Will Chinese Overtake English as the Global Language

chillibreeze writer — Satrajit Sanyal

The answer to the query, “Will Chinese overtake English as the global language?” is simply put. No. This will, of course, give rise to much controversy. However, if one was to look at the debate from the view point of a language teacher or a language professional in lieu of someone wishing to engage in a philosophical vis-à-vis socio-political discussion, then one would see certain essential reasons which support the answer.

Firstly, China is a civilization six-thousand years young, and in all her illustrious youth she has rarely tried to create either a colony or an empire in the true sense of the word. That is to say, by infringing upon the boundaries of foreign soils. Therefore, the spread of Chinese or, if one were to speak with correctitude, Mandarin - the official Chinese, was never enforced ritual on the non-Chinese people. Guangzhounese—or Cantonese as it is better known, Hakka, Chiu Chou, Taiwanese, Ao Dai, and several other dialects and sub-languages exist in China, but when one refers to the “Chinese” language, they usually refer to Mandarin. English, on the other hand was both the language of the traders as well as the colonizers who even colonized China.

Secondly, Chinese spread through the ministrations of the preachers of Buddhism and the Canonical Teachings of Buddhism were encoded in Pali. We perceive the spread of Pali to Japan, but why do we not speak of Chinese? Japan’s whole language, fundamentally speaking, is based on Chinese. Be it the script, the “kanji” of Japanese is the “hanzi” of Mandarin as the characters are the same or at least the picture-characters, or the essential intonations. So, Japan may have been religiously or culturally enriched by the Chinese? Strictly speaking, no. Now, the Chinese preachers of Buddhism did not make pilgrimages to the western world, thereby creating self-determining boundaries of their language in the lap of the Far-East. However, the English missionaries spread the “Word of God” to China, Japan, the Americas, India, Africa, and wherever they went as traders and conquerors. Their missionaries spread their religion and this resulted in the spread of English.

Thirdly, English, linguistically speaking, is a far simpler language to learn and this inherent quality makes it the lingua franca of the world. Chinese is perhaps one of the most difficult languages ever created by man, and unlike Japanese it has undergone but little modification. It retains its unchanged classical format as it was in the times of ancient history and the format in lieu of facilitating a learner, impedes one from forming clear ideas about an entirely new language. It is a hieroglyphic language, employing pictures to exemplify an idea. However, it is not an advanced hieroglyphic language like Egyptian, where the pictures were attributed phonetic values, but rather like the Indus Valley script which, barring a discovery of an Indian version of the Rosetta Stone, shall remain indecipherable as the key to the language is lost.

To support the veracity of these statements here is a short and rudimentary comparative table of the Chinese and English languages

English

Chinese

1) English has twenty six alphabets, the successful learning of which ensures comprehension of the script.

2) The phonetic values of the English alphabets, if we are to discuss “script”, do not differ—they are mutable if we are to take into account the regional variations(BBC Southern Standard as opposed to Cockney) but there is an universal value that does not change, only varies in representation( To elucidate, a Cockney may say “A slaice of kike, plaice” but shall write “ a slice of cake, please” when called upon to put into the English script the words he spoke).

3) The phonetics of English, even if it varies at points, has an international standard. A person who knows this language shall be able to discern the speech as spoken by any person educated in the English medium, even if one hails from Senegal and the other from Puerto Rico, provided they speak ENGLISH.

4) English is note tone-dependant. Being an international language, it has adapted to the diverse tongues which adopted it as theirs—thereby making it an instrument of international communication par excellence.

5) English has seen its spread via the media of religion, trade, conquest and has ultimately been adopted as the language of many non-native speakers. 1) Chinese, on the other hand, has about 10,000 characters, which are basically picture words each of which has to be committed to memory so as to ensure comprehension.

1) Chinese, on the other hand, has about 10,000 characters, which are basically picture words each of which has to be committed to memory so as to ensure comprehension.

2)There is no “script” as such, and the ‘words’ are not formed by a combination of phonetic values, but rather on the basis of the significance attributed to it by those who created the characters. This makes Chinese a very difficult language to learn, as a vast amount of memorizing is involved in its learning pattern and, as all language teachers may confess, memorization is the most boring and difficult aspect of acquiring linguistic grasp over a new tongue.

3) The phonetics of Chinese is dependant on “tones”, illustrated further in the following point, and the very concept of attributing sound-value to a character is absent. This means that over the 10,000 characters, one has to also memorize the four tones in which each is spoken—a truly gargantuan task to the instructor and student alike.

4) Chinese has four “tones” and a word spoken in each of these four may vary in MEANING, depending solely on the tonal quality. Chinese phonetics is exceedingly complex, making the learning of the language a far more difficult task than learning English.

5) Chinese has never spread in a fashion similar to English or via the same media and very few non-native speakers have adopted Chinese as a language of expression, save practicing Orientologists.

As one may well comprehend, the list goes on. If any language instructor is called upon to measure the level of difficulty involved in teaching Chinese and English, he would be bound to accept that the level of the former far supersedes that of the latter.

Also, if one were to consider trade, English has been established as a language of commerce for quite a few number of years—if Chinese were to displace it, it would have to bring about a linguistic revolution which would stand probable only in the fevered dreams of some Oriental potentate—but would hardly be deemed rational.

What is more, the general Chinese attitude is one of closure—it is an open secret that at the present time, China is actively demanding of her scholars and students alike to acquire a more than rudimentary grasp of English. Parallely, we see no attempts at the international level to produce another “Cultural Revolution”—so there is no active interest in spreading Chinese as a common international mode of expression. Perhaps this minutely parochial attitude shall deter Chinese from displacing English.

Lastly, the debate, perhaps, arose from the sheer number of the populace who speak Chinese—and since China’s manpower far supercedes that of any in either the Western or the Eastern Bloc, therefore the question of the world’s ‘Most Spoken Language’ also becoming the ‘Global Language’ might have arisen—but, as far as logic, rationale and past history (as a determinant of later socio-cultural trends) depicts, such an occurrence is indeed far-fetched.

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Satrajit writes for chillibreeze.

Will Chinese Overtake English as the Global Language

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