Chemistry or Hua-Shue?

Abstract

Presently, 10 to 18% of the world's population speaks traditional Chinese or Mandarin [1]. One of the consequences of Chinese economic growth during the last decades is a growing number of papers from that region in high impact chemistry journals. This obvious process drives us to a reflexion on the fate of the English language as lingua franca and as the scientific language in a near future. As it happened with other languages such as classical Greek, Latin, and French, English language may be bound to gradual substitution in a short period of time. During the early 90s, the presence of Chinese speaking authors in those journals was almost inexpressive, rarely exceeding 1% of the published papers [2]. Nowadays this number is close to 10% or more if one only considers the papers produced in the PRC, and everything indicates that this fraction will grow. In spite of being spoken by many people, the Mandarin language should find several obstacles to its eventual implementation as an international language. The first of them is referred to its complexity. It is extremely rich phonetically, and employs a very subtle and complicated tonal system. It uses a rich grammar, and very complicated ideograms, which can be counted in thousands. English, on the other hand, is phonetically simple and quite flexible. It is spoken by about 5% of the world's population as mother tongue and it is the official language of 54 nations [1]. It is the third in the number of speakers after Mandarin and Spanish. Such a number of anglophones may be explained by the extension of the British Empire during the nineteenth century, which was known as the Empire were the sun never sets down. Beyond its relative simplicity, since it does not use accents for example, English is also spoken by machines once everything involving communication between men and machines, especially programming languages, is based on English. It allows the utilization of short words to express what it is wanted in this context. It has to be mentioned that several protocols as for example the aviation communication system are also based on this language and, it is unlikely that they will be totally replaced at a time: this would be technically impracticable... Unless otherwise Mandarim becomes extremely simplified, I mean, much more than the actual “simplified Chinese”, and the calligraphy system be totally replaced, it is quite unlikely that Chinese will dethrone English as the lingua franca. At least for the next 50 years.