16 May
2004
16 May
'04
1:05 a.m.
In a hundred years the world will be speaking and
writing Hindu or
whatever dialect is popular in China and India
There's actually an excellent chance, I'd say, that that dialect will
be far more similar to today's English than to Maharati or Cantonese or
any of the other native Indian or Chinese languages. English is
already a lingua franca in parts of the world where you wouldn't expect
it - for example, my mother (who spent some years in India) tells that
at some pan-Indian event in the middle of last century, everyone spoke
English because there was no other interchange language available
between the Hindustani-derived speakers from the north and the
Devanagri-derived speakers from the south.
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