What's often understated is how much of an advantage the US has because it speaks the language of global commerce and technology, which for the entire 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st has been English. That's huge. It means teenagers reading man pages are reading fluently.

At some point, though, the balance could tip. It's impossible to say, and it'd be irresponsible to try to predict it, but there isn't any reason English is natively superior, any more than French was 150 years ago, or Latin 600 years ago. But it's a major advantage the US has that isn't acknowledged often enough.

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vanuatu 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think English is definitely a reason that I took for granted. To add to that from my experience:

- The culture is, I think, the root of the flywheel. The entrepreneurship and competitive intensity is unlike anywhere else I've lived (not an American). It's okay to go bankrupt. It's okay to fail multiple times and burn millions in VC money, in fact it's encouraged! Take a break and raise another round and go again, VCs like second time founders. In my home country having one business go under is the worst thing imaginable.

- The capital markets, even YC (one of the lower tier accelerators by now) gives you 500k for 7%, sometimes pre-revenue. That is an absurd proposition elsewhere

- Surrounding yourself with top talent raises the ceiling for what you think is possible and accelerates your career really fast. It's inspiring for me to be around so many smart and successful people.

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ambicapter 5 hours ago | parent [-]

What's your definition of "successful people"?

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vanuatu 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Self actualized, high optionality

	▲	samothrace 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Rich, rich

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hn_throwaway_99 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's an advantage, but I don't see that changing for a very long time:

1. English became the lingua franca right when the world really became globalized. So everyone from Europe to Asia to Africa has wanted to learn English as a second language for decades. So even if American power went away, I still don't see English falling from its perch. I often say it's really hard for Americans to learn another language because if you go to another country hoping to learn that language, so often you'll find many/most people just want to speak to you in English.

2. The only other power I could see surpassing the US in the mid term is China (and that's in no way guaranteed), but the Chinese language (Mandarin), and especially Chinese writing is inherently more difficult for foreigners to learn. I'd also argue the Chinese writing system is inherently more poorly suited to the digital world.

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materiallie 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I know it's a common pop science factoid, but there's actually no evidence that language difficulty has much to do with becoming a lingua franca.

Russian is commonly viewed as a difficult language, but it become a regional lingua franca in their sphere of influence. The only reason we aren't speaking Russian is because they lost the cold war.

I do agree that Mandarin speakers might become more open to Pinyin if more foreigners started learning the language. I'd also point out that English and Romance speakers find Mandarin difficult. For Mandarin speakers, is their own spoken language actually difficult for them? They might find English to be a difficult language.

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jjmarr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

English is one of the most difficult languages to learn, because there's so many irregular sentence/word constructions + irregular pronunciations due to vowel shift + foreign loan words like French/Latin that must be pronounced differently.

Mandarin eliminates all of these problems. The tones and characters are difficult, sure, but questions and answers being grammatically identical along with consistent pinyin is a lifesaver.

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amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Most of that is due to weird spelling, not inherent to the spoken language.

	▲	jjmarr an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The hardest part about Chinese is "weird spelling" because the written language is a separate language than the spoken one. If you're using pinyin it's already easier than English.

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_DeadFred_ an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

English is the best language for this because it easily incorporates quirks/foreign loan words. It will always win over more perfect languages because it just absorbs new concepts. It's purpose/existence from the start was to absorb cultures/concepts. It IS the embodiment of joining cultures + move fast/break things over entrenching/codifying.

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vasac 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It's an advantage, but I don't see that changing for a very long time:

It’s an interesting question: for how long will it remain important to know multiple languages in the age of LLMs? Of course, it’s better to know foreign language(s) — no doubt about that — but for day-to-day work, unless you’re living abroad, it seems that their practical utility will slowly decrease. And speech-to-speech translation will likely continue to improve as well.

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gegtik 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

are you including pinyin in your writing system analysis?

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robrain 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m on a motorhome holiday in Norway right now. The younger people I’ve spoken to, from the Netherlands, through Germany and Denmark and into Norway have as good English as me. As with most American-exceptionalism, you ain’t that special. On previous holidays in France, often held up as “never-willingly-speak-English”, we’ve had similar experiences.

Older people here in Northern Europe often seem to speak English quite well, in France less so.

	▲	noir_lord 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm English, my Danish friends have less of an English accent and are considerably more literate than the average of the people I interact with at work over most days. It isn't a moat, My partners written English surpasses mine and it is her third language.
	▲	aworks an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I, an American, was on a business trip in Sweden then a holiday in Scotland. It was easier to understand the Swedes than the Scots...

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stymaar an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This.

But this advantage is vanishing. While automated translation is still not good enough for someone fluent in English to tolerate, it's more than good enough already and the progress have been insane over the past few years.

I don't think English speakers are going to have any edge moving forward.

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throwaway201606 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The language of global commerce and technology has not and has never been English

It is money.

Specifically, right now, petro-dollars. For a while before that, it was pounds

The writer is asking how much longer that will continue to be true that it is petro-dollars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_currency

	▲	gegtik 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		right, it was english, but then it became english

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PaulDavisThe1st 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> but there isn't any reason English is natively superior, any more than French was 150 years ago, or Latin 600 years ago.

Actually, there is. English is relatively unique in its ability to incorporate loan words and features of other languages. This is in part due to its history as a merger of 10k French (thus, Latinate) words into an otherwise Germanic language. But it's also due to the unfortunate history of the British empire, followed by American hegemony, which spread English to many other cultures who freely adapted it.

Whether this is enough to justify a continuing status as "the international language" is obviously debatable. But English is different from almost all other human languages, not because it is better, but because it is just ... more

	▲	adrian_b 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The ability of English to easily incorporate loanwords is because it has lost almost all word flexion from Old English, with very few exceptions, like the plural marker "-s". Because most grammatical markers are isolated prepositions, there are no problems caused by phonetic mismatches with the words to which they are associated, like it happens in the languages where a borrowed noun must fit into a declension pattern, which can produce phonetically awkward words. While among the European languages, for English it is indeed the easiest to borrow new words, one can easily construct an artificial language that would be even better than English from this point of view, and which would remedy various problems of English, like the necessity of knowing separately a written form and a spoken form for every word, or the existence of a lot of semantic ambiguities that do not exist in other languages, or various difficulties to express various nuances using the existing modal verbs, or the too verbose methods for expressing certain verbal tenses, moods and voices. Thus English does not really have any technical advantages. Its moat is the inertia caused by its so widespread use in the present, which will prevent any other language to replace it, regardless of how much simpler and better that language would be.