I wonder if they will keep printing rubbish like this when the language of science becomes Chinese, which is not too far off.
I think Mandarin will have a hard time increasing its sphere of influence, despite what cyberpunk authors may have predicted 30 years ago.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/world/#peop...
PRC academic system that heavily focuses on science is spitting out educated classes that can in aggregate rival the size (and increasingly quality) of the English tertiary network. The current STEM production rate is ~5M or OECD combined. People mocked at PRC academic paper mills a few years ago, but now PRC talent is topping science and innovation indexes (controlled for quality), that's the natural outcome of exploiting talent at PRC scale. Project trend to 2050 (past 26 years of new births already locked in) and PRC can feasibly hammer out 100M+ talent in just STEM, and most importantly, increasingly be able to retain talent without the best being brain drained. Effect going forward is that PRC is going to snowball the generation of high impact scientific research and it will increasingly be written in mandarin - PRC removed mandatory English education. PRC scientific base will likely be large enough to rival English RoW, the dynamic will be more the PRC science sphere will be less inclined to integrate with the Anglo sphere. Especially if translation tech improves. IMO the mandarin science ecosystem will be fine competing if not leading in her own bubble. If anything, the PRC might prefer the gatekeeping science behind language as a competitive advantage. Global science will splinter and mandarin science will be it's own pole.
Shortcoming of India elite demographic dividend argument is, western academic institutes have limited capacity to absorb Indian talent, who let’s be frank, is replacing current cohort or PRC talent due to geopolitics which will make Indian brain drain problem worse and PRC talent retention better. English proficiency among brain drained elites will make spinning up indigenous Indian S&T at scale difficult, which India herself has a poor track record of exploiting. That can change with time obviously, but IMO there's something systemic happening with Indian diaspora doing well abroad for much longer than PRC diaspora but not meaningfully converting that into success for their birth country. Without India actually raising the ceiling for western academic ecosystem, you're looking at anglo and mandarin ecosystems competing closely. Unless anglos massively boost skill immigration, but that's politically difficult and the opposite is just as likely.
I don't buy that all science coming from 1/6th of the world (by population) will somehow surpass all the science coming from the other 5/6ths. The only way for Mandarin to rival English would be convincing non Chinese to use Mandarin. But I am glad to hear that China plans to begin developing its own science and tech.
Most spoken language English 18.8%, Mandarin 13.8%
Most spoken _first_ language Mandarin 12.3% vs English 5.1%
The short/medium term competition is 14% of native mandarin speakers vs 5% native english speakers + 13% non native speakers of different fluency. Long / very long term (2050-2100), Mandarin speakers will likely decline to 1/12 of the world, while English speakers will likely increase, maybe 1/4 of the world. But Ultimately only a fraction of talent is properly captured and exploited, so it really depends on state policies, i.e. PRC graduates STEM at 2x the rate of the US or 8x more graduates per year, more than west taking in talent via brain drain. Hence IMO enough to rival English, which is the best PRC can hope for because displacing English with Chinese is too culturally difficult.
It is useful for there to be some lingua franca. There are arguments for why English is a good candidate: - already widely spoken - economically important - simple word morphology - no grammatical gender - an alphabetic writing system that is relatively easy to learn
There are reasons why it is a bad candidate: - terrible spelling for an alphabetic writing system - definite articles, which confuse speakers of languages which lack them - arguable unnecessary tense and aspect distinctions - obligatory gender in animate pronouns
In any case, it's what we've got.
But it is also true that communicating professionally in a language you learned for that purpose imposes a burden that native speakers don't face. If you find it boring to read attempts to quantify this, maybe this article isn't for you.
> obligatory gender in animate pronouns
While it's just one in a long list of things, I'll point out that singular "they" is available (and has a long history) for people wishing to use non-gendered, animate pronouns. (I have also heard "it", but, while everyone's mileage will differ, my brain has a much harder time getting over the difficulty with reading "it" as animate than it does the difficulty with reading "they" as singular.)
The only way to fix this is to make the lingua franca a constructed language. I'm not exactly against the idea of Esperanto being the lowest common denominator. However, there's this implication in your post and the article that English being the wrong language is some thinly veiled imperialism, racism, or something. Science is not that way. If there was an easier language to communicate to an audience with they'd use that. The "base" language of English is far, far simpler than other languages. Gendered pronouns are available in almost every language and English is one of the only languages where you can replace them with non-gendered pronouns if you so choose. In fact, I wrote this entire post without using any gendered language. This would be impossible in nearly any other widely spoken language.
It would be easier if the frothing at the mouth pro-DEI-at-all-costs people would just say what they mean. Then the argument could be addressed correctly - English replaced Latin because it was easier and evolving. Chinese is the only language that would replace it based on paper-origin/language ratio and Chinese is an order of magnitude or more complicated. Even just speaking about the alphabet it's something like 100x larger.
If we wanted a more neutral language ideally suited to scientific discourse then Lojban would be the "logical" choice. But of course in the real world it's totally impractical.
It's why Queer Theory is so insane - very very low stakes. (If you don't believe me, read some Gayle Rubin or the less mainstream Foucault stuff).