rfmcdonald | [POLL] Second Round on the Language Issue (Reply)

The vote is in, and the results of the first round of the vote are as follows:

Mandarin Chinese: 17
Spanish: 14
German: 12
Japanese: 6
Portuguese: 4
Arabic: 2
Greek: 2
Italian: 2
Latin: 2
Magyar: 2
Russian: 2

I'd like to thank you all for helping me narrow down the field to three languages: German, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish. I certainly don't deny the legitimacy of learning the other languages identified, on the original poll or not, and I'm certainly interested in learning at least some of these languages (for wildly different reasons, Portuguese, Japanese, and Russian have the strongest appeals). Nonetheless, the weight of the votes and the arguments made in the comments threads are telling.

The three front-runners stand out to me for a variety of reasons, good and bad.

German : Jean Laponce, in his 1987 tome Languages and their Territories (see here an example of his work), said that Japanese--a language with more than a hundred million speakers inside Japan, but very few outside the Home Islands--was united within its fortress. Of the major languages of Western civilization, German comes closest to this definition. It didn't have to, but two world wars lost catastrophically, the loss of German immigrants outside of Europe to assimilation, the disappearance of German minorities inside Europe after the Second World War thanks to vengeful attacks and involuntary expulsions and voluntary immigrations and some degree of assimilation, and most critically, German's replacement by English as the central European lingua franca, seem to have helped the German language's zone contract sharply. Nonetheless, German remains a very important European language, and one with a very notable cultural and historical legacy that I would do well to access. One potential problem is the low profile of the German language in Ontario relative to other immigrant languages.

Mandarin Chinese : Mandarin Chinese is definitely a rising language. Granted that Mandarin Chinese's reach is still limited, the modernization of China and growth of the Chinese diaspora ensures this language a bright future, if possibly at the expense of other Chinese regional dialects as this San Diego Union-Tribune article hints. The tonality doesn't particularly frighten me; I sang well enough in choir in elementary school, and I'd like to imagine that I do karaoke passably well when only mildly loaded. From my perspective, the very complicated writing system and the difficulty of breaking into Chinese-language speech networks here in Toronto are potential deal-breakers. A halting fluency in spoken Mandarin Chinese untested by much practice isn't something that I'd like to spend too much time to acquire.

Spanish : If Spanish is surpassed by Mandarin Chinese in terms of the numbers of speakers, it far surpasses Mandarin Chinese in terms of its geographical spread, from Chile to Spain to Mexico and in Hispanophone enclaves which exist as far north as cold Toronto. Spanish appeals to me on multiple fronts: it's a language that, given its similarity to French, I should be able to easily and quickly learn; it's a language of global and growing reach, with a very significant cultural legacy; it's even a language that has a large and growing number of speakers in the Toronto area. The only fault that I can find with the idea of learning Spanish is that it's too conventional an idea in the era of NAFTA (but thankfully no longer the epoch of Ricky Martin).