One world language?

My vote is for Attic Greek with the addition of an indefinite article - i.e., the language of the philosophers and thinkers and those who gave us democracy and beauty.

Language is a vehicle of history and culture for the people who speak it. Consequently, I think this is a really bad idea. Beyond this--how very boring.

I think this would be a bad thing. How we think is in many ways dictated by the language that we think in, as Orwell understood very well. This is why good translation is so very difficult. Only having one language would be very limiting, I think. This is a distinct idea from having a common language, it would be quite possible for the world to have a common language but still have many languages, it would just entail that most people be bi-lingual. This is the situation in large parts of the world already, it seems that Americans and Englishmen are the only people who have difficulty learning more than one language.

In India they have about 15 official languages, but most people speak Hindi/Urdu as well. You may work with people whose native language is Tamil or Bengali while yours is Kannada, so people use Hindi as the universal one. But if you are from Tamil Nadu, then you would still speak Tamil at home and still watch Tamil movies, etc.

I've noticed in the last few years there that English is crowding out Hindi as the universal language amongst the educated crowd. I think over time you'll find maybe a couple of languages that are almost universal along with a lot of regional ones - like the India model worldwide.

we already have a world language, it's called english.

i've met tons of young people throughout the americas, africa, and asia who either speak english or believe that they should be learning english.

in india, which has about 20 major languages, english is the common denominator. so someone from the north may speak punjabi and english, and someone from the south will speak malayalam and english. so they do all of their business together in the one common language they share.

My vote is for Yawelmani. It's said that everyday Yawelmani sounded like sheer poetry and singing to outsiders.

That being said, I think there will always be about 6,000 languages spoken. Some of them will just sound a lot alike. There are around 200 varieties of English already, for example, most of whose speakers have difficulty communicating orally beyond basics outside their group in their local form of English. For writing, radio, and TV there's a lingua franca standardized form all share in which cultural loadings get stripped out. The Anglo-Saxon language police (many of them academics) here in the U.S. and U.K. have a terrible time with this, obviously.

It's not just English, of course. Formal linguistic studies of Haitian French find the language, underneath a vocabulary taken from French, to have features comprehensively resembling Western African languages like Ewe. Likewise, the different groups of Indoeuropean languages generally reflect features of their pre-IE substratum languages as well. Germanic seems to contain remnants and habits of a language resembling Basque, for example.

Multilingualism is culturally the normal, historically. Average Americans are unusual in world history in being monolingual and often dogmatically so. It seems to be a historical remnant of the Settlement, reflecting a doctrine of assimilationism to a single cultural form.

I agree with Larry, above. Each language interprets (for lack of a better word) reality in a particular way; none exhausts it. We'd all be the poorer for losing one of them. It would be like having only 1 flower or 1 face.

First, McWhorter is wrong, because we are not headed toward one language, any more than we are headed for world peace. Rather, what we are currently seeing is the extinction of less fit cultures due to rapidly changing technology. Genetic diversity is rapidly going away as well - certain peoples are simply dying out, and the leftovers are learning dominate culture (and languages). But all the while, we know that the remaining cultures are still (albeit very slowly) changing and splintering as we speak (pun intended).

And language changes cannot be stopped, which makes ideas like a single scientifically designed language (see: Esperanto) incredibly stupid. There is a good evolutionary reason why the human brain is designed to always change language. It's for self-defense; every small group of people changes language automatically in order to protect against "the other". This is why new accents are happening all the time. And it starts small; even kids shift their words, sayings, and slang, in order to separate themselves from their parent's generation. We can't stop it; it's the biology, stupid. It's how the brain is built. People simply prefer to live and talk to people who are like themselves, and whenever possible, close others off.

What confuses McWhorter is that, due to new technologies, we just happen in this era to be destroying culture faster than building it (and languages die with culture). But, as always, new cultures, and thus languages, will rise out of the ashes once the world finally stabilizes after the rapid change. Then we will start to splinter again, as always. And this will probably happen pretty quickly, since modern culture is demographically vanishing at breakneck speed (peak humans at 2050); this leaves any cultures left standing who can separate and isolate themseves from the main dying culture to pick up the pieces.

Bluntly, our "educated" class, in their foolish faith in human "progress" (and possessing a desire to remake natural law in their own image, natch), have have become public fools. Simple solution to protect the public from their foolishness: teach human biodiversity and basic genetics in public school...of course, this sort of science would create a great wailing and gnashing of teeth. But at least we wouldn't see silly articles like this taken seriously!

Would the world be better off if Eskimos, Hottentots, and Scotsmen all lived in identical prefabricated houses? Perhaps in a way, but something would be lost.

As a connoisseur of language and linguistics, I am glad that I will be dead before McWhorter's future comes to pass.

Of course, if Rod's chiliastic fantasies come true, those of us who are left will be hunting possums with slignshots and will be in a permanent state of war with the degenerate savages in the next valley over.

And language changes cannot be stopped, which makes ideas like a single scientifically designed language (see: Esperanto) incredibly stupid.

You obviously don't know very much about Esperanto, mdavid, if that's what you think about it.

Even Esperanto has changed over time as different groups of people, and individuals, have learned and used it, just as is the case with any other language, even literary Latin.

Esperanto wasn't designed to replace existing languages with a single language to the exclusion of all others; it was intended to be a second, auxiliary language that would be relatively easier to learn than most of the existing languages out there. People who speak Esperanto also speak their own native language, and often several others as well, and don't intend to replace them with Esperanto, just to use Esperanto to communicate people with whom they don't have another language in common.

(Full discloser: I'm a member of the Esperanto-USA and have taught seminars about Esperanto, though I admit that lately it's gotten pretty rusty.)

We'll never get to the point where everyone on the planet speaks the same language exclusively, nor do I think we would want do. But it's conceivable that we might get to the point where there is a single standard language learned -- as a second language -- by all educated people around the world and used for international communication.

For over 1000 years in Western Europe, educated people communicated with one another pretty much exclusively in Latin. The quality of the Latin varied, but it was the medium of choice for philosophy, theology, science, international communication, and a great deal of literature. Somehow the fact that educated people shared a common second language that they could use to communicate with one another (e.g., St. Thomas More and Erasmus wrote letters to one another in Latin because Erasmus didn't speak English and More didn't speak Dutch) didn't hamper the use and development of local and national languages and dialects. Something similar might happen in the future -- a single international language in addition to, not instead of, a plethora of local and national languages.

PS -- I have to second the recommendation of Incubus. It's particularly fun for Star Trek fans to see that William Shatner has...thesame...de...liveryin...Esper...antothathe...hasin...English. ;-)

I read Mc Whorter's article yesterday at Sully's and I am glad Rod posted it here. After the terroir of language thread here it seemed really timely.

I admit the article made me want to shriek

What McWhorter doesn't get with his embrace of one world culture is that culture is expressed through language - you lose the language you lose the culture. In a one world language - only one set of worldviews would be supported - it would truly be a Brave New World scenario. People become conditioned by their language - whatever notions, concepts etc that are not reflected in that language don't exist. A one world language would make it extremely difficult for people to conceptualize any alternative to that world - a perfect way to keep the folks docile. Taking people's language from them is a time honored mechanism of social control.

McWhorter's enthusiasm for a one world culture and language also fails to recognize the role that different cultures with differing worldviews bumping into one another play in producing human innovation. If there is only one worldview - there is no tension in the marketplace of ideas, no cultural synthesis occurrs. Talk about a static society!

As for why languages are disapearing - cause Imperial nation states do their best to destroy languages. Why was it so important for the English to do all in their power to destroy welsh irish and scots gaellic? Because those languages allowed those people to remember they were not English - they had a different history and a different culture which also predicted different values. Remembering this difference led them to revolt against the English. Destroying the language led to more docile subjects.

A language on the fast track to extinction is Breton. Brittany became part of France in the 1700's. The French government does not want Breton speakers. They actually refuse to allow any counting of the number of Breton speakers still left. They almost refuse to even acknowledge the language exists. They have been proscriptive in their practices against Breton speakers and will not participate in efforts to preserve the language. The usual strategy is being followed, if you speak this minority language you will be poor and never have power. If you wish to be prosperous and powerful - speak French. The English applied this same approach to the post famine Irish - the famine was your own fault since you clung to those traditions and language of yours. If you give up those traditions and language - you will be prosperous. Sadly - it worked. Only 20% of the Irish speak their native tongue competently today. It is ironic that the French are sooo into preserving the purity of their language while happily destroying the language of the people of Brittany.

One other thing about language - people who learn two languages simultaneously in the infancy will learn to speak slower than the single language learner - but as adults - they will have a capacity to master other languages with ease and an enhanced facility with mathematics. It appears that learning two languages in infancy actually alters synpatic processes in the brain which facilitates this remarkable adult learning capacity. Kinda seems like something we might want to encourage.

The major national languages however are not going anywhere. 50 years from now people will still be speaking some future form of English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin, Turkish, Swahili and at least 10 others.

I think they may be speaking a lot more than that. Using what I've seen in India as a guide, I'd think the more likely scenario is we may have one (or more likely 3 or 4) default second languages. English is growing pretty quickly in India and China. French is already widely spoken as a second language through much of Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Russian is pretty common in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. There are a lot more Mandarin Speakers than Japanese, but Japanese is pretty common all around the Pacific. Basically all the 18th and 19th century imperial languages have stuck to some degree.

Ironically, their spread could end up helping save a lot of smaller languages. If you are bilingual and one of your two languages is widely used in business and education internationally, then there isn't as much pressure to lose your native language. It works pretty well in India, all things considered.

m.e.graves
Will Elvish be one of the choices?

No, but Klingonase will.

To a more serious note. I can understand several languages, most European. The only non-IndoEuropean language I can speak (after a fashion) is Anishnaube. In what little I can grasp, I see a different culture and way of thought. I wish I was more fluent and learned it earlier. It would give me another point of view internally. Something to keep in mind as we all drift to English.

A universal language is as likely as everyone being able to speak 4 or 5 languages. It could happen, but it won't.

In the end, companies like Microsoft will determine what languages survive and what become quaint relics of an earlier age. As Microsoft refuses to support interfaces with langauges like Icelandic (less than half a million native speakers), they will be forced to work in another language.

Jen a says: In the end, companies like Microsoft will determine what languages survive and what become quaint relics of an earlier age.

The implication being that human culture is shaped by technologies not by what we choose to value. That once a technology is unleashed upon us we lose control and the inevitable consequences of that technology plays itself out. You may be right - but that is one dam depressing thought.

Abelard Lindsey Tyler Mavrides: well there's always Hanyu Pinyin or Bopomofo (sp?). From the little I've seen of it, if you can get around the pronunciation problems (tones) and the writing system, Mandarin is actually easier to learn than this weird hybrid language we call English.

But you're right about one thing: the dominant language will reflect the political and commercial dominance of cultures, allowing for a time lag. Right now, my money is on the Chinese.

traveling through china, the vibe is that everyone is learning english in order to operate in the global marketplace. people are learning english just in case they may get a job in trade 10 years from now. between programs on television, you will see little 5 minute infomercial things where an instructor will give a basic english lesson for the viewer. like how to politely answer the phone and kindly request that the caller leave a message. (and where to place the stress in 'have a nice day'.) and then it's back to soap operas.

so don't worry if you miss the mandarin lesson between family guy and gilligan's island. your english isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

of course, the chinese are going to own us in 30 years. but at least they'll do it in our tongue.

i would put arabic as number two after english.
it may not be on as much of a commercial level, but we're going to be having to deal with a diversity of arabic speakers much more than mandarin speakers in the near-term.

I have long thought of globalization as The Contemporary Tower of Babel due for a fall. If we see globalization and modernization fall apart due to peak oil et al., well, chances are my dialect in Cleveland is going to sound a heck of a lot different than that in Dayton really fast. Language will become fragmented once again, albeit in much different forms than, let's say, the end of the 19th century. I'm not really worried about a One-World Language -- history will take care of that sooner or later.

Ah, I come late to this topic! Linguistics was my college major, and language contact, change, and variation are my favorite emphases in the field.

My take: the media is not powerful enough to counter the natural tendency of languages to shift.

Have you heard the way English is spoken in India? Educated people there learn the language very young, but they DON'T speak the Queen's English. Indian English is its own unique register, laced with grammatical and lexical borrowings from the local languages. They have co-opted English as a semi-neutral lingua franca, but they have not left it unadulterated. Similar patterns are to be found throughout East and Central Africa. Read an English language editorial page of a Nigerian or Kenyan paper and you will be struck by the vim and vigor of the imagery, though you will not immediately there is something "extra-English" about it.

Even IF English is widely adopted and displaces many other languages, those languages and those cultures and populations will have their own impact on the language. These varieties will drift further and further from standard. People will come to speak a localized English, along with some native languages. Educated people will be able to speak standard English, but this will have limited inroads to normal society.

Media will slow the drift of English, but not stop it. Local media broadcasting in local versions of the language will hold great sway, all the moreso with the de-centralization of media away from state-run conglomerates and towards a diversity of internet modes. You will see a situation somewhat like Latin and the Romance languages, as they first started to drift apart. Demographics and history are against us. We cannot hope to hold this massive cultural and linguistic hegemony any more than Rome could hope to hold its vast empire for long. English will be dominant for some time, but we its original speakers will lose influence over its varieties rather quickly.

Esperanto indeed is the logical choice.

It's unfortunate however that only a few people know that Esperanto has become a living language.

After a short period of 122 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA World factbook. It is the 22nd most used language in Wikipedia, and a languag choice of Google, Skype, Firefox and Facebook.

Native Esperanto speakers,(people who have used the language from birth), include George Soros, World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet.

Further arguments can be seen at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU Professor Piron was a translator with the United Nations in Geneva.

A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net