Is there any other language that could genuinely challenge English for global dominance?

[Kivan]

Spanish, and maybe Russian.

[Marinus]

That can also be a thing. One can look not just at the Anglosphere or Hispanosphere as completely detached. If the Anglosphere were to decline due to gradual degradation over the centuries or disaster, people might just look at another language still belonging to the Western culture due to it being more familiar.

Yes, that's why I would say Spanish is a potential candidate, because whilst it does not have the Prestige of French, it dwarfs the latter in amount of speakers, also Latin America is one of the areas that China has been investing in for the future.

Mandarin is very foreign and exotic. It'll need more influence to be considered replacing English. However, my point still stands. If Chinese make really good culture and excel at every field in being innovative and the culture reaches us, collectively people would want to know about it and learning Chinese would be considerably less difficult than it is today. An entire society of people can move mountains. It's a driving machine, cultural output. Now the individual has to drive him-/herself forcefully and make sure he doesn't come to a standstill ever. Hence Chinese is very difficult to learn in today's world. Not if Chinese were everywhere in our daily lives with everyone around it emulating it it wouldn't be.

Yes soft power is a great pusher of language, but China has an imense history and rich culture already, unless the Anglo dominated entertainment media dies off for some reason, gradually or otherwise then I don't see how China can compete to be honest, we are generally raised, or even better, conditioned to consume our current flavour of entertaiment. Also, the gap between major Western languages indirectly helps English because even if the Spanish and especially the French hate that English is the lingua franca (lol), the leap from one language to another isn't that huge, as opposed to the analytical, tonal system of the Sinitic languages.

What generally only geeky hobbyists manage to pull off half-assedly, Israelis managed to pull off excellently. Revive a dead language with a fairly complex grammar and make it a modern language, Hebrew. They did because an entire society worked toward it together and they lacked a modern lingua franca when building their nation.

People outside of the Western world also learn English in the end and a 'cultural barrier' didn't prevent them to. Anglo soft power is just that influential.

Of course, we never know how things will play out, but many variables have to go in favour of the Chinese for Madarin to become the lingua franca of the world, I think that if English loses its status, which I doubt to be honest, Castilian more likely be taught as a second language the world over, even in China itself. The phonetics of Castilian in general are very easy to master, and once you master it, spelling also becomes a lot more practical, especially the dialect of Castile & Leon/Northern Spain.

[frdfgcg]

Where's the answer "NO"?
Obviously there is no such language.
There are a million articles, technical literature, fiction books, research etc in English.
English is the language of science and technology.
Any information can be found in English. Etc.
What you can find in Arabic for example?
Koran? lol

[NSXD60]

No, thank God, because who the hell wants to sound like a sloppy Castilian or a Meowing Chink.

[Heather Duval]

Feminism.

[Iloko]

Spanish is probably much easier to learn than Chinese lol

[Zanzibar]

Discuss.

I choose Spanish but want to choose both Spanish and Chinese. Dang. Can someone edit the poll?

[Fieraru]

Chinese maybe if things go on the way they do.

There are many Hindi speakers but they as a country or people do not seem to have the same global ambitions China does, and are more stuck in poverty. And they don't seem unified as much

[Zroota]

Neither.

But Spanish may come close, at least more so in the US. But definitely not the world.

English is still leading by far.

[Tooting Carmen]

bump