My 2 cents comments on the future of English

The author of the article is stating that English will lose soon its status of universal international language.



Why? Because the need for a common language would become less and less required with the development of the new automatic translation technologies.



Also, still based on the author statement, the English language seems to have today reached its peak in term of expansion with few ways to improve its number of speakers and as defined by Darwin, what could no more move forward will decline.



Is he true? In a long term view, we can imagine that English will not stay as the international tongue for ages, but today, what could replace it? Though it is one of the easiest – just after the French – Indo-European idioms to learn, many countries from another area are emerging. We can therefore imagine that it may be supplanted by a Sino-Tibetan, an Afro-asiatic or even a Dravidian language.



Also, as written by the author, improvements in translation techniques may put the use of a universal language no more mandatory. Anyway, this will still require huge efforts; if you need to be convinced, try to use your favorite on line translator to convert the present text in German; then translate the result in Dutch and go back to English. Now, keep in mind that these three languages are all West Germanic tongues and imagine what could be the differences if we involve languages from different roots like Altaic or Australian Aboriginal!



At last, if the move between well used languages like French, Chinese, Spanish or others could have chance to reach one day a decent level of quality what about the others ? Today, while Windows Vista, the most popular operating system, is available in 33 different languages, the United Nations found 105 different idioms that are the official languages of at least one of their members. We can therefore guess the big effort needed to translate a text in Greenlandic Inuit that has around 20 different terms to describe the white color to Khmer that use the same word for blue and for green. Also, based on the small number of speakers of these languages (50,000 and 13,000,000) , who will do this effort ?