Future Earth: I dont understand you!

Hello, Bonjour, Hallo, Ciao, привет, 你好,Hola, 여보세요, سلام etc etc

What language should I learn for the future?

I am wondering what language I should learn to best prepare myself for the future of our world. To add a bit more ATS flare to this discussion, Which language will become more dominate and widespread and why.? (War, Economic expansion, cultural expansion etc etc)

I consider myself lucky that English is my first language, Western Culture has made accommodations for the English Language and you can travel half the world without worrying about no one understanding you. English is ranked number 3 for the most native speakers, not including everyone that knows it as a second language.

I also am fluent in French, which I find useful in business.

My plan is to start learning a new language in preparation for our future. Mandarin Chinese seems like a logical choice for economic reasons, Russian seems good to, as who knows when they may conquer the world (ATS Flare), German......and so many others.

What languages do you think will be the most wide spread in our future and what will be of most use other than English?

I am currently leaning towards Mandarin Chinese, even though this would be a difficult language to learn, I believe it has a lot of potential in the future.

Perspective 1: Economic Reason

This example is almost cliché. If you ask any business professional where future business will stem from, there is a good chance he is going to say China. It has been long recognized the future business prospects will be Chinese in nature and if you want your piece you better speak Chinese, specifically Mandarin Chinese.

In Chinese linguistics, Mandarin is a group of related varieties or dialects spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. Since the early 20th century, a form of standardized Mandarin (described above) has been the official and de facto national standard language in China and it is today one of the most frequently used varieties of Chinese among Chinese diaspora communities internationally.

Source

And according to Bloomberg

Mandarin, China’s official tongue, is also the top language worldwide for business other than English, according to Bloomberg Rankings.
Mandarin, spoken by 845 million people, scored highest in a ranking of languages, excluding English, based on business usefulness. The ranking scored languages according to the number of speakers, number of countries where the language is official, along with those nations’ populations, financial power, educational and literacy rates, and related measures.

Source
If I am primarily concerned with my future business endeavors this is supporting evidence

Cultural:

With a population in the billions, would it not be fair to presume that cultural expansion, which we are already experiencing, will be more prevalent in the future? Art, music and literature will also become more accessable..

Because of this, and the fact that learning this language technically allows me to converse with 1/6 of the worlds population, I put another check in the positive column.

Global Domination: ???

Maybe China eventually dominates the world either militaristically or economically and people who can speak the language and English may be highly prized!


This is not really a concern of mine, but fits in well with the ATS crowd.

To conclude this seems like a very practical choice. However the difficulty involved seems extensive and what are the chances i would actually apply this within my life time...who knows

Another thing to think about is, how long do you think any significant change would require?

We are children.

A really simply example: Emotion is the ocean on which the boats float. Each boat is only able to provide a description of the immediate area of the ocean its occupants can see and while each describes essentially the same thing they never get the full view so to speak. The next leap in language will be like discovering air travel we will be able to see the boats and that which they have been describing and we will describe all kinds of new things from this vantage but it still won't be the ocean. How do we arrive at the ocean well that's a question for another moment.

Which language should you learn? All of them. Which is not as difficult as it sounds. It has be demonstrated time and again that problems which appear complex usually have a rather eloquent simple solution/algorithm/drive

"Micahel Anti - Behind the great firewall of china"

reply to post by usernamehere


Thanks for the input, are you referring to some kind of advancement in which we as a species will have some kind of seemless communication, without language barriers?

Smoke signals.....

Because when we're sent back to the stone age, then all you'll be able to do to signal the near by villiages is do smoke signals.

Originally posted by r2d246
Smoke signals.....

Because when we're sent back to the stone age, then all you'll be able to do to signal the near by villiages is do smoke signals.

I like you reasoning. Perhaps we return to some relatively mono-tone grunts? But unless we completely wipe ourselves off the face of the planet, i believe their would be some vestige of language remaining.