Watch your language

When people discuss the future, they invariably think either of the immediate future, the next five, ten or twenty years, or they get lost in fantasies of the far future, when all notions of our civilisation have long since passed into history or mutated into the unrecognisable. This is OK, after all someone has to think about these things, and we need places (both physical and intellectual) to which we can escape. But the kind of future-gazing which has always interested me most is the medium term, the point just after I and everyone I know has died – a world which has recognisable continuities from what we know today, but is markedly different to ours. This, of course, is the basis of my piece Lechistan 2150, which is online here.

People frequently ask me which of the four or five thousand recognised world languages are worth learning, and I have recently been considering which of them are really going to matter in that mid-term future. These are not the languages that you yourselves need to learn, unless you are young, ambitious, or want to be in a position to teach your children or grandchildren these languages. When you find your retirement fund has been taken over by the Chinese, and that your software is all written by Indians, you’ll be glad you listened to me. :)

You might expect me to say it ;), but I still believe English will dominate this medium-term future. However, I suspect that a process of ‘Latinisation’, i.e. the break-up of the single language into different dialects, will begin. But it won’t end as Latin did, in mutual incomprehension. In the future people will speak two versions of English; a ‘standard’ version which almost anyone throughout the world can comprehend, and a ‘local’ version which will be so interlarded with local vocabulary and phonetic & grammar patterns derived from local languages that it will be barely recognisable as English. (This phenomenon is called ‘diglossia’ in linguistics.) The difference from the model of Latin after the collapse of the Roman Empire is that modern communications will ensure that this ‘standard’ version of English also survives, and will act as one of the world’s linguae franca.

The question I find most interesting, however, is whether this local English will replace or absorb the already resident languages. Here in Poland, a conversation between teenagers can include so many English words mixed into the language (for humorous or ‘cool’ purposes) that a casual listener, not knowing Polish, may wonder briefly whether they’ve happened across English speakers from somewhere unfamiliar. (By the way, Polish is actually a language I expect to still be spoken in 200 years’ time, albeit after some mutation, because its cultural tradition and the number of current native speakers will sustain it.) But languages like Dutch, German and Danish, which are physically and linguistically close to English, culturally influenced by it and increasingly by unrelated languages brought by immigration, may prove unrecognisable in the future to current speakers of those languages.

Chinese, of course, will be another great future language. Harnessing a capitalist economy to a dictatorship with reasonably effective control of around a quarter of humanity will make China (and the Chinese diaspora, when they lose their fear of investing in their homeland) an economic superpower of a kind we fear to imagine right now. But there is no single ‘Chinese language’, but a succession of mutually incomprehensible dialects, unified only by the Chinese script. And the languages of the southern seaboard, Cantonese most prominent among them, are numerous and proud. But Beijing’s insistence on disseminating Putonghua, the ‘Mandarin’ version of the language which unites the north of the country, appears to be paying off; even those outlier territories of East Asia such as Singapore, Indonesia and other places settled by Southern Chinese teach Putonghua to their local Chinese communities. And when ethnic-Chinese businessmen realise that the party really doesn’t mind you getting rich and glorious, then they will only reinforce the already formidable power of ‘Communist’ China. So the Mandarin tongue and the near-uniform written language should lead China into the next two centuries. Ganbei! :)

If anyone doubts why Arabic is going to count so much in the future, then they must have been hiding somewhere very pleasant and very isolated for at least the last five years, and probably longer than that. Islam is going to be inevitable in the 21st century and beyond; it is the Moslems who are having children in sufficient numbers to replace themselves, unlike the majority of Western populations. There is no point in complaining about it; a future Europe will be light-brown in colour and more likely to be having Fridays free, in between cursory visits to the mosque, rather than Sundays free, in between not going to church at all. :)

The question with Arabic is that, not unlike Chinese, it is not a single and unitary language spoken throughout the Arab world; the version spoken by the Africanised Arabs of Mauritania is incomprehensible to the Iraqi or the Upper Egyptian. Educated men are taught the Classical Arabic of the Koran, and a modified version of this same version (called Modern Standard Arabic) serves as a lingua franca on television and radio, so that Arab broadcasters can ensure their message is ignored and despised by all their brothers. But the man in the souk, while he may understand the basics of this language, does not regard it as his, as a ‘mother tongue’; it is a tool for the intellectuals and the citified folk. (A more detailed discussion on this by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about is here.) However, once again the question of increased access to modern communications arises; al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite TV service, has transcended its national base and become a regional, cultural and global force. In the future, as the price of receivers and transmitters decreases, and the common man gets access to high technology, I believe that the diglossia factor will kick in more fully, and that Arabs will handle MSA as easily as their own dialects; and having lost its cultivated, snobby perception, it will form a unifying force as strong as the English language is today. But the ideology it conveys will not be Hollywood, McDonalds or MTV.

Indonesian will probably be the biggest surprise to anyone reading this list, as (tsunami aside) it’s not a part of the world we’ve heard much of in recent years. But to my mind some important factors will make this a key language in the future. Firstly, it’s easy to learn; not many irregularities, word formation is regular, easy to pronounce. And it (together with its twin Malay) serves as a lingua franca not only for the 250 million inhabitants of the Indonesian archipelago, but also for Malaysia and Singapore, the former being an important manufacturing base, the latter a financial hub. And Indonesia itself, thanks to its internationally-run sweatshops (which local entrepreneurs will soon take their cut from), has considerable economic potential. Also, as the world’s most populous Islamic nation, it will have an increasing say in the world’s destiny; events in Bali should remind us of that.

Hindi might not seem necessary; we all know that India is playing an ever-growing role in the world economy, as anyone in Britain or the US who’s had to call directory enquiries or a computer helpline in recent years will know. The educated of the Indian middle-class number over 150 million, and they speak English, sometimes better than the English do. (Listen to Indian actress Aishwarya Rai (and look at her) to hear what I mean.) So why does Hindi count? Because it’s the link language for the rest of northern India, and the workers need managers who can interact with them; and again, it’s the language of a worldwide diaspora (follow the tide of the receded British Empire, from the Pacific Islands to Wembley). But won’t they all speak English? We mustn’t underestimate the power of nationalism, or its slightly more attractive cousin, ‘culturalism’; identifying with an indigenous, non-Western, non-European culture will be a powerful motivator in the future.

Spanish is probably an obvious choice, another ‘language of the conqueror’ which covers a multitude of races and cultures. Spanish apparently recently overtook English as the language with the second-greatest number of speakers. The key moment here will be when the economic power of South America, freed from decades of CIA-sponsored dictatorships, links up with the increasing cultural awareness of the US Hispanic population, who are continually predicted to outnumber the white European-descended population any moment now.

French isn’t a difficult guess to make either. Whereas the French and Belgians are, like other white Western Europeans, not replacing themselves at a sufficient rate to sustain their existence beyond the next two or there hundred years, their places are being taken by their colonial children, of Arab and African descent. I suspect that, as I said earlier about English, a kind of ‘post-French’ will evolve, full of influences from those peoples. What about the economic side of things? Well, sooner or later all that labour and creativity will be harnessed, and as technologies trickle down from the rich West that doesn’t want it, some of it will be exploited and put to uses no-one has imagined. The rich cultural heritage of France’s past will blend with the variegated non-white and non-Christian future in a way that Molière would never have imagined…