The place of English in the world today

Thôi được, để trở lại chủ đề chính, xin post lên đây bài nghị luận này về tương lai Anh ngữ. Good reading !!!!
We live in an age of Anglophone triumphalism. The melange of low-German dialects carried to Britain on the tongues of mercenary war bands a millennium and a half ago has now become the first language of some 350 million people and the second language of at least a billion more. When an Indonesian businessman meets a customer from Finland, they converse in English. Airline pilots flying international routes communicate with their controllers in English. Seventy-six percent of the content of the Internet is in English. (The runners-up are, in order: Japanese, French, German, and Chinese.) English is the world language, and this will become more true as time goes on-these are assumptions most of us carry around in our heads without much examination. Are they true?
There are a number of reasons for thinking that English may be at, or perhaps even past, the high tide of its influence. To begin with, the proportion of humanity speaking English as its first language is declining. Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, gives the following numbers: 9.8 percent in 1958, 7.6 percent in 1992. If the rate of decline is linear we must now be hovering just over 7 percent. To be sure, this decline is relative, not absolute. The populations of the great English-speaking nations are not falling. Nor are the people of those nations switching to any other first language, even where there are strongly felt linguistic issues in controversy. Irishmen show even less inclination to speak Irish than their grandfathers did; the enthusiasm of Francophone Canadians for their language has not infected their English-speaking compatriots; and Americans, despite all the blandishments of the "multicultural" hustlers, are pleased to resist Spanish. The decline in the proportion of the world''s people who have English as their first language is simply a consequence of those people being First Worlders with low birthrates. The rest of the world is outbreeding them. Since no English-speaking nation is in the imperialism business any longer, our language is left with its home islands, the child colonies of the early-modern period, and a scattering of nations once ruled from London (or, like the Philippines, from Washington) but with indigenous cultures of their own into which English has been able to put down some shallow roots.
Granted that English as a first language is in relative decline, may we not still console ourselves with the thought that it has no challenger as the preferred second language over a large part of the world? Russian imperialism turns out to have been a damp firecracker, and the post-Sputnik enthusiasm for learning Russian seems ludicrous now. In the 21st century you will learn Russian only if you want to read Pushkin in the original. The present fad for Chinese will go the same way unless that nation can shake off its addiction to despotic government, a development of which there is currently no sign at all. No other language is even a candidate for worldwide acceptance. Air-traffic controllers will continue to speak to pilots in English for as long as they need to speak to them at all-perhaps for another generation, after which automation will take over completely. Even then, will not the world still need a lingua franca? And those nations once under English-speaking rule-won''t they be glad to have got a head start from their former imperialist masters?
Not necessarily. In these latter cases, English has been accepted against the grain of national, racial, and anti-imperialist emotions because of its convenience and neutrality. A country with a multitude of quarreling tribes or sects needs some common tongue, and it is best that it should be one that is hors de combat. Nigeria, where anyone with any education at all above the elementary-school level can speak English, offers a good example. Yet even these common-sense considerations have not helped English to hold its own everywhere. During the years when ****** Nyerere ruled Tanzania (1962-85), he promoted Swahili as the only proper common language for his people, with the result that one now meets college-educated Tanzanians who can hardly speak English at all.
Even India, often cited as the one nation where English is an indispensable medium of exchange for myriad sects and races, is slipping the leash. Samuel Huntington quotes two professors of English at New Delhi University: "[W]hen one travels from Kashmir down to the southernmost tip at Kanyakumari, the communication link is best maintained through a form of Hindi rather than through English." It is true that English is the common tongue of a small, well-educated elite of Indians. Democracy militates against established elites, though; as, of course, do more radical social changes. The Russian ruling classes of the Napoleonic age who populate War and Peace spoke French among themselves. A hundred years later, as Tsarist Russia began to modernize and the towering achievements of 19th-century Russian literature generated pride in the national language, that nation''s elites were using French less and less-and after Lenin''s revolution, of course, not at all.
If the peace of the world can be maintained, and technological progress continued, there is a larger threat to the supremacy of English as a second language, and indeed to multilingualism in general: computer translation. Now, if you have actually tried to use any of the current translation software you are probably smiling at this point. These programs are awful. They cannot even distinguish between ordinary nouns and proper names. I recently went on the Internet to look for a biography of the poet Witter Bynner. My search engine, which trawls through sites in all languages and translates the material into English before presenting it, located a biography on Amazon''s German website and listed the author''s last name as "Strength." The author is, in fact, the American critic James Kraft.
These deficiencies, however, are those of an immature technology, one that can be expected to develop rather rapidly over the next decade or two. Recent news from this field is very hopeful. The drop in the price of computer memory to near zero, and the rise in speed of retrieval from that memory to near infinity, has meant that the knotty analytical problems described by Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct can to some degree be bypassed by simply drawing on great masses of linguistic data. With a huge database of recorded utterances in different languages, indexed by comparative frequencies and contextual clues, translation can be done by brute force, without the machine needing to "understand" much. Twenty years from now we shall have hand-held language translators.
It will, of course, be rather easy to outfox them. Every language offers no end of possible utterances. Without trying very hard you can say an English sentence that has probably never been said before. My own children constantly generate remarks like: "My Power Ranger fell in the sump pump." Such od***ies will, however, present no obstacle to the swift acceptance of computer translation, once it passes a certain threshold of accuracy. New technology always offers trade-offs to its adopters. Machines only ever approximate the living world; we must always go halfway to meet them. When humanity switched from riding horses to driving cars, we easily resigned ourselves to the fact that this new aid to locomotion could not jump fences. Your $69.99 translation gadget will stumble over subtle allusions or constructions; but you will get accustomed to that and just stop using them in its presence. Nor will your Translate-O-Matic be any use in the classic science-fiction situation of a first encounter with alien civilization: Their language would have to be "learned," added to the database. For the 4,000 tongues of Planet Earth, though, machine translation will work very nicely, once their few trillion most common utterances are logged into the database and properly cross-referenced.
The implications of this are wonderful. Until well within living memory the making of mathematical tables, ephemerides, and the like was done by human beings using mechanical calculating machines to perform millions of repetitive arithmetic operations-mental drudgery on a staggering scale, the equivalent of coal-mining with pick and shovel. Nowadays any child can churn out those tables in minutes on a home computer. Before long, language learning may seem as antique and unnecessary a skill as the computation of ten-figure logarithms by hand-a great relief to those of us who are hopeless as linguists. (A category that includes disproportionately many English-speakers. In the old French Foreign Legion it used to be said that the English recruits were the last to get promoted because they were slowest to master the giving of orders in French.)
________________________________________________
Personal opinion: I''m for a multilingual world, not one dominated by only English ....

Oh, you underestimated China !!!
It is predicted that by the year 2050, the PNB:
of China will be $45 000 000 000 000
and of the US will be $35 000 000 000 000
the UK will be far behind !!
So China has all to become the new superpower of the world, and its language may become even more important than English.
By the way, I think English, in the future, as well as Chinese, will become so important that it will be subdivided into several smaller languages. It is not nonsense to say that English is an endangered language. It is because it has become uncontrolable.

Okie, I agree with @nhu_my. The English and the American (with the not-very-few population) learn English. The Chinese learn English too. But the E and the A don''t learn Chinese. What do you think ?

To esu, sao em lại xoá bài viết của anh thế..
tàu mà đòi lãnh đạo thế giới ư?

The American and British are at least starting to learn Chinese, as well as the Europeans.
To crematory_007: Bài của anh cụt lủn, không có giá trị thông tin cho nên đáng được xem là bài spam. Rất tiếc đã phải xoá bài ấy để bới làm loãng chủ đề.

Xin phép các bác hơi lạc đề một chút thôi nhé !!! Vì mình đang bàn về tiếng Trung hay quá mà ... Nhân tiện copy đoạn văn này cho mọi người đọc chơi, nói về việc học tiếng Trung:
Grammar is easier than you may think:
There is no conjugation of verbs
There are no gender rules

Characters, too:
Complex characters are built up of less complex ones. So once you get a solid foundation of the simpler characters, even the most complex ones are a piece of cake.
It''s memorization, but not all memorization. As with any language, with experience, you can often guess at the meaning or pronunciation of a character by simply looking at it in context.
Many characters are actually pictures of what they represent. That makes much of the necessary memorization much easier.
OK, so the tones are hard, but there is good news:
It actually becomes more natural with practice
There are hundreds of dialects in China, and even when speaking the same one, people from different regions can pronounce the same words very differently
People will understand you even if you''re not perfect!
Culture
Modern Standard Chinese is spoken by more people than any other language.
The contributions by the Chinese community in such areas as cuisine, music, art and festivals give us a great opportunity to widen our experience and aesthetic appreciation.
China boasts 4000 years of continuous civilization, with contributions in philosophy, the arts, science and technology that were the equals of anything from the West at the time.
Economy
With the largest population and the fastest growing economy, China has among the greatest potential as a market for U.S. goods.
The present economic growth rate of China is highest in the world (10%-14%).
Government
Chinese (Mandarin) is one of the U.N. official languages (along with English, French, Spanish, and German)
The People''s Republic of China is widely expected to become a major geopolitical force in the new Millennium.
Trở lại chủ đề chính là tương lai tiếng Anh, mời các bạn tham khảo bài báo này, của đại học Cambridge, phân tích khá rõ vai trò của tiếng Anh như là một ngôn ngữ toàn cầu hiện nay:
http://assets.cambridge.org/0521823471/sample/0521823471WS.pdf

I meant to write sooner but I fell asleep last night.Still,it''s impossible to ignore such a great topic.So,here we go again!
What is the official language in the world and the prospect of Chinese(C) and English(E) in near future?I was told that sooner or later,E would be replaced by C a couple of years ago and expected to learn the language used the most in over the world.Besides the first rank population,the reality is that the number of C learner has rocketed lately.Also,I know the economic growth of China is incredibly high.Believe it or not,according to reliable source,it''s estimated about 13%,which is out of control.But its authorities must keep secret and so do we(Fell free to delete if necessary,Mod)That is why China will be collapse as first thought.As far as I concern,it''s inevitable that China will become a superpower one of these days.So,its language absolutely plays in top role.Still,put aside all aspects of economic and politic,I strongly believe nothing is gonna change the power of E just because we all know it used by American.Despite the painful facts above,they are wise enough to prevent the C dream coming true.Wait and see.After all,I never change my mind,E remains the number one.
One more thing,how come you don''t argue about the future of Vietnamese.As long as V is used by up to 2 billions people,the official language definitely belongs to us.Trust me!Simply,each family gives birth for more than 10 babies and the next generations settle down in Antartica.Why not?The earth gets hotter.I''m just kidding

Hê hê tớ làm gì phải xoá bài của bác chứ !!!
Còn về tương lai tiếng Việt, hình như đã có chủ đề này rồi ở bên box tiếng Việt í mà.
I think we can only wait and see if China or the US will be the smarter one and whose language will be the dominating one. Both are actually very wise.

Okei, I think we should point out which criteria make a language become international one, then compare Chinese and English based on those. And let''s determine what we debate here "Whether Chinese will ever outdo English" or "Whether Chinese will become more and more influential in today''s world ". If the latter question, YES, I absolutely agree with you, esu; if the former, No, I don''t think so. Here some criteria in my opinion. Anyone for English pls contribute some more.
1. Population talk as native or nearly native language
2. The influence of countries in favor (politic, economic, military, and cutural power)
3. The complicatedness
I will come back later.
Cheers

I think your list is already complete, no need to add anything more. Now let''s debate if CHINESE will ever be able to become more "international" than ENGLISH.
(1) Population. This is the major advantage of Chinese, that everybody agrees, I think. About population talking the language, Chinese outnumbers - and by far - English.
(2) The importance and influence of the countries speaking Chinese and English. China is becoming extremely quickly a new superpower of the world. As the figures I have shown you above show (of course you can find other sources to illustrate the potential of China as a superpower), China''s PNB will in a relatively near future be able *****rpass that of the US, not to mention here the UK. By the way, I would like to give you more predictions:
In 2050 the world''s situation will mostly be like this:
First, three 3 countries: China, the US and India (in importance order)
Then, three medium countries: Russia, Japan and Brazil
At last: the European Union.
That is for China itself. But Chinese is also talked in Taiwan and Singapore (where it is a lingua franca), and these 2 countries are already of great economic importance.
(3) Complicated or not ? Cái này viết tiếng Việt cho dễ hiểu. Tuy tiếng Hán có nhiều ký tự nhưng:
(a) Số ký tự đã và đang giảm dần, do những nỗ lực đơn giản hoá ngôn ngữ của chính phủ Trung Quốc hiện nay.
(b) Cách viết của rất nhiều chữ cũng đã được đơn giản hoá cho tiện việt học hành, xoá mù chữ.
(c) Những chữ đó được tổ chức theo bộ, lại được hợp thành theo 6 nguyên tắc nhất định, điều này hệ thống hoá được một phần và giúp người ta nhớ mặt chữ tương đối dễ dàng hơn.
(d) Ngữ pháp tiếng Hán đơn giản hơn tiếng Anh nhiều, và không có những ngoại lệ kiểu: số nhiều bất thường, động từ bất quy tắc, giới từ được dùng một cách mơ hồ ...
Tạm thời thì thế đã nhé.