Essay about Chinese language taking over English (0)

Will Chinese become more important than English in the near future?
As David Graddol, a visiting professor in Hong Kong , says in “Will Chinese take over from English as the world's most important language ?”, he must often answer the questions concerning Chinese importance over English.
Graddol states that China 's economy is growing and it is already second in the world. In fact , it has become the largest exporter and first in energy consumption . In addition, China will presumably be the largest manufacturer soon. However, he questions whether Chinese language grows at the same pace as its economy.
Graddol's teaching in Hong Kong starts with a lecture called “World Englishes”. He notes that he wrote his book “The Future of English” in 1997, same year when China got Hong Kong back from Britain . Graddol reminds the students , how many things wasn't happened then: euro was not put in use, even Windows 98 was not ready . He had been in Hong Kong before that, actually, making a TV-programme about global English for BBC, which showed that Putonghua, the native language, had become more important. Nevertheless, that programme was never completed, because no one thought it was interesting enough.
Then Graddol writes about importance of language and how it should be assessed. He discusses whether it should be the number of speakers, their social status or even wealth and whether the number of speakers of Putonghua should include only native speakers, which is 1.3 billion people, or should they take other dialects into consideration too.
Furthermore , Graddol brings an example from Guangzhou and their local language Cantonese which is endangered by Putonghua. Many people protest about using too much Putonghua, but the students believe that in Hong Kong, the problem is mostly in official signs wrote in Putonghua. He also points out that one of his students said that Putonghua is gaining power instead of English.
The writer then highlights the fact that English is envied by many other language speakers in Europe , for example the French . It is envied for its liberal attitude to different variations in English. He implies that there are other languages , like Spanish, which become more and more important partners to English.
To conclude, Graddol concedes that in his opinion, English is not threatened by Chinese, although he thinks that it is possible to have bilingualism in the future. Graddol is almost sure that no language will take over English and it will stays as a global lingua franca.(Graddol, 2011)