There was a whole fuss last summer when the authorities of the southern Pakistani province of Sindh announced that learning standard Chinese will soon be compulsory for all local students from sixth grade onwards. This program should start from 2013 on.
Some comments about the announcement were made in an article entitled Chinese - The language the whole world wants to learn published in the daily newspaper The Independent on 2011-09-08 (see online version: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/chinese-ndash-the-language-the-whole-world-wants-to-learn-2351204.html).
On the one hand, some observers say that this will erode Pakistani culture. On the other hand, some analysts are convinced that it makes sense as our planet's most populous nation is just next to the province of Sindh.
The education minister of Sweden also announced last summer that all primary schools in his country would offer Chinese within a decade. In Sweden, by the way, only 10% of dissertations are written in Swedish while 90% of them are written in English nowadays.
In the October/November 2011 issue of The Linguist (Vol. 50, No/5 2011), Peter Butler of the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland mentions that Scandinavian countries were the first in Europe to embrace Globish (global English) and are now the first to be concerned about the implications of domain loss in their own languages. And as English keeps on establishing itself not only as a global lingua franca but also as the lingua docta (and lingua oeconomica), the loss of linguistic integrity that threatens to befall the Scandinavian languages may affect larger European languages in the future.
In the USA where English is the de facto national language (and not official language despite several proposals in amendments to immigration reform bills), the number of public and private schools offering Chinese (see note on Pinyin or Wade-Giles system here below) to its students has risen to 1,600 from 300 in only ten years. Eventually, Chinese could be the lingua franca that the whole world desperately seeks...
What is the Pinyin system? Pinyin is a romanized spelling system of the Chinese language, used to represent Chinese sounds with European letters. Of all the 26 letters of the English alphabet, 25 are used in Pinyin. The sound “V” is not a phoneme used in the Chinese language. Although the letters are the same, the sounds they represent differ in some cases. For this reason, there is really no easy way to tell from Pinyin exactly how the Chinese words sound, but it is extremely easy for an English speaker to guess (source: www.edukitty.net).
Zàijiàn!
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