AHC: English the First Language of Most Nations

The way things are going, we'll all be learning Chinese before long... :)

Bruce

I'm guessing we're looking at a slightly altered Snow Crush lingusitics - English base heavy in Chinese loan words salted with Hindi/Sanskrit for the finalized global language. :D
 
You literally have from the beginning of human civilization up till today. Everything permitted by the laws of physics is possible.

Anything pre, say, 1300, means no English at all. After that, honestly, I don't see how it could happen without mass totalitarianism or some kind of plague or comet strike that wipes out almost all humanity but leaves the population of the British Isles alive by some kind of wildly improbable freak.
 
If we can do some sort of Spain-screw and have *Columbus working for *Henry VIII, we could certainly get a lot more English speakers [1]: take a British Latin America and maybe a lot of North America too, and give it better growth rates and immigration levels than OTL Spanish and Portuguese-speaking America before 1800, we can probably get first-language English-speakers well over 1 billion and perhaps pull ahead of Mandarin by 2012 to make English the most spoken language: the _majority_ language, on the other hand, remains a much harder goal.

Bruce

[1] With the proviso that some of the dialects will have a fair amount of difference: how well does, say, someone from Madrid nowadays understand the speech of someone from Lima?

Educated hispanophones understand each other quite well, like educated Americans and Brits do. But the poor people are more dialectical and take more getting used to.
 
Interesting. What parts of Latin America have suffered from the greatest divergence, do you know?

Bruce

From what I understand, the Caribbean islands. Also the old Spanish spoken in the southwest US is pretty hard to understand for Castilians, because its so archaic (most other dialects have been modernized/standardized by mass media--telenovelas are shown around the hispanophone world, for example--but New Mexicans and Arizonans have escaped that by being part of the US)
 

Deleted member 67076

Interesting. What parts of Latin America have suffered from the greatest divergence, do you know?

Bruce

Most likely the Spanish spoken in the Caribbean, due to heavy influence from tribal and African languages along with recent American influence.
 
If the British rule in India commits itself energically to teach English to Indians extensively for a sustained period, it would come close. But in itself, it would be a very major change that would require explanation, since it was totally against everything the British were ever up to in India (or in any other colony of theirs for that matter). Not to mention the costs.

I think you would need a massive amount of immigration to India and British-Indian intermarriage to make something like this possible. Like a Spanish America analogue. Except that India has such a large population I'm not sure that flipping the majority of the populace to native English speaking would even be possible. More likely you'd end up with a large English-speaking minority.

However, the above scenario would not be compatible with colonizing the rest of the British Empire's OTL territory, because Britain does not have an unlimited amount of settlers.

I don't think what the OP is proposing is possible. At absolute max, the British Empire could have replaced Spain as the colonizer of most of Central and South America, possibly in addition to parts of North America, as well as Australia and various small islands, and maybe make some inroads in India by aggressively intermarrying with the locals there, and the same in South Africa or another African colony. That's it. The rest of the world cannot possibly start speaking English as their first language in any realistic scenario.

In a more outlandish scenario, you could have some sort of British Empire analogue where all native English speakers universally have two traits: 1. Having zero qualms about intermarrying other peoples wherever they find them, and 2. Be constantly trying to subjugate their neighbors. This would be way, way out there. Even Rome, in 500 years, only managed to flip half of Europe to speaking dialects of its language, a mighty feat to be sure, but a far cry from most of the world.

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Most likely the Spanish spoken in the Caribbean, due to heavy influence from tribal and African languages along with recent American influence.

Mexican and Andean dialects have a lot of indigenous influence, though. Some Mexican dialects have picked up a sing-song nature due to the strong influence tonal languages like Tarascan, Zapotec, Otomi, and Yucatec Maya.
 
English becomes the liturgical language of an Islam-like 'heresy' of Christianity that finds itself spreading across Europe after several Papal gaffes. Meanwhile the King of England finds himself ruling over everything from Ireland to Frisia to Brittany.

Colonization of New World two hundred to five hundred years later.

Industrialization occurs and European empires spread across the world, including the English one. In England itself, however, a demographic trap occurs after the country is devastated by war and a small plague and the aristocracy has to restrict the lower classes more and more.

This situation leads to English emigration far and wide, and finally culminates in a 'proletarian' revolution, which spreads from England across Europe. This pseudo-communist ideology spreads outward and communist states educate everyone with a basic education that nonetheless imparts them with English, until 51% of the world, thanks to England and its former colonies particularly in the Americas, speaks English natively.

Because these states treat everyone equally (as badly), the people of non-industrialized regions are forced to elevate into an industrial state with funds from far flung regions in the industrialized world. The instant jump from traditionalism to communism skipping the demographic transition leads to only a small increase in population, so they can all be taught English within several decades.
 
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