Re:The world’s hardest (for native English speakers) languages
by pradocchia on Monday December 21, 2009 @10:12PM
(#1009317)
I've heard it argued that all Chinese dialects are in fact creoles, an artifact of the expanding and shrinking Chinese empire. ie, indigenous language + language of the court + several generations -> new dialect.
And if you can argue that for Chinese, you could argue it for the romance languages, for English after the Norman invasion, etc.
I could say that in English and in Chinese, and with effort in German.
The participant here who submitted the article is dubious about any one language being harder than any other language. I was exposed to that doubt as part of the standard dogma of linguistics while studying linguistics, and I have observed difficult features in many of the languages I have studied.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415
That said, I have also read in the linguistics literature a hypothesis that there is a language-universal process of forming creoles and koineization,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koin%C3%A9_language#Process_of_...
and my educated guess would be that English (having spread around the world, and spoken in the country with the most native speakers, the United States, mostly by people whose traceable ancestors were NOT native speakers of English) might be a more koineized language than, say, Twi. So perhaps on a truly worldwide, pancultural basis, English is somewhat easier to learn to communicate with other speakers of English than most languages are to communicate with other speakers of those languages.