[Foundation-l] New projects opened

[Mark Williamson]

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 Notbod<bodnotbod at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 11:59 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at 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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