Will Mandarin ever become an international lingua franca? (movies, taxi driver)
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I think there'll be continued significant growth in Mandarin as a second language, but it will not come close to replacing English as a lingua franca. America's a major superpower and major cultural exporter, but even more importantly, the United Kingdom's expansive empire meant that a huge swath of the world uses English pretty frequently. On top of that, there are plenty of other countries that use a Roman alphabet based language with many having overall pretty similar features to the English language with Spanish, French, and Portuguese all being languages used by huge segments of the world's population that use the Roman alphabet and have a lot of shared attributes to English compared to Mandarin Chinese.
No. Never in a million years. It's not even relevant as a second or third language. Few people bother to learn it and even fewer actually learn to speak it well. Even puppet foreigners married to Chinese nationals living in China speak like 5 sentences. Unlike Japanese and Korean, no one watches Chinese tv shows or movies. It has no cultural outreach. It's also an incredibly irrelevant language in science and on the internet. Other than native speakers, no one reads publications in Chinese and no one uses Chinese websites. Not even Taiwanese use Chinese websites, that should tell you how terrible they are.
Like Russian, it is an important language in intelligence for the West, though, as China and Russia are basically Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire of the 21st century. And in international tourism, which as a sector has been wiped out thanks to China's bioweapon lol. That's about it.
It’s a difficult language to learn and China remains a nationalistic, insular culture outside of business. And I agree their digital outreach is very poor, mainly to their repressive government and high rates of censorship. No one outside of China wants to read Winnie the Pooh’s propaganda.
I don't want to say "never," but English has such a head start on every other language as the lingua franca that it's virtually impossible that Chinese will make any inroads on that in our or our children's lifetimes.
In the first place, don't confuse the number of people who speak a language with how useful the language is. There may be a billion Mandarin speakers (actually, many Chinese nationals are not fluent in Mandarin), but almost all of them live in the same country. That makes it supremely non-useful as an international language.
Compare that to English. English has millions of native speakers in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, and millions more non-native speakers everywhere. Mandarin is used almost exclusively in China. That's apart from the international cultural aspect (films, music, Internet, etc.) which heavily favors English over every other language.
In terms of ease of acquisition as a second language, English has some difficulties, but nothing compared to Chinese. Apart from the tones and the almost totally native Chinese vocabulary (there are few to no cognates with other world languages), Chinese characters are burdensome to the memory and inflexible. They are well suited for Chinese languages specifically, but every other language that has attempted to borrow them has either given up (Vietnamese, Korean) or been forced to create a supplementary writing system because characters were inadequate for their language (Japanese). Time has proven alphabetic or syllabic writing systems to be superior for every language except Chinese and definitely preferable for a global lingua franca
I don't want to say "never," but English has such a head start on every other language as the lingua franca that it's virtually impossible that Chinese will make any inroads on that in our or our children's lifetimes.
In the first place, don't confuse the number of people who speak a language with how useful the language is. There may be a billion Mandarin speakers (actually, many Chinese nationals are not fluent in Mandarin), but almost all of them live in the same country. That makes it supremely non-useful as an international language.
There's a lot of Mandarin speakers in Asia outside of China/Taiwan. There are tons of mandarin speakers in Singapore, Malaysia, even in Thailand (most of the Taxi drivers in Bangkok know how to say things in Mandarin. Not to mention the huge Chinese population in Australia, USA, etc.
English is the dominant language, lingua franca or elite tongue in:
Africa - the world's fastest growing continent uses English as the dominant lingua franca (sorry French, but you're secondary). Atop Africa are two countries - Nigeria and South Africa - that are the biggest economic pillars and English is the de facto language of learning and communication.
India - the world's third superpower in the making. Won't become a superpower for another 30 years at least, but this is the world's most populous country from 2025 onward and will be a major cultural force by mid-century.
UK - the world's 19th century superpower and a country with lots of global industries (banking, accountancy, advertising, law)
USA - the world's current sole superpower and an economic, cultural, and artistic powerhouse, and a country that, even with China's rise, will maintain superpower status. Has immense soft power reach thorough Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
The catchment area of English isn't just the Five Eyes and their 500 million people. It's the 1.9 billion in South Asia + 800 million in Africa. That's 3.2 billion people, or nearly 50% of the world.
And Europe and Latin America are far more in the Anglophile sphere than the Sinophile sphere.
There's a lot of Mandarin speakers in Asia outside of China/Taiwan. There are tons of mandarin speakers in Singapore, Malaysia, even in Thailand (most of the Taxi drivers in Bangkok know how to say things in Mandarin. Not to mention the huge Chinese population in Australia, USA, etc.
The Chinese population in the U.S. is 5 million. That's not huge by any stretch and certainly doesn't exert any cultural pull among Americans (nobody is bothered to learn Mandarin because of 5 million people, especially when the alternative is Spanish, with 62 million Americans being Hispanic).
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