Rincewind"[quote="Relax"[quote="Tenshinai wrote:Japanese is more likely to work on the Philippines and a few other places than English is,
No one knows Japanese in the Philippines. No one knows Japanese outside of Japan by and large. More know Chinese in the Philippines than Japanese.
English in the Philippines is actually a creol language. IT IS one of two language franca's of the Philippines. Most phone call centers are being based in the Philippines because of their EXCELLENT ENGLISH language pronunciation. You can go anywhere and speak English in the Philippines and almost everyone knows it unless in the deep countryside. When I was there near 30 years ago this was true. I am sure this has changed since then to some degree. Their literature is in English quite often. When I was there, their text books in many schools were in English. This has changed since then as many texts have been introduced in Tagalog(filipino to everyone else in the world). It is the base language of commerce and government in the Philippines. This is slowly changing to Tagalog which incorporates large portions of English part native, part Spanish, part Chinese. Tagalog is essentially becoming a bastard language like English already is.
This is true for many countries where a written language is a very recent addition. Many countries in Africa, English is what they write in. Take Nigeria for instance. 200Million people and their government literature is in English! Pretty much any place the British Empire existed for over a hundred years in Africa, all of the official language of government is in English. The population may not know how to speak it fluently but many can read it. This influence is obviously waning with the break-up of the British empire in the 60's.
Will Mandarin make inroads into Language Franca? Not until China starts letting its massive population move of its own accord it will not. For over 200 years the worlds language franca has been English because of the British Empire built in the 1700's. Will English die out as language Franca? All depends on economics.
Another driving factor is computers allowing quick transcript of the written language into your own. I would predict all of those countries that built by the British Empire to completely eliminate the English language as their governance language. Now this will also percolate into business and engineering where nearly every publication in the world in business and engineering is published in English. Engineering standards. Business practice standards etc.
Spanish overall probably would be a better language franca than anything else. At least one can read/write it easily unlike ENGLISH![/quote]
I would venture to disagree with that last point. A few years ago a Spanish friend of mine told me of an incident where he had been following a South American film. He said that he could not understand a word that they were saying & that the only way he was able to understand it was by reading the English subtitles.[/quote]
It depends on which South American Nation, Several of them speak hybrid languages, usually an indigenous native language or two and either Spanish Dutch English and Portuguese.
