Is Mandarin the Language of the Future?
Westerners are generally aware that in the distant past, Latin was Europe’s international language. It was succeeded by French, which ultimately ceded its place to English as the lingua franca of the entire world.
Many observe the meteoric rise of China and surmise that some day, maybe in the not-too-distant future, Mandarin will replace English as the world’s language. There are good reasons to believe it. China’s economic clout is stupendous and growing rapidly. Perhaps more importantly, since just about the dawn of time, the Chinese have been generous to foreigners willing to kowtow to their brilliance. To get in on the future, it would seem natural that people will have to learn their language.
But a few obstacles hinder, and perhaps derail, Mandarin’s bid for preeminence. To throw them into sharper relief, let us compare the new challenger to the reigning champion.
Thanks to its unique history, English is relatively easy to learn. In particular, it is easy to learn badly: foreigners with only a very limited vocabulary and no knowledge of English grammar can make themselves understood. English has been a cosmopolitan tongue since the 18th Century and is spectacularly so now, so native speakers and learners alike are well-accustomed to dealing with all levels of fluency.
By comparison, thanks to its confusing and ubiquitously critical system of tones, it is often impossible for people without some formal instruction to communicate in Chinese. Any language in which shi can have over two hundred meanings will never make a natural lingua franca.
That tones are especially difficult for adults to master is the most damning: no language is an international one without large numbers of people learning it after childhood. It is not easy for most children, either. Schoolchildren from Chile to Norway to Mozambique can readily pick up some English, but few nations have strong linguistic or cultural ties to China.
Another damningly complicated feature of Chinese is its written language. Chinese characters are unique and beautiful, but even in their Simplified form (adopted in the Mainland in the 1960s), they are maddeningly tricky to learn. To read a basic newspaper article, one needs to memorise at least three or four thousand complex characters whose structure has no relation to how they are pronounced.
I will note that in the 21st Century, most Chinese have become accustomed to typing with a Latin keyboard, and having characters recommended in a ribbon across the top (basically the same as spelling suggestions for European languages). It has become so ubiquitous that a recent survey scandalised China by revealing that many undergraduates at Peking University (China’s Oxford) cannot write by hand the word “sneeze.” Smartphones make Chinese marginally easier, but having the worst writing system in the world is still a big strike against a global language.
Mandarin does have some redeeming qualities. Its grammar is quite straightforward. This is largely a result of Mandarin’s heritage as a lingua franca among Chinese dialects- indeed, it is an excellent common tongue within China.
That most Chinese people struggle to learn new languages also provides a strong pull factor. Some languages, most notably German and Hindi, would be bigger world languages, if only their speakers were not so good at learning English. Mandarin does not have this agreeable problem: it is very hard to get around even Shanghai without speaking the language. Furthermore, as a former hedge fund analyst in China, I can attest that speaking even broken Mandarin can open huge opportunities for a foreigner.
But at this point, and into the foreseeable future, China lacks one critical element: soft power. Most people around the world learn and polish their English because it is everywhere. It is possible, and often much easier, to watch movies, listen to music, chat with foreigners, and get better jobs by speaking English. The Chinese government has invested billions trying to gain cultural clout, for example by setting up Confucius Institutes on university campuses, but they feel ineffably manufactured and uncool. Chinese directors and music artists often struggle to beat the West even within China.
Economic clout offers leverage, but this is only one pillar- without the cultural draw, not many people will learn and practice a language. The USSR dominated Eastern Europe for two generations, but Russian made little headway. In a competition between a super cool language one can learn by osmosis and one that may help you get a job only after countless dreary hours in a classroom, the former will usually win.
Chinese once did have that kind of cultural pull. The legacy of its millennia of dominance in East Asia still permeates modern Korean, Vietnamese, and especially Japanese, which in addition to a massive admixture of Chinese vocabulary is still written in kanji characters.
But today, the only foreigners who have strong linguistic and cultural ties to China have strong non-linguistic reasons to demur from accepting it as an international language. Conversely, even if China becomes culturally cooler, as it well may, it is unlikely that the billions of people who already speak languages that are closely related to English will go to the massively greater trouble of learning Mandarin. It is also worth noting that even if the United States declines as a world power, English still has a robust power base, while Mandarin’s prominence rests entirely on the Chinese economy.
It is probable that a few Chinese words will make the jump into the international lexicon, as some Japanese ones did during Japan’s ascendance in the late 20th Century. Singapore English (“Singlish”) offers an extreme example of what the future could hold. People from some Asian countries who have a hard time learning English or Chinese may gravitate toward the latter. But it took English, French, and Latin each centuries of blood, sweat, and tears to gain their enviable positions. The Chinese can build a skyscraper in weeks, but linguistic hegemony is more complicated.
I used to think Mandarin was on the fast track to replacing English. That was a major motivation for my 15-year-old self to make the unusual decision to spend my summer holiday in an immersion course in Shanghai. My classmates came from every inhabited continent, and we were all passionate about Chinese language and culture. In such an intense atmosphere, we learned quickly; we were all easily able to converse with locals. But toward the end of the summer, I noticed something funny. My friends spoke many different first languages. Fewer than half had ever lived in an English-speaking country. We were in China, and had all spent countless grueling hours learning Mandarin. Yet without exception, when we were together, we spoke English.
