+25 English wouldn't be the most popular language in the world if Britain hadn't colonized half of the world. amirite?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

It's also not super hard to learn. IMO - that's why Mandarin will never take the slot of trade language despite being the #2 spoken language overall and #1 for native speakers.

by Brilliant-Cod 1 week ago

I heard that the Chinese were considering abandoning their alphabet because early computers didn't have the processing power to work in mandarin.

by No-Contest 1 week ago

The other system you're thinking about might be zhuyin (bopomofo)

by Fluffy_Mastodon 1 week ago

No it's the one that allows you to directly type radicals

by JewelerSlight 1 week ago

You're probably thinking of 倉頡. There's basically a radical on each of the letters in the keyboard and you type using those.

by Ill-History-6998 1 week ago

Oh wow, I didn't know that existed

by Fluffy_Mastodon 1 week ago

No we have pinyin which can be typed using a normal keyboard

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Yeah, not an expert. I was listening to a podcast called "stuff you should know" and they were talking about it. I forget when they were talking about or how long the conversation lasted. It was back in the early days of computers. Eventually the tech improved and it was a moot point. Or maybe they came up with pinyin to solve the problem.

by No-Contest 1 week ago

I guess there was also an older system called "five stroke" or something (idk the English translation) but computers brought pinyin to be way more mainstream now I think

by Anonymous 1 week ago

because context, most words are only 2 syllables and the following syllable falls in a mostly predictable pattern as to what it could possibly be. There are 21 initials (and two special initials) and 38 finals in total in Chinese Pinyin. Some initials and some finals cannot be combined together. According to certain rules, all these initials and finals can actually form a total of about 400 syllables. then there are 4 tones making a total dictionary of 4x4 x400 = 6400 total words. (there are also exceptions and 3 syllable words, but we can discount those for predictive text) meanwhile for english it is about 20,000 in English, there are three key numbers to remember: more than a million total words, about 170,000 words in current use, and 20,000-30,000 words used by each individual person.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Except not every tone is valid for every initial-final pair. The amount of syllables in Chinese is far lower than 6400, only around 1000 IIRC

by Delaney29 1 week ago

yeah i couldn't get hard numbers on that one and even assuming maximum it is still less than a third of just normal english.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

There is no alphabet that was the problem

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Chinese is typed using the latin alphabet

by Anonymous 1 week ago

🤓 It's not an alphabet

by kolemayer 1 week ago

Unless you're Korean. They really struggle with it.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

As my native language is much simpler than English... No tenses... No inflammable means flammable, etc. I find english is quite confusing and hard to learn. Easier to just force myself to understand English by consuming English media than to learn via English lessons. Thus my horrible grammar, probably

by Anonymous 1 week ago

English as a language is far too diverse for this. In case of English, grammars are mostly descriptive: "this is how native speakers speak/write and what they mean," as opposed to prescriptive: "this is how you're supposed to speak to mean that." There are attempts to use prescriptive grammars with English (think English textbooks) which tell white lies about what means what and what is allowed or not. Example: "I ain't got no time" isn't bad grammar. It's just informal. There isn't a body that decides what's proper English and what's not. It's a constantly evolving language with a ridiculous amount of variants. Proper English is the one native speaker speak and understand first and foremost. tl;dr native speakers have amazing grammar

by Anonymous 1 week ago

No inflammable means flammable that is a latin thing, English just borrowed it. The Pork vs Swine, Page vs Sheet, Poultry vs Fowl is a French vs German conqueror thing. inflame means to be hot, to become heated. flame means on fire.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

English is a whole bunch of languages in a trench coat. Which makes sense since there is practically no meaning between how a word is written and how it sounds. And none of those languages is from Asia. Which means English have non of the sounds they use in Asia. Which is making English difficult very difficult to learn for asians.

by Jeffbashirian 1 week ago

Inflammable means flammable?! What a crazy country! My duty is fulfilled

by Ycrist 1 week ago

I find it hard to believe any language is simpler than English.

by Hungry_Recording 1 week ago

TBF I think it's just as hard to perfect it as most other popular languages, but it's the easiest one to learn up to a conversational level. No conjugation, no declination, no grammatical gender, just a handful of fixed diminutives. Tenses are complex, but for simple conversations you can get away with using like 3-4.

by Optimal-Whole3124 1 week ago

It might surprise you to learn that English is one of the hardest languages for most people to learn - just like Chinese. Someone who grew up speaking Spanish, or Portuguese or French, or any of the other latin-based Romance languages will find it a considerably easier task to pick up another one of those than to learn English, because of common sentence structuring, gendering of words, and the like.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Well yeah, the romantic languages are all related. I didn't say that none of them could ever be the trade language. It's called Linga Franca because it used to be French. English isn't super easy. Still much easier than Mandarin. Especially the written word.

by Brilliant-Cod 1 week ago

Romance* not romantic

by Anonymous 1 week ago

that is absolutely not true. Following your logic and considering I am Bulgarian, Russian or Polish should be far easier for me. Yet that couldn't be further from the truth. English grammar is piss-easy. Pronunciation is another story, but speaking basic English is very, very easy.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I'm a native Spanish speaker and I found English super easy compared to Portuguese and Italian.

by Pristine-Wealth 1 week ago

The basics are easy. There's just a ton of weird edge cases because of English being a mish-mash language. As different groups conquered England they brought in pieces of their own language. And then they added a bunch of Latin grammar for no reason. Also why there are so many words for the same things with different connotations. I've heard a linguist joke that English is really 3-4 languages in a trenchcoat.

by Brilliant-Cod 1 week ago

You can get pretty far using just basics in English.

by Lumpy-Bother 1 week ago

I'd say that's the same for most languages. The basics are always easier. When you dive into the advanced, every language is difficult and takes a life to fully learn it properly.

by Pristine-Wealth 1 week ago

Native portuguese speaker here. English wasn't super hard for me because English grammar is quite simple (a lot simpler than Portuguese grammar), there are a lot of similar words due to french influence in english, and most importantly, we have a lot of exposure to english media which helps a lot with the hardest part of English which is pronunciation. Currently trying to learn mandarin and it's infinitely harder because it's just so different. There are no similar words. Tones are hard. Memorizing characters is hard. And unlike english, I'm not surrounded by chinese media. I know I won't make it far, it's fun though.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I always likened it to bass guitar - you can be serviceable quickly and it's complex to master.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

It is, but the benefit of English is explaining a lot with less words being necessary. It's part of why it's adopted internationally for aviation.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Why use many word when few do trick?

by Jay63 1 week ago

Yes, not many words needed for aviation. But you don't want to be like the pilot whose last words before crashing into a mountain were, "What means 'pull up'?"

by Adventurous-Long-371 1 week ago

Respectfully disagree, as a Slavic native speaker, learning English was rather easy. I started quite early in school, which might have been partially the reason why it was easy.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I'm English and found english to be very easy to learn

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Im English and found it easy to learn, too hard to master. That's cause I got a loose wire in my communication side of my brain.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Gendering of words is kinda stupid anyway

by Generohan 1 week ago

you forgot about the wacky spelling

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Mandarin is incredibly hard for English speakers to learn. I made the attempt at one point. And it's ranked as the first or second hardest major language for English speakers to learn. (Sometimes Arabic is considered harder.) And yes - the written language being symbolic makes it even harder to learn. (Though I didn't even attempt it when trying to learn Mandarin.) It helped when there were a dozen languages using the same written language. But it makes learning Mandarin today even harder.

by Brilliant-Cod 1 week ago

I suppose it depends on what aspects of language you struggle with. Grammar and sentence structure had always been my bane, so as a native English speaker Mandarin was easier for me than the Romance languages.

by ToughOwn6562 1 week ago

I hear even a lot of ethnically Chinese people don't speak Mandarin.

by Careless_Scholar_552 1 week ago

Mandarin is the official dialect of Chinese that's preferred by the Chinese government and taught in the schools. A lot of the Chinese immigrants in North America speak Cantonese, and Cantonese is still treated officially in Hong Kong, but in Southern China around Guangzhou where it used to be spoken the government is moving people towards Mandarin.

by Adventurous-Long-371 1 week ago

Hard to create a standard language when Chinese seems almost designed to highlight class distinctions based on how many words you know (pre revolution and standardisation I mean), so many characters, writing especially is horrifically difficult even for native speakers

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Mandarin is easy to speak, hard to write.

by Terrybryana 1 week ago

English is ridiculously simple to learn, when mandarin is SUPER HARD

by ZombieWorldly 1 week ago

Yep. English is super easy to learn. For westerners at least.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

It's also extremely adaptable. English has no problem taking words from other languages and making them English words.

by Brilliant-Memory9195 1 week ago

Not only the internet but computer science in general If you didn't know english, most programming languages would seem random and without sense But I guess it kinda falls under the us hegemony one

by Anonymous 1 week ago

a lot of programming languages actually have translations

by Anonymous 1 week ago

And not all programming languages are based in English, for example Sampo is based in Finnish.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Good luck finding well-documented libraries written in your native language though

by Vast_Rub 1 week ago

Dutch is just a German speaking English with a bad accent.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Lingua Franca is a Latin term directly translated as "french language" but meaning English.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

It does not mean english, english is a lingua france, not the lingua franca

by LimitTraining7560 1 week ago

And let's not forget Germany, Russia, and France shooting itself in the foot (several times even).

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Ooo, the first time I've seen the word Hegemony outside of an OSC novel!

by noragerhold 1 week ago

the british empire is why the US speaks english. without the british empire i'd say the dutch would be most likely to there place in north America . a dutch america would probably speak a more unique language that's a blend of mostly dutch and german. since the dutch population wouldn't be enough alone to colonise. the dutch empire already had many colonies so wide spread like british empire, although they would have a smaller one not being able to compete agaisy the french and spainish as well as the British. in such a world it would be hard to say where the internet would be invented, in our world it was an anglo-american project but in this world that would be unlikely, tbh it's hard to tell, without the british empire would the computer even be invented in england? history would change to much to tell.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

That is simply incorrect. The internet as we know it was born from a us military computer network.

by TimeContest 1 week ago

3 is because of 2 and 2 is because of 1.

by Expert-Raisin7282 1 week ago

It really helped that one of the ex-british colonies got really into the entertainment industry, flooding the world with movies and songs in english.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Where do you think US came from :) And where the Internet came from :)

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Could have been any of the other germanic languages. If Hitler prevailed honestly it would be german we're speaking rn.

by shieldsdave 1 week ago

Instead of the Internet I'd put the fall of the Soviet Union. Even with internet, if the soviets would have "won" the cold war, we'd be writing in russian as lingua franca right now.

by Dull_Pangolin6597 1 week ago

I think this is definitely a much more specific view. I do see the point OP was making; colonization was the key that made all of the things you mentioned possible.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Who you callin' a pensive douche, buddy?

by Big_Spirit_6611 1 week ago

😂😂☝️

by beattysam 1 week ago

That sounds like a posh gentleman's wash.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I would have preferred calling a wand, a "baguette magique" tho.

by astanton 1 week ago

Wow, things would be different if it weren't for checks notes history.

by Maleficent_Piece 1 week ago

Ah yes, it appears the the floor here is made out of floor!

by Jay63 1 week ago

It's adorable watching teenagers figure out how the world works. They always think they're the first ones to realize it.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

OP is from North India where there's a hate going on for English and the use of English. They want everyone to only speak Hindi in the nation of 22 major languages smh.

by Faheyrichmond 1 week ago

OP just discovered history has an impact on the present

by Ecstatic_Horror 1 week ago

What do you mean its not just some plot someone invented to have what to talk about during those boring ass classes? /s

by Designer-Ad-2310 1 week ago

You know what? … That's fair.

by Electrical_Knee_1370 1 week ago

Yeah and I wouldn't be able to walk without my legs.

by torpmargarette 1 week ago

If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bike

by Salt-Ad 1 week ago

Spanish? French? They were also heavily into colonization. Apart from that, Europe is a good indicator of what the world might have looked like.

by No_Term_660 1 week ago

Yeah not sure of this even true because there are way more countries that speak Spanish than English. I feel like English is so popular worldwide because of American Cultural imperialism more than anything. Hollywood TV and music.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Not cultural imperialism, just plain imperialism. American culture was spread with military bases.

by Illustrious-Hat 1 week ago

Just ignoring Hollywood?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Hollywood isn't popular in a vacuum. It gained worldwide popularity after the US military and imperialistic politics brought American culture to Europe, Asia, and South America.

by Illustrious-Hat 1 week ago

Also I feel like people in the west don't realize how widespread Russian is.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

outside of Russia its mostly spoken by former soviet states, right?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Yeah, they colonized their neighbors rather than distant continents. Central Asia is huge though. Like the fact that people speak Russian from Ukraine all the way to Tajikistan is enormous. Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, that's a lot of countries!

by Anonymous 1 week ago

From the perspective of land thats a huge amount but for population size is that is still less than france (or rather french speaking people)

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Even I agree with Spanish and French. But what about if any country didn't colonize any other?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Probably still spanish, portugeese or dutch as they where the biggest traders in the world even without colonization.

by laverna50 1 week ago

Don't forget the Arabs, they were all over the Indian ocean for centuries, which is why there are so many Muslims there

by Classic_Society2401 1 week ago

Yeah true. But they said "without colonization" and i think of conversion as a kind of colonization. I'll admit that this can be up to debate though.

by laverna50 1 week ago

I feel like this is true for practically all languages. Ultimately either people were converted to the language because it was easier for them to speak that language logistically speaking, or they were born to parents who speak the language. Repeat the process for those parents and so on and so on, and eventually you'll have most of the world being a convert to a language.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

"Colonization" is inherent to the human experience, every culture on earth has been doing it to each-other for hundreds of thousands of years. Even England had been "colonized" multiple times.

by darrylmorissett 1 week ago

Keep in mind that Spanish is spoken also in many parts, which include but aren't limited to most of the American continent.

by Sad_Heat 1 week ago

Birds couldn't fly if they didn't have wings.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Why are you just now telling us?

by No-Woodpecker-8817 1 week ago

Agree to disagree here.

by Dull_Pangolin6597 1 week ago

I hope not, otherwise that would be embarrassing for them

by Anonymous 1 week ago

All the more impressive when considering the population of England at the time was 4 million

by Careless_Scholar_552 1 week ago

Well there were less people, and the British Empire lasted like 300 years so there was a lot more than just one time you know

by Anonymous 1 week ago

If my grandma had wheels, she would've been a bike

by Financial_Bus 1 week ago

It's also worth noting that English is a good choice for a lingua franca because it's very information dense. As opposed to say, Japanese, which is the lowest info dense language.

by TimeContest 1 week ago

,,If X did not Y, then Y wouldn't happen."

by FlamingoUnusual5016 1 week ago

Spanish, French, or whoever colonized half the world instead.

by Brilliant-Memory9195 1 week ago

And World war 2 serious reduced the influence of the german language around the world too.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

WW1 had the bigger effect on it I think, as it pretty much killed the desire to be proud about peoples german heritage, for example around 20% of the us are descendents of germans, but ww1 made it very unpopular to say you were. Same reason why the British Royal family changed their house name from a german name to an english sounding one.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Number 1 exporter of Independence days to the world... your welcome for the holiday ;)

by Jovanny25 1 week ago

The previous Langua Franca was French so it's safe to assume that if English didn't took over it, French would still be the language of international communication

by jessy32 1 week ago

Jesus christ I am so happy English is the one

by Overall_Dragonfly 1 week ago

I would imagine either spanish or french being strong contenders for a replacement language, most likely spanish.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Probably Spanish, for the same reason.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

That is how languages spread.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

if humans hadn't evolved then we would all be monkeys right now

by mlubowitz 1 week ago

Are we saying that just England didn't colonize, but everything else remained the same? If so it would be Portuguese or Spanish, probably, or sobre version of Portunhol.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

In a world where the Brits just never left Britain, likely French and/or Russian as those are the next largest empires closely predating and/or co-existing with the british empire. Without the british, the French empire is a lot larger and since they colonized many of the same geographic regions, it stands to reason that language would be more widespread on continents where English is common.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

France hadn't colonized Europe when it was the lingua franca in Europe. English as world language has more to do with the status and power of the US than the UK.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Ahem. And the US was essentially born out of... remind me again..?

by Hbashirian 1 week ago

Water is wet, grass is green

by jchamplin 1 week ago

It would've been some low-context language.

by Nicholaus43 1 week ago

If we all agree to speak Esperanto we squander the dominant culture.

by Turner81 1 week ago

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

by CommercialOpening620 1 week ago

If my grandmother didn't have wheels, she wouldn't have been a bike

by Kassulkechelsie 1 week ago

Depends on if France and Spain still have colonized the other half of the world. These two were everywhere. If not, I'm guessing, the language of the country emerging as the greatest economic or cultural superpower. Like Mandarin or maybe Arabic and Hindi. Or perhaps Esperanto would be a bigger thing.

by Lowejaycee 1 week ago

Strong disagree. It is mostly due to Internet having originated in the US and the US global influence. When Britain was one of the most powerful countries French was one of the most spoken languages due to the French culture... so it is not about Britain at all.

by Hungry_Recording 1 week ago

If the Sun wasn't hot the Earth would be really cold.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

The French and Spanish colonized the other half the world, so there's your answer.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

It was until recent that I digested the connection that the British empire mutated into the US empire. The spirit to innovate and build went into US and exploited the large land mass with fertile lands connected with natural waterways. English became big because US influence became big via internet, media and US + Western allies producing/trading all over.

by Mental_Language_1396 1 week ago

Honestly, if white people understood what they have done to the rest of the world, they would let English die out asap. English has replaced native languages in many countries.

by Icy_Bath9161 1 week ago

As opposed to all the other languages that weren't spread in similar ways?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I would say it's more the Anglo-American victories for each world war

by Stunning_Can9841 1 week ago

English was already the language of America, Canada, NZ and Australia, and many many more countries before even the First World War.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

The British Empire only initiated its expansion. What made it the lingua franca was the United States.

by Rdickens 1 week ago

Where do you think the U.S spread English to? India, Australia, Nigeria, Canada, Hong Kong?

by csauer 1 week ago

...which wouldn't have existed without the british colonialism, thus further proving their point. Without them, there wouldn't be an english speaking USA, if USA existed at all in it's current form in this alternative reality, they'd all probably be speaking spanish or... french.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Easily their biggest flex

by South-Detective8129 1 week ago