Just today I came across this entry, he wrote
" I also want to learn Chinese because 20% of the world speaks Chinese and I fully expect that China will quickly join the ranks of "Super Power" along with the United States within the next 20 years or so. "
I totally agree with him and he is not the first I’ve heard expressing this opinion in recent years. According to Wikipedia List of languages by total speakers, Chinese is the most widely spoken language. As stated, it does not take into account second languages. As many people can speak more than one language, I suspect English is still the de facto business language.
This article, GDP by Language, may provide some illumination. According to it, English only accounts for 30% of the world’s GDP. And from the graph that chinese is rapidly expanding.
The influence of a language is examined here. Chinese is ranked a low 6th after English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic. I believe that is set to changes in the few years to come.
Also I think there should be a difference between spoken and written language. This is particularly important for the web because almost all the material are in printed (textual) form. For example I often watch or listen to Chinese news, but I hardly read Chinese news.
Wikipedia has another interesting statistic, Wikipedia articles per population. Of the huge population that China has, it has only 19 articles/million native speakers. One wrong conclusion that could be drawn is that the number of Chinese internet users is small so there is not much article contributed. However the number of internet user in China is second after the US. Take a look at this statistic. At 7.3% penetration and 10.6% of the world population.
After all these and thinking back, Singaporean has the government to thank for the bilingual policy that allows us to conversant in both English and Chinese. Of course this advantage is eroding away fast.
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