To the East side
Both high schools in Norman will offer instruction in Chinese this fall, which strikes me as a fairly sensible thing to do (which Chinese? Standard Mandarin?), though I’m not quite sure I buy this rationale:
According to Dr. Jessica Stowell, associate director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Oklahoma and director of the Oklahoma Institute for Teaching East Asia, Norman will be among the 40 Oklahoma schools that will offer Chinese next school year. She said Chinese was important for the next generation of leaders in terms of economics and diplomacy.
“We must understand Chinese in order to have a level playing field in business and national security,” Stowell said. “More Chinese people speak English than there are Americans. Over 400 million Chinese speak English; there are 300 million Americans. The Chinese are 1/5 of the world’s population. When Americans allow others to speak English, rather than learning their language, we give away the competitive edge to those who speak our language and understand our culture.”
Stowell also predicts Chinese, through the sheer volume of speakers, will become the leading language of commerce, the Internet and of the elite: “It is simply the language we need to become global citizens on a grand scale, and to reduce the trade deficit with China on a very self-serving scale.”
I am, of course, in favor of being self-serving, but I don’t see English being dethroned as the world’s lingua franca any time soon, population figures notwithstanding.
Still, Asian influence is growing in Oklahoma. While fumbling around the Web, I turned up this application for the school-lunch program in Oklahoma City schools in Vietnamese. [Link to PDF file.] There being about ten thousand folks in town who trace their ancestry to Vietnam, this seems like a reasonable accommodation. (English Language Learner services are offered by the district in Vietnamese, Lao, and Spanish.) The state school with the widest variety of language instruction might be Booker T. Washington High in Tulsa, which offers eight languages: Chinese, Russian, French, German, Latin, Spanish, Italian and Japanese.
(Norman story via Tailgate Politics.)
Dwayne "the canoe guy" »
10 May 2007 · 3:10 pm
Up in Vancouver BC last year, we attended a church that translated services into 10 different languages. I can only imagine what the schools have to teach up there.
Heather D »
10 May 2007 · 3:57 pm
If you’ve ever seen Firefly or Serenity, you would have noticed that Joss Whedon had the same idea about the common language. I’m just glad that the school systems are finally adopting an asian language.
sya »
10 May 2007 · 9:25 pm
I would assume they’re teaching Mandarin. The written language is tailored to it. The other dialects have words/sounds/idioms that can’t be translated to the official ideograms. (Or at least that’s what I’ve been told. I’m pretty much illiterate in Chinese except for the simplest of words.)
Mister Snitch! »
10 May 2007 · 10:35 pm
English speakers will be wealthier, but Chinese speakers will outnumber us.
Dan »
11 May 2007 · 3:56 pm
Chinese won’t become the lingua franca* because it’s so hard to learn. For all of our misplaced pride in the difficulty of English, it’s not that hard to learn the basics. English is not especially difficult because of its idiosyncratic grammar, or because of its idioms, which every language has.
The difficulty in learning English over other languages is in acquiring its enormous vocabulary.
But English is a useful language. We have so many words because we draw from so many languages. We have words for most nuances, and we regularly transform words into new forms. We also generate new words prodigiously.
Tenses are clear-cut. Prepositions, while difficult to learn, are very useful and, used correctly, leave little room for ambiguity. A good writer can be incredibly precise in English.
But the reason Chinese won’t take hold worldwide is that reading it requires enormous study. Learning Chinese characters takes years. And speaking and understanding verbal Chinese is very problematic for adult learners.
Should we learn it? Yes. Will it take the world by storm? I doubt it.
I think instead we will see some sort of pidgin English with a reduced vocabulary and simplified grammar as the common international dialect.
*- Is anyone else amused when they describe English as the lingua franca?
CGHill »
11 May 2007 · 4:09 pm
“Is anyone else amused when they describe English as the lingua franca?“
I was, but then I try not to laugh at my own jokes.