China’s increasingly dominant position in global economic and political affairs has so far not been matched by similar progress in international use of either the Chinese currency or language. This can at times seem curious to some of those charting China’s rise. Jeffrey Gil of Adelaide’s Flinders University offers The Rise of Chinese as a Global Language as an explanation of how at least the latter might finally come about.
Although an academic text, replete with references and footnotes, it’s a short book—the main text is only just over 100 pages. Since Gil also contains summary histories of language (going back almost to the dawn of time) and overviews of the various variants of Chinese, Chinese characters, etc., which are not entirely germane to the argument being made, it is in practice perhaps not even as long as that.
Despite the academic cladding, the argument is more or less the familiar one: China is increasingly important economically and geopolitically; as a result, the Chinese language is increasingly important and hence it will grow in usage, ultimately to the point where it becomes a global language, much as English is now.
It is useful to have the case for Chinese being made with an attempt at rigor rather than rhetoric. To structure his analysis, Gil deploys a “language comprehensive competitiveness framework”—developed in China twenty years ago, as it turns out, “to analyse the use and status of languages and dialects in multilingual societies”. He runs through various kinds of “competitiveness” that Chinese might have: policy, cultural, economic, educational, population, scientific/technological. Gil doesn’t present this as a quite a slam dunk, but there notably no question mark in the book’s title.
The argument however remains unconvincing. Gil gives a formal definition of a “global language”, but the central feature is that third-parties use it for communicating with each other, something evident, for example, at the EU which will continue using English despite the United Kingdom having left.
Gil says that 100 million people around the world are now learning Chinese, and there are of course good practical reasons for that, just as there are for the far larger number of people learning English. But, as Robert Lane Greene put it when he addressed this question in You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws and the Politics of Identity, “The really relevant question is how many non-Chinese communicate in Chinese… the number is doubtless tiny.”
China’s rise will not ipso facto change this: a language’s status as a lingua franca does not derive directly from the status of its home country. Latin served the function, albeit more regionally, that English now does for more than a millennium after the state which spawned it ceased to exist.
Global language status is driven by network effects rather than the sorts of “competitiveness” Gil outlines: English is the most used language because it offers the most linguistic connections. This is not necessarily a permanent situation, but Chinese has a lot of inertia to overcome. Gil posits the possibility of English and Chinese coexisting as global languages; but the dynamics of network effects make this seem unlikely as well.
None of this is to say that the linguistic dominance of English is desirable: Minae Mizumura makes a good case in The Fall of Language in the Age of English that it is not.
Chinese has a couple of practical strikes against it, not least its ideographic writing system, something covered in detail elsewhere, notably A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language by David Moser. Gil claims that technology has greatly eased the writing of Chinese: one can, he says, just enter romanized pinyin and let a computer select the character, “meaning learners need only learn Pinyin and character recognition”. Only. With English, romanization alone suffices.
There is, Gil writes,
a historical precedent for the adoption of characters outside of China in the form of the long-standing use of written Chinese for scholarly and official purposes in Korea, Japan and Vietnam … and demonstrates people will learn and use characters if there is sufficient reason to do so.
The Chinese used in these places was however progressively simplified and local alphabets or syllabaries are now necessary to a greater or lesser extent in all these languages’ writing systems. (A better example might be the widespread adoption of emojis whose ideographic nature is no impediment to their use and is arguably a benefit, since their meaning is independent of language.)
The Latin alphabet is, furthermore, very flexible when confronted with new words. If two non-English speakers wish to communicate about something for which English doesn’t have a word, it’s easy enough to write it down. An Italian pasta maker can invoice an Indonesian client in English for “strozzapreti” because the word is understandable from the spelling. There may well be a term for “strozzapreti” in Chinese, but it won’t be “strozzapreti” and there would be no way to write it or read it without reference to a dictionary.
The computer technology that makes Chinese more accessible than it otherwise might be may also render the question obsolete. As Nicholas Ostler wrote in the The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel, advances in computer translation will mean that “everyone will speak and write in whatever language they choose, and the world will understand.” Ironically, it may be Chinese advances in AI that ultimately make learning Chinese unnecessary.
Gil concludes that more research and observation is necessary. Nothing wrong with that. Things change, even (or especially) language.