Quote:
Originally Posted by MonctonRad
Mandarin and Russian are, and will continue to be important regional languages in central and east Asia, but since neither country developed worldwide empires, they will never be "world" languages. The world languages are, and will continue to be English, Spanish and French.
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Well, that might only be the past, but can you really tell about the future? It is hard to predict anything these days.
The thing is China's changing way faster, to a larger scale than anything before. Their rapid growth is something never seen before in human history, and they're aware of it.
This is no longer the sadistic Mao Zedong age when they all were supposed to starve and shut their mouths.
Their dictatorship (read their Chinese Communist Party that's actually nothing much so communist any longer) manages to raise a incredibly large and productive middle class that will seek economic expansion beyond their borders at some point.
I remember when I was a kid, people used to say -
they're only uneducated workers. They're meant for low added value and cheap business. Ah, bad idea, pretty bad mistake to scorn them that patronizing way, because that is no longer the case already. We should've been more leery.
They can train some highly skilled workforce in their country and develop some advanced tech now. It barely took 20 years for them to go this normally long way.
They acted very smartly by protecting their domestic market from products made in USA or in Europe, and they stole a lot of knowledge from us by requiring production to be relocated in their country.
Now, their influence is noticeably growing here in Europe. So I wouldn't take Western languages as anything so comfortably or forever established.
Again, we've misjudged their workforce and ability to get it more educated, that might cause some difficulties to us in the coming decades.