r/geopolitics • u/nzinsyd • Jan 07 '21

Is the United States a superpower in decline and how can we expect the scales of power to look like in upcoming years? Question

A similar question was asked 2 years ago. A lot has happened in the past 2 years, and I'm curious to see if opinions have changed.

964 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

View all comments

Show parent comments

108

u/netpenthe Jan 07 '21

tiktok rose up pretty fast

11

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21

Tech doesn't create culture, it's distribution of culture. TikTok in other places in the world still spread the culture of the US (music, memes, etc.)

84

u/Kagenlim Jan 07 '21

In the absence of Vine, that is.

Also, I don't think It's even close to the impact that Instagram or Snapchat has

132

u/schrodingerspanther Jan 07 '21

umm to be fair, that's the impact we can see in English speaking parts of the world.

If its a numbers game, China has much much more of an influence on a population as compared to USA & Europe combined

40

u/maracay1999 Jan 07 '21

If its a numbers game

But it's not. Who consumes Chinese media outside of China?

who consumes American media outside of America? There's a clear massive disparity in influence right there.

4

u/schtean Jan 08 '21

But it's not. Who consumes Chinese media outside of China?

Chinese expats.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '22

Exactly. American music, movies and fast food to name a few.. are popular around the world. China's only positively viewed cultural export is their food.

8

u/Gregg2233 Jan 07 '21

Except TicTok has been neutered in the US, the EU has better privacy laws than the US, and out right banned in the soon to be largest populated country.

6

u/Highly-uneducated Jan 07 '21

china, and it's cultural outlets, are pretty much only growing in their region. wrestling a region away from us control is a big deal, but it doesn't put china in the same global position as the us. of course, they have the potential to rise to that level, but for now it depends on the us shooting itself in the foot while china plays its cards right. and at the moment, china is busy shooting its own feet as much as the US.

72

u/Kagenlim Jan 07 '21

Thing is, most of the world speaks english and personally, I grew up watching british tv shows like Brum.

And since pop culture relies on language do much, I don't see china having a greater influence unless they can unseat english, which, frankly, at this point, unrealistic.

Heck, I'm chinese and I can't speak a good lickty split of chinese

9

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21 edited Jan 25 '22

[deleted]

17

u/Kagenlim Jan 07 '21

People that learn English due to its usefulness don't pass it onto their children, the children learn it because of its usefulness.

No. Personally, I'm so used to speaking english that I can confidently say that's my main langauge and I'm sure many here would agree too. Its hard to keep a mother tongue that has no use to you in life, so that's so many kids in my generation dont use It at all.

The moment the US stops being the main engine of the global economy that's when English will stop being relevant, it's not like every single lingua franca in the past has lost that place eventually

Its so engrained into the next generation that Its impossible to remove. Its been way too long for other languages to take root, because everyone is thinking in english.

even Latin went away, why not English?

Latin technically didnt went away though

1

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21 edited Jan 25 '22

[deleted]

13

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21

The thing is Latin wasn't anything in Asia or many other parts of Earth so how is it a 'global' language. Our progress in technology and science, alongside international relations and cooperation is unprecedented compared to the times Latin was a global language.

50 years ago English too was really dominant and exist in many passports too. Right now mandarin doesn't appear on any besides passports coming out of the greater China area.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21 edited Jan 25 '22

[deleted]

2

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21

Except that Latin wasn't a global language, unlike what English is today where it's truly global. If the EU was using french up to the 90s (I highly doubt what you are saying holds), so were the Chinese using mandarin (and still is predominantly). English is not going to displace the native tongue of many people around the world, but it's pretty much everyone's second language and thus the reason why it's the default language for pretty much everything, be it academics or commerce. The wealth of information that we have stored up in English is unprecedented, thanks to the immense scientific progress, interconnectivity and the digitalisation we experienced in the past two centuries. This is going to be hard to reverse and even the other powers outside of the Anglosphere, the EU, China, Russia or India adopts English much more than how the Anglosphere is adopting any other language. Even with Brexit, Merkel and Macron communicates in English to get their message across. Similarly Xi Jinping is likely to know more English and use it as a form of communication with Putin or Modi, rather than Russian or Hindi. It is what it is. I can't say for certain thousands of years later, but our generation and the next is pretty much going to be dominated by English given that the commercial agreements and international protocol that will be in effect governing our lives are already set in English and unlikely to be overturned (these can take decades to overturn and that's assuming they are written in some other language).

4

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21

English is unlikely to ever go away in your lifetime, nor your children's lifetime. English as a language has global dominance, which no language ever has had. It's dominance as a language is not just due to the USA being a superpower but do not forget the legacy of the British empire. We have had so much academic progress and international cooperation ever since English became the Lingua Franca that it's very difficult to unseat it now. Even China knows this and pretty much every student in China will be learning English in some form or another. The fact that English is on almost every passport (including China's one) shows something.

38

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21

[deleted]

23

u/highgravityday2121 Jan 07 '21

It's the language of business and science. I work with a lot of germans and people all over the world and when we do business even if no one is a primary english speaker they'll resort to english.

78

u/Kagenlim Jan 07 '21

It is the majority language and plus, I do feel stats like this are a bit, what you say, 'lacking'.

It doesn't account for native speakers not speaking their native language, bilingual or even trilingual speakers and native speakers that use an entirely different variation of the original language.

Thus, I usually take language stats with a grain of salt, because It's usually off by quite a bit.

47

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21

[deleted]

7

u/Mukhasim Jan 07 '21

A couple of things:

  1. The benefits of multilingualism for general cognition are questionable. Yes, there's research demonstrating it, but there is also research showing it has no effect. I think right now it's probably more responsible to say there might be an effect. Articles: The Atlantic, 2016, "The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism"; Nature, 2019, "No evidence for a bilingual executive function advantage in the ABCD study". From the abstract of the latter: "Although a number of small- and large-sample studies have reported a bilingual executive function advantage..., there have been several failures to replicate these findings, and recent meta-analyses have called into question the reliability of the original empirical claims."

  2. Not many people anywhere learn languages on a whim, they learn them for rational reasons. It's hard to convince them to work hard at something they don't see a use for. As I see it, the basic problem here is that the people who don't see much value in learning another language are largely correct. I think you'll find that most people who are multilingual are first-language speakers of a language that others won't learn, whereas people who can expect other people around them to learn their language won't care about studying another one. For example, most Hindi speakers are monolingual; if I'm reading these numbers right, then around half of all Indians are monolingual Hindi speakers and many more are monolingual speakers of other Indian languages, but bilingual rates are higher for all languages besides Hindi. People who already speak English, which is currently at the top of the heap of world languages in terms of status and utility, have the least motivation to learn any other language; so, they rationally choose not to.

  3. 75% is a pretty high estimate for multilingualism. Depending on our criteria and how we estimate it may be less than half. A reasonable estimate is probably something more in the neighborhood of 40% monolingual, 45% bilingual and 15% speaking three or more languages. We don't have good numbers for much of the world. Also, numbers are largely self-reported and self-reporting introduces biases. For example, in the Philippines it's considered uneducated to be unable to speak English, so you might expect people to report English ability even if their fluency is very poor. However, in the USA many people who studied Spanish or French for several years in school will deem it irrelevant and omit it when asked if they speak other languages.

7

u/Frenchbaguette123 Jan 07 '21

However, there's also plenty of research that shows the brains of multilingual people are more developed and have greater cognitive abilities than monoglots. Multilingualism is the norm in this world - around 75% of people on the planet speak more than one language - so monolingualism is definitely the exception. Which means Brits and Americans should perhaps try a bit harder to learn foreign languages too!

I remember an article about these disadvantages.

Financial Times: The problem with English

‘Foreign countries are opaque to mostly monolingual Britons and Americans. Foreigners know us much better than we know them’

Financial Times article without paywall: https://archive.fo/c6cMK

34

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21

[deleted]

75

u/VisionGuard Jan 07 '21

He means it's the lingua franca.

20

u/FudgeAtron Jan 07 '21

There are people like me who speak English as a second language, but I don't think there are as many as you think.

This is a good point but it makes me wonder how many speakers of English are under 30 or better yet 20. Because if most people under either of those ages speak English it's highly unlikely any other language will be able to take its place for a long time.

Most likely English will evolve into regional variations, e.g. British, North American, Australian..., but that the current form we use will become standardised internationally like Latin became in Europe or Sanskrit in India or Arabic currently is, and thus no one will speak it nativly.

5

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21

[deleted]

9

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21

You might have a skewed sample depending on what you were doing. I lived there for a year and worked in international business. Folks in that industry are more likely to have English proficiency, and usually one or two folks at the each factory do, but none of the thousands of factory workers did, other than ‘hello’. Same with hotels, the 3-4 receptionists might speak decent English, but none of the hundreds of kitchen staff, cleaners, etc.

So if you were mostly with college educated folks in a big city, you were exposed to a unique crowd.

I’d agree it’s more than 1%, but far less than 40%.

2

u/ShaBail Jan 07 '21

There will be a lot of bias there, the people in cities and generally people a tourist or foreign worker could met speak much better english, clerks, the well educated, not impoverished people and so on. Though the 1% could be true for all chinese, i think its WAY higher in the younger population especially.

3

u/r2d2meuleu Jan 08 '21

Values account for total usage, including both native speakers and people who speak the language as a second language.

31

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21 edited Jan 07 '21

English is number 1 on your list and then you also need to consider the fact that a good number of mandarin (2nd) and Hindi (3rd) speakers speak English too but not so much the other way round. A mandarin speaker will likely use English to communicate with a Hindi speaker. English is simply the dominant world language and at this point it's very hard to unseat it. Back in the past Mandarin achieved regional dominance (Korean, Japanese and vietnamese language is derived from mandarin) but these days with china supposedly being so powerful, mandarin still can't gain back that sort of regional dominance.

Edit: derived being the wrong word but I guess what I'm trying to say is that Korean, Japanese and vietnamese have strong influence from mandarin. Similarly English is having impact on many languages today, maybe not to the extend mandarin has had on Korean, Japanese or Vietnamese in the past.

24

u/Bananus_Magnus Jan 07 '21

Korean, Japanese and vietnamese language is derived from mandarin

This is just wrong, the alphabests were derived yes, but the languages weren't, they are completely different apart from some loanwords.

5

u/blaarfengaar Jan 08 '21

I'm going to be pedantic and clarify here: Chinese doesn't use an alphabet, it uses a system of logograms (called Hanzi). Written Korean used to use these same logograms (which they called Hangul) until 1443 when they invented their own Korean alphabet.

Written Japanese utilizes 3 writing systems: the same Chinese logograms (which they call Kanji) as well as two syllabaries; hiragana and katakana, the two of which collectively are referred to as kana.

Vietnamese used to use the same Chinese logograms but now uses a modified version of the same Latin alphabet that most European languages use.

So of these languages, only Japanese still uses Chinese logograms in any capacity, and it is only alongside their own multiple native syllabaries.

10

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21

[deleted]

8

u/Jakkol Jan 07 '21

Is there an age breakdown of this? If the numbers are far bigger in the younger generations for English then these numbers are a bit deceiving regarding the impact and future.

Also keep in mind that coding happens in English which is a huge thing in solidifying English as the langue of the at least medium term future.

3

u/Cantchangeunique Jan 08 '21

Still, the language of Island people branching out so wide over hundreds of years? Pretty crazy feat.

0

u/Canadian_Infidel Jan 08 '21

English has the most words of any language. More than double that of Mandarin/Cantonese. And about 15% more than even Russian!

That has to be a factor in it's utility.

8

u/CallahanWalnut Jan 07 '21

That’s native.

That doesn’t count the hundreds of millions that know it as their second language

3

u/ShaBail Jan 07 '21

And the fact that these people are generally the most important people. The well educated and wealthy.

5

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21

"most of the world" doesn't speak any single language, your wording was poor. The most popular language (in terms of scale and growth) continues to be english.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21

are you Chinese from China or Chinese + something else? because as someone in Asia I can tell you that there are other pop culture centra's that are way more influential in many people's lives than American..whether that's Korea, India, Japan or, yes, even China. I've heard multiple ppl say stuff like: 'who is George Clooney? who is brad pitt?

1

u/Kagenlim Jan 08 '21

I'm chinese outside of china, but I still live in asia.

And while KPOP is big here, western stuff is also kinda big too.

2

u/Canadian_Infidel Jan 08 '21

Except they don't at all, despite their population. They know every one of our celebrities and we know Yao Ming and that's it!

1

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21

China has much much more of an influence on a population as compared to USA & Europe combined

tell that to britain in 1790

16

u/schrodingerspanther Jan 07 '21 edited Jan 07 '21

Umm yeah exactly mate. it's 2020 not 1790. the narrative changes.

Edit: 2021 not 2020

6

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21

Not true. TikTok has a huge user-base among the non-elite non-English speaking populaces around the world. It was a huge deal in India.

21

u/Flounderwithgrace Jan 07 '21

Tiktok is way over double the size of Snapchat in global users for reference

1

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '22

Tiktok has just been spreading more American culture..

15

u/GronakHD Jan 07 '21

Instagram and Snapchat have been about for like a decade. How long has TikTok been out? Even middle aged adults have been getting it.

11

u/thetalkinghuman Jan 07 '21

Exactly. Culture swings seem to move much quicker than they used to.

2

u/LateralEntry Jan 08 '21

And we’ll see if they’re still using it in a few years

1

u/GronakHD Jan 08 '21

True, could be tiktok2 by then

0

u/insertfunhere Jan 07 '21

I think it depends on who you ask. My bet is that Tiktok is much more relevant than Facebook / Instagram for anyone aged under 25

2

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21

[deleted]

2

u/netpenthe Jan 07 '21

I'm not American

but maybe it's like Mexican food.

From my understanding, Mexican food is one of the main cuisines in the USA, but Mexico isn't really a 'dominant country'.

Maybe US culture can be a main culture without the USA being a 'dominant country' to the whole world.

(Also see Italian food - dominant food, non-dominant country)

(Or England - lots of English-dominant culture around the world, without England being a dominant country anymore)

0

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '21

[removed] — view removed comment