of “Westernisation” or “Americanisation”, stated in the China Daily, an article by Niu Chiang and Martin Wolff “Does China not yet realize the reality that the emerging China has the immediate clout to demand that those desiring to do business in China or with China should learn Mandarin, rather than expect 1.3 billion Chinese to learn English?"
However, a large disadvantage for Chinese being the next global language, is that is only spoken in 5 countries which are all situated in Asia (Singapore, China, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippine). Also, China has 937 million of native speakers, to only 20 million secondary speakers. This shows problems for the language being considered as global because only 2% of the speakers are not native speakers. So Chinese is still mostly considered as a mother tongue.
On the other hand, English is widely spread over the world. It is spoken in 115 countries by 480 million people in total with one third being secondary speakers. This shows how English is more of an international language.
In conclusion, Chinese is too local and therefore is far behind English as a global language, but with Chinese’s huge potential for the future, it is still a threat in the long term to overtake English in the race of globalisation.
Reference:
http://www.esperanto.org.nz/chinglish.html
