FourCast 43 - Don't insert animals there

Sarah Lane and David Prager will give us words of wisdom on candy-coated humans, the Gross Domestic Happiness quotient, and one language to rule them all.

Get the episode at this link.

Comments

[ddawg]

Hilarious episode! I might have to think twice before I eat another M&M!

In regards to the language discussion, I'm a bit more skeptical to the continual dominance of the English language. While I definitely don't think English will go away anytime soon, I think there are a few challenges (and challengers) as we progress into the future.

Spanish, which already dominates the entire South American continent (aside from Brazil) continues to push its way northward towards the United States. I think we're going to continue to see that conflict between the English and Spanish language play out within our own borders in the coming years.

Mandarin Chinese will also be a huge challenger. As China continues to develop and expand, Chinese is becoming increasingly important. Not only is it becoming vital in the financial world, as China continues to spread its influence around the world (such as to Africa and the Middle East), we're seeing a shift towards Chinese as the language to conduct business/trade/construction. There's been plenty of articles on how Mandarin Chinese is becoming popular as "the" language to learn. While there might be parallels to what happened with Japanese back in the 70s and 80s, unless there's a huge collapse (economically/politically/population-wise) in China, this one might give English a run for the money - and much more than what we saw on Firefly (where Chinese was used more for cuss words).

What if instead, languages eventually are split not on a geographic-level but on a socio-economic level around the world? Perhaps we'll see a future where the blue-collar or the third world operate in one language while the middle and upper classes speak in another?

Anywhos just some of my random thoughts. Love the show!

P.S. Tom, with Chinese on the internet (aside from video), there isn't as much of a distinction between Mandarin Chinese and other Chinese dialects. Chinese is fairly consistent in its written form (although each region may have its local slang (even specialized characters) as well as varied words/phrases).

[Mike Deeds]

Hey guys, great episode.

As for the English dominance in the future, I don't see this as farfetched as you guys(and the poster above me) made it out to be. To be short and to the point here, English is already used universally by all air traffic controllers and flight crew members worldwide as mandated by the International Civil Aviation Organization. While the numbers of people doing this is not nearly the size of countries or even the world, it just shows that it is possible to get people of all nationalities to collaborate and use one language.

Love the show,
Mike