Chinglish: the Esperanto of the 21st Century?
向世界推广汉语，增进世界各国对中国的了解 (promote the Chinese language abroad and help every country in the world to get a better understanding of Chinese culture) is the motto that can be found on the homepage of the China National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (NOCFL).
The globalization of English and the active promotion of Mandarin by the Chinese government has implications for how the world will communicate some decades from now. Trusting China will claim an increasingly important role on the global stage, it is equally safe to assume that the importance of its language will benefit from this development. The Chinese are proud of their culture and historical feats, whereof the language is the main expression. Efforts to romanize the Chinese language were shortly contemplated in the 1950s but soon abandoned and put in the closet. It would be comparable to replacing the English spelling by another phonetic system. It goes against the grain of the language.
Thus I foresee a bright future for Chinese and I foresee that the Chinese language will no longer be the sole domain of the Chinese people. As a result, the price of the ´´commodity´´ Chinese will rise.
From the time China first started admitting international students inside its borders, these students often spoke to one another in Chinese. One reason was that many of them had a non-Western background, meaning they did not necessarily speak English. A second reason was that speaking Chinese with fellow students was a good way to practice the language they had come to learn. Of course English was still used on many occasions. If there were such a thing as a lingua franca in that setting, the term Chinglish is what would most accurately describe it.
With a growing number of people studying Chinese (according to some estimates, 30 million at the moment and 100 million within five years), the language is bound to change to some degree. Few will deny that Chinese is a complex language and some research suggests a primary school student in China can only write a quarter of what his/her peers in the West know. Because of its inherent complexity, the Chinese language is not easily mastered by Westerners, and thus a form of abstracted and simplified communication will develop between learners of Chinese among themselves as well as between the ´´foreign´´ and the “native” speakers. The advent of computers also contributes to the chinglification process. Many Chinese no longer write characters with their former ease and contemporary email communication is a far cry from wenyan (文言) and even baihua (白话).
The fact that Westerners rarely master Chinese does not imply its use will remain confined to China. What it means is that Chinese is becoming a language that is internalized by more and more Westerners, who make many mistakes. Even the ´´big noses´´ with Chinese spouses rarely speak it perfectly. Some of the foreigners export their newly-acquired linguistic and cultural baggage back to their home countries, making sure that Chinese is de facto becoming a world language, starting in the neighboring countries of China. Sooner or later, this new category of ``foreign´´ users will consider this language their own; a language that nobody has the right or ability to interfere with or take away from them. This increasing number of ``foreigners´´ will not abash from using ´´their´´ language in public, even when not spoken fluently. Thus, like we see a great variety in English dialects (not only the traditional division between American and British English, but also Australian and Indian English, and now also the accent with which English is spoken in China), a greater variety in Chinese will develop, resulting in what one could call international Chinese or 国际中文 (as opposed to the terms 普通话 putonghua or 国语 guoyu).
The concept of English or Esperanto as a sole vehicle for international communication is an ethnocentric way of looking at the world and underestimates the contemporary role of China. Seeing Chinese as the future number one world language is equally wrong. A yin-yang formula, the two complementing and enriching each other, seems to describe better the need for some sort of lingua franca. Out go Esperanto or English, in comes Chinglish?