Machine translation, allowing people to communicate globally via hand-held devices like iPads and smartphones, will soon replace English as the world’s most dominant language according to Nicolas Ostler, a leading linguist.

All ‘lingua francas’ rely on economic, cultural, administrative and military dominance, according to Nicolas Ostler who wrote 'The Rise and Fall of World Languages'.

English will become ‘the last lingua franca’ as Europe and North America lose economic power and are replaced by emerging nations like China, India, Russia and Brazil.

“One day English too, the last lingua franca to be of service to a multi-lingual world, will be laid down. Thereafter everyone will speak and write in whatever language they choose and will understand.”

As machine translation, in the form of Google translate or language translation apps like Siri continues to improve, Ostler predicts it will become easier to translate written documents quickly using hand-held devices to translate speech and signs in real time.

“The most plausible future for English is it will continue to be spoken as a mother tongue (in English-speaking nations) but it’s position as lingua franca will be over taken by technology as more and more people live their lives electronically.”

“It is conceivable that the nature of lingua franca English will become text talk," Ostler said.

And English isn’t the only language that will suffer extinction. Ostler believes half of the world’s languages are so endangered they will die out by the end of this century.

Alex Dupont

See Also

• More about language translation
  Translation is the act of rewriting a document, changing it into another language. The original language is called the "source" language. The language into which the source text is translated is called the "target" language.
• Hay Festival 2012: English will die out like Latin, leading linguist claims
  English will soon die out as the world?s most dominant language and be replaced by ?machine translation? that allows people to communicate via hand-held devices like iPads, Nicolas Ostler, a leading linguist has claimed.
• www.nicholasostler.com
  Nicholas Ostler's website