I disagree. All languages that have had a chance of becoming world lingua francas - English, French, perhaps Spanish, are some recent examples - were not only the languages of economic or political powers, they were also the languages of vast colonial empires.
Is it likely that English would be the second working language of India without India's colonial past? Would French be the official language of dozens of African countries if they had never been ruled over by France? Chinese has a very large speaker population but the number of speakers outside of the Han ethnic group and/or the PRC is negligible. Almost all non-Han speakers of Chinese are ethnic minorities in the PRC, virtually all Chinese speaking people outside of the PRC are ethnic Chinese. Is this because Chinese is difficult to type (which it isn't, by the way, on modern computers)? Highly unlikely. People don't choose to learn or not learn languages because of the perceived ease of typing or even the perceived difficulty of learning that particular language, they do it because of the perceived level of prestige and economic and political power it will bring them.
What could the motivations be for an aspiring professional in for example Congo be to learn Chinese? There are few and almost all of them are related to business dealings with China.
Hindi is in a similar position - it has quite a large number of diaspora speakers, but outside of a single country and/or national origin, it has virtually no reach.
Mark
On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Bod Notbodbodnotbod@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 11:59 PM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
(What's the next lingua franca going to be? When?)
It would have been Chinese if you could get a workable keyboard.
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