1. English became the lingua franca right when the world really became globalized. So everyone from Europe to Asia to Africa has wanted to learn English as a second language for decades. So even if American power went away, I still don't see English falling from its perch. I often say it's really hard for Americans to learn another language because if you go to another country hoping to learn that language, so often you'll find many/most people just want to speak to you in English.
2. The only other power I could see surpassing the US in the mid term is China (and that's in no way guaranteed), but the Chinese language (Mandarin), and especially Chinese writing is inherently more difficult for foreigners to learn. I'd also argue the Chinese writing system is inherently more poorly suited to the digital world.
Russian is commonly viewed as a difficult language, but it become a regional lingua franca in their sphere of influence. The only reason we aren't speaking Russian is because they lost the cold war.
I do agree that Mandarin speakers might become more open to Pinyin if more foreigners started learning the language. I'd also point out that English and Romance speakers find Mandarin difficult. For Mandarin speakers, is their own spoken language actually difficult for them? They might find English to be a difficult language.
Mandarin eliminates all of these problems. The tones and characters are difficult, sure, but questions and answers being grammatically identical along with consistent pinyin is a lifesaver.
If you're using pinyin it's already easier than English.
I'm curious if this is just an opinion, or if there is data on this. As a native English speaker, I would have thought this to be true. But I have literally never heard this from people who learned English as a second language, and I was always surprised when these folks said they thought English was pretty easy to learn. My guess was that the "loosey goosey" rules of English are a double edged sword. Yes, there are tons of irregular sentence constructions and exceptions to the rules, but at the same time, most native English speakers (at least in the US) don't actually care all that much if you get all the exceptions right, so if you follow the general rules, people will understand you and respond. I mean, tons of native speakers mix up lay/laid/lie/lied (or sometimes throw in a layed for good measure) all the time, and people don't really care.
This is in contrast to other languages where people will give you blank stares (or worse, take offense) if you get one verb conjugation wrong.
It’s an interesting question: for how long will it remain important to know multiple languages in the age of LLMs? Of course, it’s better to know foreign language(s) — no doubt about that — but for day-to-day work, unless you’re living abroad, it seems that their practical utility will slowly decrease. And speech-to-speech translation will likely continue to improve as well.
- The culture is, I think, the root of the flywheel. The entrepreneurship and competitive intensity is unlike anywhere else I've lived (not an American). It's okay to go bankrupt. It's okay to fail multiple times and burn millions in VC money, in fact it's encouraged! Take a break and raise another round and go again, VCs like second time founders. In my home country having one business go under is the worst thing imaginable.
- The capital markets, even YC (one of the lower tier accelerators by now) gives you 500k for 7%, sometimes pre-revenue. That is an absurd proposition elsewhere
- Surrounding yourself with top talent raises the ceiling for what you think is possible and accelerates your career really fast. It's inspiring for me to be around so many smart and successful people.
It is money.
Specifically, right now, petro-dollars. For a while before that, it was pounds
The writer is asking how much longer that will continue to be true that it is petro-dollars.
Actually, there is. English is relatively unique in its ability to incorporate loan words and features of other languages. This is in part due to its history as a merger of 10k French (thus, Latinate) words into an otherwise Germanic language. But it's also due to the unfortunate history of the British empire, followed by American hegemony, which spread English to many other cultures who freely adapted it.
Whether this is enough to justify a continuing status as "the international language" is obviously debatable. But English is different from almost all other human languages, not because it is better, but because it is just ... more
Because most grammatical markers are isolated prepositions, there are no problems caused by phonetic mismatches with the words to which they are associated, like it happens in the languages where a borrowed noun must fit into a declension pattern, which can produce phonetically awkward words.
While among the European languages, for English it is indeed the easiest to borrow new words, one can easily construct an artificial language that would be even better than English from this point of view, and which would remedy various problems of English, like the necessity of knowing separately a written form and a spoken form for every word, or the existence of a lot of semantic ambiguities that do not exist in other languages, or various difficulties to express various nuances using the existing modal verbs, or the too verbose methods for expressing certain verbal tenses, moods and voices.
Thus English does not really have any technical advantages. Its moat is the inertia caused by its so widespread use in the present, which will prevent any other language to replace it, regardless of how much simpler and better that language would be.
This is actually another strength of English, not a weakness.
> one can easily construct an artificial language that would be even better than English from this point of view,
The history of artificial languages (Esperanto in particular) is not encouraging in this regard.
> Thus English does not really have any technical advantages.
I wasn't really trying to suggest a technical advantage, but rather a cultural one. English users, as a worldwide bloc, are really incredibly open to loan words, modified grammar, and even whole new vocabulary. All of this happens in other languages too, but the culture of english makes or allows it to happen much faster and much more broadly.
Older people here in Northern Europe often seem to speak English quite well, in France less so.
It isn't a moat, My partners written English surpasses mine and it is her third language.
But this advantage is vanishing. While automated translation is still not good enough for someone fluent in English to tolerate, it's more than good enough already and the progress have been insane over the past few years.
I don't think English speakers are going to have any edge moving forward.
At some point, though, the balance could tip. It's impossible to say, and it'd be irresponsible to try to predict it, but there isn't any reason English is natively superior, any more than French was 150 years ago, or Latin 600 years ago. But it's a major advantage the US has that isn't acknowledged often enough.