Research On The Trend Of The Development Of Global Languages

There are many different languages in the world, and during the long human history, different languages have been developing, and their international statuses are changing all the time. Some languages gradually become powerful and prevailing, like English, while some gradually fly low and retreat from the cultural center, like Latin. This thesis tries to analyze, from some cases, a sum of different factors, which will influence the status of a language to find out the general rules for status change. Here the concept of hard power and soft power raised by Joseph·S·Nye is borrowed to illustrate the idea. Then, maybe it will be more explicit for us to deal with the issue of culture and language competitionAnd also, at this age of globalization, English, as a powerful language, is expanding all over the world, and is threatening the existence of other languages. Some languages which are used by only few people have died out or are on the verge of extinction. Even such a big language as Chinese, which exerts more and more influence in the world stage now, is being osmosed by English. More and more lettered-words in Chinese are the best evidence, which provokes much controversy and debates among Chinese people. On one hand it is inevitable in the process of opening to and learning from the world. On the other hand it, to some extent, destroys the purity of Chinese, mainly in its written form. Faced with this dilemma, what action should we take? Or can we manage to keep on opening to the world while preserve our language identity? In this trend, what will be the prospect for all these languages in the world? After analyzing the cases throughout history to learn some rules, if the direction is adverse to Chinese, we could do something to change it. While analyzing this situation, this thesis tries to offer some views of the writer himself.