Talk:Global language system

Arithmetic error: article is self-contradictory

The article states, "Supercentral languages: very widely spoken languages that serve as connectors between speakers of central languages; according to de Swaan, there are twelve of these: Arabic,Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Telugu and Swahili;" but this is a list of thirteen - not twelve - languages. zazpot (talk) 14:55, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

Kids of life

How seriously is this list taken by people other than De Swaan and his circle? I admit most of it makes sense but why Japanese (which is big and important but is not the prime connector for any languages other than Ainu - and arguably Ryukyuan, if it counts as a separate language) and not Tamil or Zulu, which interconnect several, for example? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.185.117.226 (talk) 17:18, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, even so, Ainu and Ryukyuan are not central languages, so it doesn't support the supercentrality of Japanese. One could imagine a Brazilian communicating with a Chinese in Japanese, although that's unlikely to occur outside of Japan. It seems inaccurate to count people using the majority language of the country they live in, because then, the vast majority of national languages could be considered supercentral. I hope someone with access to the book could provide us with the criteria and statistics used to obtain the list.

For the same reason, Portuguese is questionable. One could imagine an Argentinian and a Japanese communicating in Portuguese in Brazil. But is that likely to occur outside of a Portuguese-speaking country?

German is also questionable. It's spoken mainly in Europe, and given an average European's knowledge of English, it's unlikely that a large number of non-German speakers would choose German to communicate. For instance an Italian-speaking Swiss and a French-speaking Swiss would likely converse in English even when both know German.

German is widely used in academia, and is a major instrument of international communication for scientific and other technical purposes. Koro Neil (talk) 09:39, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Not any more. My German-speaking science and math professors told me that they have published all their papers in English, and this is certainly known to be the norm even for Germans (and now even the French) in the mathematical sciences. Less anecdotally, from the Goethe-Institut: http://www.goethe.de/ges/spa/pan/spw/en3889454.htm — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:3134:5310:E2F8:47FF:FE36:92DC (talk) 14:34, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

I think the idea is that German connects several German dialects, which are being treated as languages in their own right.

Mandarin Chinese could be considered supercentral only if we assume that the Chinese languages are distinct languages and not dialects, and that Cantonese and Wu are central languages.

Firstly, they are, and such political distinctions are ignored by linguists. Secondly, there are many non-Sinitic language speakers who use Mandarin as a lingua franca. Certainly Chinese should be counted as supercentral.

I agree that Tamil could be supercentral. Which central languages does Zulu connect? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.189.244.41 (talk) 11:04, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes Tamil should be supercentral. Zulu possibly too - variants of it, or mixes of it with English, are used to connect Sotho, Venda, Tswana, Xhosa speakers, etc. However, with English predominating, Zulu not having many literary resources (only a couple of newspapers), and the bulk of urban black South African youth speaking a few mixes of Zulu, English and even Afrikaans to communicate, and English in other contexts, the situation is too complicated to include Zulu without caveats. I agree that Japanese and possibly Italian and German are strange choices.

Brief Review

My students revised this page for a course (HG2052: Language, Technology and the Internet) and I am adding a couple of comments as the final review. Francis Bond (talk) 15:08, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

• the page is a very good description of the system and its critical reception
• I think it fulfils all of the good article critera.

English academic

3 sentences of global language And 3 sentences of lingua Franco 64.226.58.134 (talk) 07:50, 9 January 2023 (UTC)