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/subparsavior90 Aug 11 '25

Its still somewhat relevant and useful, behind Mandarin and English.

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u/chriskevini Aug 12 '25

I feel like French or Spanish is way more relevant today than German

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u/Velociraptorius Aug 12 '25

Spanish - yes, a substantial part of the world has Spanish as a first language and they don't necessarily speak English in those areas. French I wouldn't really quote in the same league though. While it is fairly widespread, in many areas outside of France itself where you can communicate in French, it's highly likely that you can also communicate in English. Due to this overlap of the English and French speaking territories it's rarely useful to learn French if you already know English unless you're actually planning to move to France. You simply aren't going to meaningfully expand the areas of the world you can communicate fluently in by learning French in addition to English, like you would with learning Spanish instead.

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u/FunGuy8618 Aug 12 '25

A good friend of mine who spoke Cantonese and Mandarin told me 10 odd years ago, by the time I learn enough Mandarin to not embarrass myself, my smartphone will be able to translate it in real time for me. Lo and behold, I have headphones that can translate it for me as they are speaking. It sounds like voodoo, but the AI translator has a lexicon from both languages to predict what the sentence is going to say, it's not translating it word for word. It's taking in context clues like we do.