Why Chinese Doesn’t Rule The World

Chinese is the most spoken language in the world with roughly 1.2 billion native speakers. Much more than the measly 360 million native English speakers, or the measly 350 million native Spanish speakers. So this begs the question, why isn’t Mandarin, the Lingua Franca?

There are many reasons why English is the Lingua Franca and not one of the many dialects of Chinese. One of the largest may be the fact that 1.5 billion people speak English as either a first or second language. This is more than the speakers of the many dialects of Chinese. And plus, the 1.5 billion speakers of English, are dispersed throughout the World, not just situated in one country. In this case, only China and some of its surrounding countries.

Most people know that if a Uruguayan man, a Russian man and a Kenyan man all start having a conversation, it will likely be in English. Even if none of them speak English as a first language. Mandarin, and its many variants, are really only native to China, even Mark Zuckerburg, someone who speaks Mandarin. Knows, and has stated that English will not be challenged by Mandarin. It may be useful for businessmen or foreigners who do business in China to learn Mandarin simply to communicate with their Chinese counterparts. But then again, the same could be said for any language, such as French and Spanish, which would be far more useful in our eyes.

There are quite a few reasons why English has become the Lingua Franca but the following two are likely the largest factors:

The British Empire

Known as the largest empire in history, the British not only spread their culture, but also their language. This is why we see places as far away from each other as India, the United States and New Zealand, who all speak the same language. This has allowed it to be ingrained in popular culture such as music, sport and movies. English is indeed the language of technology with terms such as ‘internet’ or ‘texting’. Both terms that can be found in many other languages such as Russian, French, Spanish and German.

The American Empire

This is a little bit controversial as the United States of America does not like to be referred to as ‘The American Empire’. However, big multinational corporations such as Apple, Walmart and GM are able to spread their language through the chain of command. Meaning that anyone who wants to get promoted to a high ranking position in these corporations, will need to speak English. And these people will likely teach it to their children and grandchildren. Even words such as ‘hashtaging’ has roots due to American companies such as Instagram and Snapchat.

English is also an inherently a neutral language, as it does not have genders for its words as seen in Romance and a large amount of Germanic languages. By 2020, it is expected that 2 billion people will speak English. This is so true that even Islamic Jihadi’s, people who claim to hate the West, even perform propaganda videos in English or with English subtitles. In English, there are essentially no class barriers within the language, that are able to distinguish what class you come from, with the only real distinction being how you pronounce certain words (such as ‘Scone’, but we won’t get into that here).

What do the Francophones say?

Even Francophones (French language speakers)- who’s language was previously the Lingua Franca- have begun to conform to the new Lingua Franca. Many of France’s largest corporations have begun to produce documents for official use in both French and English. With some going as far to pretend as if their first language is English and French is just a second language. 

Will Chinese Take Over?

The odds of any form of Chinese, whether that’s Mandarin, Cantonese or another Chinese dialect becoming the Lingua Franca is minuscule. Simply due to the fact that it is a formidable language to learn, simply due to Chinese’s lack of an alphabet. This means that each character you see in a piece of Chinese writing is its own separate word, this makes it difficult for a non-native speaker of East Asian languages to learn Chinese.