> Well, they do have a point, to the extent that Norway, Sweden, Denmark
> and
> Finland are rich countries, with a well-developed network of US
> immigrants/emigres/family members. Their languages are taught at major
> US
> universities, something not true for many other significant languages
> and
> cultures on the planet.
All of this is true of Chinese. (Not as rich per-capita as Scandinavia, of course, but its culture is extremely old and prestigious, which makes up for the per-capita income difference, I would think. The problem is that, for English speakers, Chinese is much more "foreign" than the Scandinavian languages, which are also Germanic, of course.
> The real question is, though, just what *is* an Asian language, anyway?
> Are we talking Tagalog, Kannada, Marathi, or just
> Chinese/Korean/Japanese?
> This is more than just a cultural question. It goes to the heart of how
> the East Asian region -- a rapidly-integrating economic space -- is
> developing a multinational political and social identity.
Good point. The true multicultural position, of course, is that Tagalog and Marathi, to say nothing of Thai and Indonesian, are just as worth attention and respect as CKJ. But then equal status would have to be accorded to several thousand languages (I don't remember how many are left -- they are dying off as fast as endangered biological species). The problems the newly expanded EC is having getting all its necessary translations done will pale in comparison with the situation when the global multicultural utopia is finally realized.
The practical solution, of course, which is totally politically incorrect but is already in operation, is to use English as the basic world language. Completely unfair, I would be the first to agree, but no artificial language, such as Esperanto, has caught on, and Esperanto in any case is as Western-centric as you can get. Might as well stick with English.
If China continues to grow in world economic importance, that, plus its population and its historical/cultural prestige, will make it a contender for the world language status presently held by English. But its great lack of resemblance to the Indo-European languages, which are spoken by most of the economically advanced and advancing nations (including Russia and India), is a considerably handicap.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt