Just stumbled across a book review of a book called Globish which will be released in the next few days. It states that English has become the world language. Let me cogitate that (ha, I do use my new favorite word from time to time). After a little bit of deep thinking I have to agree. Much of the way we communicate today or what we use on a regular basis is dominated by “English-speaking” companies, products, services or similar. Let’s take the computer for example: Windows’ market share is currently around 90% and the rest is probably split up between Apple and Linux. All English-speaking. The world’s largest information ressource Wikipedia is multilingual, most of the articles are still in English (over 3 million compared to 2nd place German with about 1 million). The world’s top browsers are “English-based”: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and a few others. The most common language on the Internet is English, with close to 500 million Internet users. The world’s largest social network? Facebook – also English. The world’s largest search engine? Google – also English. The world’s largest telephone manufacturer? Nokia – Finnish. But I bet that they wouldn’t have this market share if they had stuck to a Finnish interface.

Now, if the world was ruled by cars we would probably talk German. But Germans love to use English words because it makes it sound more sophisticated. Probably the only non-English word when it comes to cars is Fahrvergnügen… and maybe Michael Schumacher, although he is not a word, strictly speaking. If the world would concentrate around drinking wines we would all be talking French. And we now that once you have a glass or two your French improves to a level where you (think you) can speak it fluently.

In the end, things that you use at work are probably the most influential when it comes down to deciding about a global language. Obviously, there are some local heroes like Baidu for search in China or Alibaba or e-commerce, but learning Chinese is such a difficult task that it will take a couple of generations. In addition, China has been good at copying stuff from the rest of the world and adapting it to the Chinese market. But what China really needs to do is come up with really innovative stuff so that others start copying their ideas / products / services. And at that point we can start talking about Chinese as the global language and we’ll start seeing long queues in front of a Chinese hardware manufacturer flagship store waiting to buy the latest technological gadget.