Multilingualism and the economic crisis.

Will the present economic crisis diminish the prestige of English and bring about more multilingualism?

Here is the podcast.

Comments

[Juliano]

It would be great if this podcast gets transcribed, very good, as always steve ruling!!!

[Rollo]

How about avoiding the political problems that come with using a current language as the universal one and pick something ancient. Latin maybe. But then the eastern Euros might object and insist on Koine Greek.

[Dan]

To answer your question, no. The crisis has nothing to do with language, and more to do with 1) supposedly intelligent people creating financial instruments that they don't fully understand, 2) betting a lot of money on those instruments, 3) government and regulators turning something of a blind eye, and 4) the desire for high rates of profit trumping the needs of investors.

Even if another language -- be it French, Mandarin, German, Esperanto, or Yoruba -- was the lingua franca (if you will) of international commerce, the use of that language wouldn't diminish because of a financial meltdown.

[Shon]

Hi Steve, I enjoyed your video as always.

While I agree with the premise that English could possibly be replaced as the "lingua franca", I don't think there is any evidence to support the notion that the world is moving toward greater multilingualism. In fact... I think the evidence supports just the opposite.

Languages are dying off at an enormous rate. The list of dead languages grows daily. It just isn't practical in a non-agrarian society for people living in the "village next store" to not speak the same common language. As the world gets smaller...so does the list of languages.

If I were to compare multilingualism to the financial system, I would compare it to smaller banks being eaten up by bigger banks, and those banks being eaten by mega banks.

It may not be in our lifetime... but eventually...the number of languages spoken in the world could be drastically reduced.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Dan,

I did not say that the crisis had anything to do with language. I did not even say that the crisis was caused by people speaking a certain language. I said that the perception was that the US was to blame, and people are reassessing an economic system based on a market where people spend beyond their means, the Anglo-Saxon model. This could lead to a loss of prestige for English. Over achieving parents may want their children to learn 2 or 3 languages, not just one.

Shon,

It is quite possible for English to be less dominant, regional international languages to get stronger, some minor languages to be revived (Welsh, Catalan, Basque, Hebrew, Latvian, etc.) while other languages disappear. There is no contradiction in these trends. More multilingualism does not imply the protection of threatened languages.

[Vincent Pace]

Steve, I couldn't resist the bait on this one, even though I'm a bit late to the party.

My full post is here, but in short English is very likely to remain the de facto lingua franca for a very long time to come, largely thanks to the amount of world GDP English speakers represent.

[Roy]

I have visited Vincent's page and the arguments he presents are very compelling. My initial opinion was pulled in both directions - but I have this underlying notion that the popularity of language is largely dictated by the power of the dominant countries - perhaps it is influenced marinally by popular trends and world economics in a current context. Overall, however, it does appear that the correlation is almost cemented towards the power of the nations in "control" and their economic and industrial might around the globe. I had no idea that China was already half that of the total GDP of the english speaking world. With their growth rate, it would be interesting to see what happens over the years.

[Vincent Pace]

The numbers I used only cover until 2002, so I wouldn't be surprised if China's already crossed the halfway point substantially for English speakers. In any case, one thing's clear: barring something much more ground-shaking than even the current economy, English and Chinese will be the top two most natively spoken languages as a percentage of world GDP in our lifetime.