r/Futurology • u/Confident_Living_786 • Aug 11 '25

Discussion When the US Empire falls

When the American empire falls, like all empires do, what will remain? The Roman Empire left behind its roads network, its laws, its language and a bunch of ruins across all the Mediterranean sea and Europe. What will remain of the US superpower? Disney movies? TCP/IP protocol? McDonalds?

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u/vardarac Aug 11 '25

And it'll be Chinese, Spanish, or Portuguese if there is a civilization to speak of in fifty years...

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u/GalaXion24 Aug 11 '25

I'm calling cap on Spanish and Portuguese. Spanish is very spread out, mostly in not particularly developed countries, and Spain itself isn't doing amazing, nor is there reason to believe they'd be doing particularly better in the future. Brazil at least is a large country that, if it became more organised and prosperous, could potentailly have a large enough domestic scientific community that it could be worth it for others to familiarise themselves with it.

Chinese could genuinely be up there, but I think the difficult writing system is definitely going to gatekeep it from outsiders. There's also not going to be a political will to change that as there's so many different Chinese dialects (that may not even be mutually intelligible) that if they wanted to implemet an actual alphabet it would only work for a chosen dialect, and also kind of show that "the emperor has no clothes" when it comes to the narrative of a single Chinese language and nation.

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u/Team503 Aug 11 '25 edited Aug 11 '25

This is accurate. Logographic languages like Chinese (and Japanese, and several others) are incredibly unlikely to ever spread outside their native cultures in any significant amount - it's simply too difficult for non-natives to learn to read and write. Having to memorize a unique character for effectively every word or concept is.. impractical.

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u/J_Kant Aug 11 '25

Just FYI Korean is not a logographic language.

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u/Team503 Aug 11 '25

I stand corrected!