The new Mandarins.

A prim twenty-one year-old with a perpetual smile, Yumi is quick-witted, energetic, and thus, one would think, eminently employable. But the Japanese job market, tough for a young woman in the best of times, has been downright forbidding in the past few years of economic slow-down. So Yumi has ventured to multilingual Singapore to improve her job prospects, betting that foreign language skills will raise her chances.

There are many young Japanese women with similar intentions at Yumi's language school. There are also students - teenage, college-age, and middle-aged - from around the world. A thirty-something husband and wife from Korea; a pair of middle-aged sisters from the Philippines; academic exchange participants from the United States, Australia, Europe, and even Russia. But when these foreign students pass in the hallways it isn't with the typical English greetings hello or what's up but rather the Mandarin Chinese ni bao (are you good?) or zenmeyang (how's it going?). For these individuals, like thousands of others in university and commercial classes throughout Asia, are betting that Mandarin Chinese will be the next business language of the Pacific Rim.

Will the economic transformation of China spread the use of Chinese language throughout the Asian region, as these students expect? Could the increasing utility of Mandarin erode English as the second language of choice in Asia? And now that the sushi, sumu, and karaoke crazes have subsided, is the world turning not Japanese but Chinese after all?

Despite the growth of Mandarin language instruction in Asia and elsewhere, these questions may still seem farfetched from an Anglo-American point of view. We have become so accustomed to English as the global language of commerce, science, and entertainment that no alternative seems practicable. English can be heard, read, and spoken from Buenos Aires to Brussels to Beijing, and it is commonplace to overhear a Thai and German, or Indonesian and Japanese executive conversing in English within the lobbies and lounges of Asia.

But commonplace is not always common-sensical. The initial momentum toward English as a global language was provided by two conditions no longer evident: the British Empire and U.S. postwar economic predominance. The language itself is a frustrating one to master through study. Compared to most languages, English uses an enormously large vocabulary. It has numerous phonetic and grammatical inconsistencies. As one Chinese professor in Beijing confesses, "I have been studying English for fifty years, and still I'm afraid of your prepositions."

Chinese is no picnic either. Spoken Mandarin may have relatively simple grammar and an economical use of words. But the reading and writing of 2,500 to 3,500 essential characters or ideographs is a daunting task even for native speakers. In any post office in China one can hear appeals for help: Hey, how do you write Harbin (a northern provincial capital)? Which is the Shan of Shantou (a southern coastal city)?

In many respects, however, computerization of Chinese will facilitate commercial functions, and the race is already on, among start-up firms and corporate giants alike, to produce the software of choice for the Chinese language market.

The english term "Mandarin" refers to the northeastern Chinese dialect that China's rulers have long promoted as a unifying language. Within China this dialect is referred to as "standard speech" (putonghua); outside China, it may be called "country language" (guoyu) or simply "Chinese" (huayu). Most Taiwanese speak fluent Mandarin, as do most educated mainlanders. Large numbers of Hong Kongers, who traditionally speak Cantonese dialect, are brushing up their Mandarin for post-1997 PRC rule. Similarly, business and cultural ties with China and Taiwan are reinvigorating Mandarin usage among the twenty to twenty-five million ethnic Chinese throughout Southeast Asia.

Mandarin has always been the language of high culture among the Chinese within China and abroad. It is now becoming the language of pop culture as well. Taiwanese and Hong Kong movies, television shows, and music formerly produced in dialects, like Cantonese or Hokkien, are increasingly made for distribution to the wider Mandarin market. The international success of Chinese artists such as filmmakers Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) and Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern; To Live) adds to the allure of Mandarin among the young.

Until recently the designation of Mandarin as the world's most spoken language was mainly due to the size of the population of China itself (1.2 billion and climbing). But now Mandarin may be poised to spread beyond the Chinese world as a language of commerce and influence among the elite and professional classes of Asia. The economic impetus is clear: Trade within the region is expanding twice as fast as Asia's trade with other regions. And if reformist policies are sustained, the growing China market stands near the center of those trade flows. China could also become Asia's largest source of tourist revenue. In 1995 PRC citizens represented the third largest group of Asian tourists, a relatively new and growing phenomenon.

The potential for Mandarin as an Asia-wide language rests on historical as well as economic foundations. Japan, after all, was the major source of finance and tourist revenue in the region for two decades until its recent recession. Yet the Japanese language never did catch on. The legacy of the Second World War threw up some obstacles, as did the peculiarities of the language itself. More fundamentally, however, Japanese language offered other Asians access only to Japan, not the wider region. Japan is a unique cultural entity centered on itself; by contrast, Chinese influence has long circulated throughout East and Southeast Asia. Classical Chinese characters provide the foundation for written Japanese and, to a lesser extent, Korean languages. The Korean President Kim Young Sam has called for efforts to standardize Chinese character usage in East Asia, thus facilitating document translation and second language study. While Chinese characters no longer occur in written Vietnamese, spoken Vietnamese still contains a large percentage of Chinese loan words from the many centuries (111 B.C. - 939 A.D.) of Vietnamese tributary status. This means that native speakers of Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese may find the study of Mandarin easier and more stimulating than that of English.

In Singapore, where 78 percent of the population is ethnic Chinese, the government's "Speak Mandarin" campaign has been in force for seventeen years. Originally intended to unify the many Chinese dialect groups in Singapore, both culturally and politically, the campaign now touts Mandarin as the key to business success in Asia. Not surprisingly, a growing number of minority citizens in Singapore (Malays, Indians, Eurasians) are petitioning to have their children admitted to Mandarin courses.

The potential for Mandarin elsewhere in Southeast Asia is still problematic and yet is progressing. Chinese minorities have long been viewed with suspicion by the dominant ethnic groups for their cliquishness and business acumen. Indeed, suspicions have intermittently erupted into hostility, as with the post-coup chaos of mid-1960s Indonesia. However, this has not prevented Southeast Asia from having two national leaders of partial Chinese ancestry in recent years - former President Corazon Aquino of the Philippines and former Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai of Thailand. Similarly, while private Chinese language schools were barely tolerated in Southeast Asia three decades ago, now they are prospering. Commercial Mandarin study is on the rise in Thailand and the Philippines among students of both indigenous and ethnic Chinese backgrounds. The Malaysian government is expanding the study of Mandarin as a third language (after Malay and English) in government schools. Even in Indonesia, where resentment of Chinese commercial influence runs deepest, there has been a relaxation of long-standing Chinese language prohibitions. Two Indonesian universities now have Chinese language departments, and a wider circulation of Chinese newspapers and tourist brochures has been permitted to stimulate commerce and tourism.

The mates down under are also in on the trend. The Australian government has launched an Asian language campaign as part of an ambitious effort to integrate Australia with the Asian economies. Their target is for 60 percent of all secondary school graduates to be functional in one of four Asian languages (Mandarin, Japanese, Bahasa Indonesia, or Korean) by the year 2006. The Australian military has also announced that it will use Asian language fluency as a promotion criteria.

The question of whether more Mandarin in Asia will mean less English is a complex one. Many societies pursue successful bilingual education programs, but trilingual communities are rare. A remarkable number of EU citizens do speak three or four languages with virtual fluency, yet these languages have basic similarities. Some Hong Kongers and Singaporeans function effectively in three languages, but many more fail in the attempt.

English will clearly remain the predominant global language, even as Mandarin usage spreads in the Asian region. There is too much momentum behind English for it to be easily displaced. Yet a growing number of aspiring young Asian professionals, like Yumi and her classmates, will be weighing the relative advantages of English against Chinese as they chart their careers. "Can I master both English and Chinese?" they will ask themselves. And for those who cannot there will be a further question: Which is more useful, appealing, and easier to learn?

At the same time, Asian government officials and educators will be pondering different questions around the same issue. And their assessments will be affected by geopolitical and macroeconomic trends. Is China becoming a more or less responsible actor in the region? A more or less coherent economy? Are the United States and other English speaking economies integrating more or less closely with Asia? And, last but not least, which language is least upsetting to the existing political and social order? The answers to both sets of questions, in English and/or Mandarin, will be heard in the hotels, airports, and classrooms of Asia for decades to come.

Robert M. Pease, a director of the Compass East-West Group, was a Fulbright scholar in Singapore during 1993-94.