Chinese or English: Which Will Become Dominant in a Global Marketplace?

by Andrés. T. Tapia —

Last year there was a raging debate on Chinese social media sites about which language was going to be more important, Chinese of English?

Chinese online commentators debated with passion on both sides of the issue. With the help of a Chinese national, Billy Chan, who is a social networking specialist and technologist in Canton, China I present some of the arguments made on behalf of both languages.

Those supporting English as more important cited these reasons:

1. Chinese has too many words with the same pronunciation. It takes more time for the decoder than the encoder to understand the communications exchange.
2. Children take more time, some say 3-5 years, to learn a language.
3. Chinese grammar is less definitive than English. Tense and word form need to be defined by context, often generating blur of intended meaning.

Those making the case for Chinese made these points:

1. Chinese characters are two-dimensional hieroglyphics, taking less time to scan to absorb meaning. English is scanable, but it’s based on remembering letters with no logical pattern. The human brain more easily sees patterns.
2. Chinese is convergent, meaning it has remained cohesive by not incorporating words from other languages, while English is divergent, meaning that it is always co-opting words from multiple languages. This has led to English having over 1 million words which makes things such as interdisciplinary research very difficult.
3. Chinese takes fewer words and pronunciation to convey meaning. There are no letters in Chinese, only words in one syllable. One syllable could convey one or more meanings. And many words has same pronunciation. Many Chinese parents report their children are good at math compared to English speaking children. They believe this is because the Chinese numbering system is easier to remember and practice. 11, 12 13, 14, for example, have all have different spelling structures in English, and so do the days of the week like Monday, Tuesday compared to the Chinese 1st, 2nd, 3rd days.

For more on the debate in Chinese (score a point for those making the case for needing to learn Chinese!), go here and here. (You can get a difficult to understand web translation by pasting the url in a Google search and when results come back click on the Translate button next to the search result.)

A few more points: If we compare just the sheer numbers of the 750 million people who speak English compared to over the 1 billion who speak Chinese, Chinese has the edge. But when comparing how widely distributed English speakers are not only in the official English-speaking countries in Europe, the Americas, Oceania, Africa, and South Asia, English wins on that point. In fact, non-native speakers — according to linguistics professor David Crystal’s estimate – outnumber native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1. It’s no wonder then why English is the official language of transnational organizations such as the UN.

To me, having experienced the benefits of being fluent in English and Spanish and with a working knowledge of French, there is no question that learning Chinese will provide a competitive advantage to any worker doing business within China and with the Chinese in a pub, bistro, cafe, ballroom near you as they expand their global reach.

The Great Irony

But there is something ironic about English gaining greater power even as the English-speaking countries decline in their economic power. The more the Chinese, Brazilians, Russians and others get into the global business game, the more there is a need for a common language.  I wrote about this in a couple of earlier blogs (”With the Rise of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, How Relevant Is English?” (Part 1) and Part 2) where I outlined that English will remain a dominant force even as, and in fact because of, the global bazaar becoming more multilingual and multicultural. Also, with the US still leading in innovation, the importance of English will keep increasing.

The winning combination, of course, is the use of a global shared language yet  having business and personal practices of learning other languages and honoring and respecting native language use locally in employee communications, benefits explanations, etc.

So if it is the case that English is going to become even more dominant in our global world, how ready is the global workforce to be English competent? I will write about why there is a lot at stake in the answer in my next blog post.

In the meantime, what do you think about the strategic role of languages in global business?

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