19 ms·

It's not a well-liked view, but I'm very glad that humanity is on the path to speaking only a few languages (or perhaps just one). If you disagree, consider th

• mrob 10y ago
  We probably would invent new languages, or at least new dialects, to signal group membership. If somebody has made the effort to learn the language then they're probably serious about being part of the group. As a practical example, consider the revival of the Hebrew language, which happened mostly as an expression of Jewish identity. Strengthening group identity is the main motivation for preserving rare languages.
  • ufmace 10y ago
    That's an interesting take on it. I wonder if there's much history of groups starting out with common languages, then groups separating and the languages evolving separately, either intentionally to demonstrate group membership, or just due to lack of communication between groups, and continuing to differentiate until they're effectively different languages. I only speak English, but I've heard several different accents on it so strong that they're hard to understand. I wonder if the speakers of these accents find it impossible to understand other strong accents.
    • mablap 10y ago
      Well there you have it. The vocabulary teens use varies from city to city. The vocabularies of (France) French and Canadian French are different to an extent, as are those of (England) English and American English. It seems to me completely obvious that "one language to rule them all" is an absurd idea bound to fail. It will morph and splinter by itself.
    • freyfogle 10y ago
      much history? This is exactly the way new languages evolve.
    • khedoros 10y ago
      My mother-in-law is from an island off the coast of Honduras. She's a native English speaker, but has a strong accent, and the dialect of English that they speak has grammatical differences, along with some different vocabulary. I suspect that some comes from Spanish and some from Garifuna. Without modern communications, their dialect of English would've continued diverging, and eventually be considered different enough to be a new language, rather than just a dialect.
    • jugbandjames 10y ago
      > I wonder if there's much history of groups starting out with common languages, then groups separating and the languages evolving separately, either intentionally to demonstrate group membership, or just due to lack of communication between groups, and continuing to differentiate until they're effectively different languages. Thats basically what sociolinguists investigate. Here's an example of a study that kind of does that: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233713880_A_Quantitative_Sociolinguistic_Analysis_of_Bahamian_Copula_Absence_Morphosyntactic_Evidence_from_Abaco_Island_the_Bahamas https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233713880_A_Quantit...
  • Animats 10y ago
    The maintenance of Yiddish is an extreme example. It's explicitly used to prevent ultra-orthodox Jews from "straying off the path" and joining the larger society.[1] In Israel, the ultra-orthodox speak Yiddish, not Hebrew, and often don't even know Hebrew. This is the use of a dying tongue as a means of social control. [1] http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/off-the-path-of-orthodoxy http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/off-the-path-of-orth...
    • smsm42 10y ago
      I think it's a bit different - these communities (which BTW are a minority even among orthodox religious Jews) choose to speak Yiddish and not Hebrew to express their detachment and disconnection with modern Jewry and specifically Israel. Secondary consideration is the status of Hebrew as the holy language, not to be used in mundane and profane matters. This was long the case in the Jewish diaspora, but with the start of the Haskalah project and the idea of Israel as the Jewish state, this has changed. These communities have not accepted these changes and thus try to preserve their way of life as it was beforehand. The use of Yiddish here is more of a consequence than the reason.
• mablap 10y ago
  Are you willing to stop speaking, reading, thinking, writing in English and use Mandarin? And what about the fact that some concepts and words are enunciated more succintly or clearly in different languages? I mean, you have the perfect example in front of you: why are there so many programming languages? Could it be that some language constructs are more difficult in one language vs the other? Why invent new programming languages when you've got C?
  • ludamad 10y ago
    Re: "And what about the fact that some concepts and words are enunciated more succintly or clearly in different languages?" We just borrow the relevant words :)
    • sbmassey 10y ago
      Sometimes it is not just individual words, but grammatical structures which make things more succint. Latin has lots of such like your gerundives or your supines where you can express with a simple word ending what would take a bunch of words in English
  • Kenji 10y ago
    I am willing to give up my language in favour of a world language - in fact, I have already done that. I think in English. I write all my poetry, stories and dreams in English, I only communicate in that language unless it's with family or coworkers. I pretty much gave up on my native language. I feel like English is superior in many ways because it has words that my language does not, which forces me to describe awkwardly what I mean instead of using a single word. In German, happiness and luck are merged into one single word (da fuq?). German has no succinct word for contrarian (noun). Or another point for English: Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone. - Paul Tillich
    • mablap 10y ago
      Erm, Tillich could have chosen a better example: in French you also have isolement and solitude.
• chousuke 10y ago
  From an utilitarian viewpoint, sharing a single, global language is probably useful. but I feel that such a world would likely also suffer from less variety in culture and viewpoints. Languages tend to accommodate the way of thinking prevalent in the cultures that speak it, and vice versa the language also shapes the speakers. To learn another language as a non-native speaker, especially one that is sufficiently different from your own, you must also learn a different way of looking at the world; something that I think is a useful experience for anyone. Before reading the article, had you ever considered that there might exist a word describing exactly why cat videos are popular? In my opinion, no-one should be satisfied with speaking only one language, so long as they have the means to learn another.
  • eropple 10y ago
    This post is a good one, and that utilitarian idea that unilingualism is good because you can hire people is a claim borne of the kind of short-sighted technocracy that bedevils tech and tech culture. In the appendices of 1984, Orwell was speaking of conscious linguistic malformation to make it difficult to communicate concepts that the manipulators of Newspeak (née English) wished to stamp out. It's not better when you do it because somebody sticks HBO on your television. People here venerate Paul Graham's Blub Paradox article--I wonder how many stopped to think about the possibility that we're speaking Blub, and the attempt of a unilingual world is incomprehensibly more problematic than that of computer programming languages. From the root comment of this chain: > Do you feel stunted or unsatisfied because your ancestors didn't pass their native tongues down to you? I don't. How would you fucking know? Technocracy in action: we can't think of a black swan, so black swans can't exist.
    • TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
      A single language would never work anyway. It would inevitably split into dialects and regional/generational/racial slang, which would soon become incomprehensible to outsiders. English patois in some parts of the world makes no sense to British/American speakers, even though it reads and sounds more or less like standard English. You don't even have to travel to find the split happening. Just try listening to teenagers. Language isn't just a utility. One of its functions is to define social register and tribal identity, and humans are so attached to both they can't accept homogenisation.
• freyfogle 10y ago
  yes, of course we would invent new languages. We do this continually. In any big language there are many different dialects. This is a way to signal group identity. Over time they become new languages. Latin becomes French, Spanish, Romanian, etc. If you disagree why do you not speak your English with a (choose those that don't apply:) English / southern / Indian / Scottish / Irish / South African / Jamaican / New England / etc accent. As an aside - I'm confused why you care what language I choose to speak or teach my children? How does it hurt you for me to be multilingual? If you desire to see the world only through the prism of a single language, well, fair enough. Likewise you can feel free to eat the same food for every meal, listen to the same music endlessly, re-read the same authors, program in only one language, etc. Lots of us enjoy experiencing more of the great diversity of humanity.
  • wvenable 10y ago
    This is still somewhat historical. Latin becoming French, Spanish, Romanian, and all accents are all a product of geography. France, Spain, Romania, etc. It's not group entity, it's location identity. But the generations aren't separated by geography anymore. Well there may well be intellectual advantages for multilingualism, different unilingualism typically just leads to conflict.
    • riffraff 10y ago
      > all accents are all a product of geography not necessarily, there is often a clear split between social classes of groups of people (i.e. consider the association of "cockney" with working class, or the discussion around "ebonics" for african-american-english) And there are cases where specific communities evolve their own sub-languages (e.g. cants and argots). There is surely less separation now then there once was, but it never was only geography, it's just that geography is the strongest separator.
      • thesoonerdev 10y ago
        Does it mean, then, that as the people who are anti-immigration such as Donald Trump get elected and geographic mobility (potentially) decreases, we can work our way backwards and say that these languages are less likely to die? In other words, does the trend towards anti-globalization lead to the unexpected side effect that some languages may actually take longer to die?
• DanBC 10y ago
  Like, if we all spoke English? glesga https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xan2xU-ZFic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xan2xU-ZFic Irish "What's filim?" https://youtu.be/UJ1Akr-UBis?t=57s https://youtu.be/UJ1Akr-UBis?t=57s Geordie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY4TT3VtR8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY4TT3VtR8o 120 miles from Glasgow to Newcastle. 250 miles from Glasgow to Westport, Ireland.
  • Symbiote 10y ago
    The British class system plus geography (I grew up in the Midlands and south) means it takes me a few minutes to understand anything at all of the Scottish clip, and a few seconds for the Geordie one. The Irish is no problem, but real (not mainstream tv) Irish would be. But, in my experience, people speaking these dialects could communicate with someone from elsewhere easily. They're also less different than they would have been decades ago.
• Bromskloss 10y ago
  Do you feel the same about the rest of your culture too?
• sbmassey 10y ago
  On the other hand, maybe having multiple cultures might be a good idea if it provides firewalls against the spread of bad ideas, and allows competition between groups pf people with different cultural outlooks.
• DonaldFisk 10y ago
  If we all started to speak the same language, it would make most of the world's novels, short stories, poetry, song lyrics, and movie dialogue inaccessible, and different ways of looking at the world would be lost. And which language should be chosen? English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Esperanto, or something else? Ask bilingual speakers if they'd prefer just to speak one language and to forget the other one. Knowing two languages gives you access to two cultures, even if one is dying or dead.
  • ketzu 10y ago
    For myself it's more like: I'd like to speak more languages, not have the world reduced to speak the two I already know! But this is a purely opinion based discussion lacking any real data so far.
• sargun 10y ago
  I believe that this is one of the best things that TV has given us - the homogenization, and adoption of the English language. It eases communication and trade across cultures. It also makes it cheaper to recruit people from all around the world with a given skill. Right now, there's a shortage in skilled welders. There's a massive number of skilled welders in Asia that make bit less money than the welders here do. Why can't we bring them across -- cost of certification? No. It's the language. Language enables globalization. I'm sure there are still advantages to being bilingual that exist as well, but inventing, or adopting obscure languages to become one's mother tongue only seems counterproductive to me in the long run.
  • freyfogle 10y ago
    Agree there are huge advantages to us all agreeing on standards (English as language of business, metric system, etc). But from that doesn't follow that we all need to be monolingual.
  • WalterBright 10y ago
    The homogenization and stabilization of language started with the printing press. Radio, and then TV, started homogenization of pronunciation.
  • Koshkin 10y ago
    I love English language, but I don't like it, and I find it unfortunate that it is the English language that has acquired the status of the most important international language today. Even the "standard" pronunciation turns out to be extremely hard to do correctly for non-native speakers, for many even after years of speaking it. The distinction between some phonemes is way too subtle for them to get right; some words are pronounced the same while spelled differently; some are the other way around. There is too much reliance on the context in determining the exact meaning of a word... The list can go on. The language was born as one among several used by the tribes living on an island, which may explain why it is so different from the languages of continental Europe.
    • int_19h 10y ago
• erehweb 10y ago
  We actually do want to invent new languages now - consider Game of Thrones, Star Trek, LOTR etc. In a monolingual world, would any of these have real adherents? Maybe. Even within English, various groups have invented sublanguages - Cockney rhyming slang or Polari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari
  • eropple 10y ago
    The idea of "foreignness" implicitly carries with it the notion of approaching ideas and the universe in which we live in a way that isn't the same as ours. So we invent new languages to represent that. Almost as if that's the point, yeah?
    • coldtea 10y ago
      Same as the idea of personal or group identity. People like to be different -- either themselves to others, or their groups to other groups (because they also like to belong. Belonging and being different at the same times translates to groups and subgroups). And they show that in many ways, language is but one. From clothing to consumption, tons of other things are used to that effect.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• coldtea 10y ago
  >If you disagree, consider this thought experiment: Imagine if the entire world spoke a single language. Would we ever want to invent new languages, making mutual communication harder? It would be silly. We do something similar to that already. Kids make up their own lingo when playing, subgroups invent new slangs within a single language, areas make their own dialect, we invent new cultural languages (e.g. music genres) that differentiate us from others, we invent new computer languages despite having existing ones, etc. Heck, even English got developed while other languages already existed. But that's a question for an alternative reality. It doesn't answer whether it would be better to remove historical languages, and adopt a single (existing or new) one. What I mean is that what would be the best approach in a world that spoke a single language does not really enlighten us about a world that already has many. The world that "spoke a single language" wouldn't have existing living cultures in different languages like us to remove, and thus they'd have nothing to fear of losing. Besides, languages encode ways of thinking and the culture/history etc of its generations speakers, something that will be lost in a monoculture. Single language = single universal culture = same shit all over the world, no diversity. And if you think you're still getting diversity within a single country (e.g. because you have stuff ranging from Metallica to the Residents and from Hank Williams and Beyonce to Philip Glass and John Zorn) then you really don't know what actual cultural diversity is.
  • pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    >you really don't know what actual cultural diversity is // So a young nomadic Mongolian girl and I (UK, middle-age, male, working in craft/retail) don't represent different cultures because we can both speak English? Go on, explain, clearly I don't understand. Didn't you already explain that there were vastly different subcultures within the population of English language speakers? Don't you think there's more to culture than mutual unintelligibility?
    • mablap 10y ago
      Again, the article has a specific definition of what it means to speak "one language" - it means to renounce all knowledge trapped inside the dead language, cultural and all. Therefore yes, if you both only spoke English (in the absolute case at issue) you woudn't have different cultures, by definition. Language and culture are not linearly independent.
• gkya 10y ago
  > Ideally, linguists and historians would document these languages and their cultures, then let them quietly fade. Teaching them to new generations is not only a futile effort, it's less beneficial on net. I agree to this, and only this, from your comment. There's a lot of romanticism in reviving dead or dying languages that recalls a likeness to the Human Zoo. But on the other hand, languages and dialects are very tied to the political spheres, which are always on the change, and the languages change with them. Dialects form themselves everywhere: even each household has it's own tiny dialect where some phrases make sense only therewithin. And for language in the modern sense is basically a partially constructed dialect based on a dialect spoken by the ruling class of a dialect continuum, and as dialects and politics are ever-changing animals, languages will always change. While some dialects become closer to a given language, others diverge, or even emerge. And for lingua francas, they change too. It is possible that English will let it's status go to some other language in the coming centuries, just like Latin, French, Aramhaic, etc. did in the past. > And most people don't realize how great a cost we pay for having so many languages. Well, we can't ask people to let go of their identities because we'd rather not do internationalisation.
  • yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Why can't we ask people to give up their identity? Let's consider the possibility that arbitrary linguistic (and other tribal) divisions are harmful. Consider the possibility that giving the political sphere more levers to pull to manipulate us is not a good thing. In much the same way, consider the step backwards we've taken in messaging. We had a lingua franca - XMPP. We gave it up so that various powerful actors (google, facebook) could lock us into their unintelligible dialect. Was this a good thing?
    • ktRolster 10y ago
      Why can't we ask people to give up their identity? You're not willing to give up your identity. It's a lot of work, among other things.
    • gkya 10y ago
      > Why can't we ask people to give up their identity? Because that's how they _be_. Even if we created a monotonous people without any identities, different persons with different abilities and interests will diverge from others and cluster with similar individuals, forming various intersecting groups, and lead to a complex system of group and personal identities. (edit, forgot: Such groups bring together diverging dialects, first diverging metaphors, then words, phrases, etc., so on maybe until mutual intelligibility is lost.) Your XMPP analogy does not hold because XMPP was popular among some tech geeks whereas even my granny who does not understand the concept of video and blushes and hides when changing her clothes when the TV is on gets to use WhatsApp, with help from my mom who thinks her WhatsApp is locked because of the recent encryption thing they introduced and the yellow little message the app displays related thereto.
• douche 10y ago
  If for no other reason, I would be psyched to see a single language win out, especially if it were an alphabetic language that could easily be encoded in 8 bits. Fuck Unicode.
  • danieltillett 10y ago
    LOL. Only on HN would such a reason for one world language be made.
  • viraptor 10y ago
    It wouldn't solve a problem of transcribing the old texts, or when using mathematical notation or other symbols inline. They still need unicode.
• Razengan 10y ago
  This sounds like the view of someone who has never been exposed to more than one language. If one were to try applying that idea to programming languages, they would get laughed off HackerNews. They'd be told to just "pick the right tool for the job." Perhaps you meant that we should only have a few or one dialects of each [major] language, which is more reasonable. No one language, or any system of communicating intent, is perfect. There are figuratively countless nuances in each language that you just can't express in another. Which is why even English doesn't have just English words. I almost feel irritated just having to point out things which should be obvious.. Language is also art; even through my limited exposure to Japanese, for example, I've noticed many expressions that just wouldn't work in English, and definitely wouldn't convey the same intent or feelings, or paint the same picture so to speak, no matter how you imported them.
  • danieltillett 10y ago
    I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English. Sure in some languages some concept can be expressed more subtly or poetically, but the concept can be expressed provided the assumed knowledge is present. It is the lack of assumed cultural knowledge that prevents these Japanese expressions from making sense in English, not that they can’t be expressed in English in principle.
    • sanoli 10y ago
      Sure, you can express pretty much any concept from a foreign language in English, and vice-versa if the language is thorough enough. What you lose is the power and conciseness that comes from having a single word expressing a concept that would take 10 or 18 words to be correctly expressd in English. I have memorized a few interesting ones in some languages: 'Litost' (czech), 'Prozvonit' (czech also),'Tartle'(scottish), 'Mamihlapinatapei' (an idiom from Tierra del Fuego), 'Ya’aburnee' (arabic), and my own language's 'saudade', which to some is just translated as 'longing for something you have lost', but is, for native speakers, of course, something else.
      • danieltillett 10y ago
• sanoli 10y ago
  Usually, the people who espouse such views are never the speakers of dying tongues. I'm not saying your view is the wrong one, or that it isn't rational. The sentence in the beginning of my post was spoken by an anthropologist who studied a tribe who was losing its language, and yet didn't completely grasp the other, mainstream language, fully. I never forgot that sentence. The youths of the tribe, he said, were in a constant limbo, their language and culture dying, and never part of the bigger, dominating culture. Their children's children will probably be ok, will probably be fully assimilated, but to not think of the fate their parents and grandparents is not right. Many efforts are futile, but it doesn't make them all wrong. Sometimes it is the right way to act.
  • drauh 10y ago
    Additionally, there is a richness of thought and experience that other languages bring to the human experience. Just google for "untranslateable words that should exist in English" or something similar. Not to mention that even computer languages have a similar quality: different languages allow one to think about things in different ways. How much would computer science suck if the only language available was Fortran 77?
    • proteinbased 10y ago
      I'm not so sure about the richness, though I get your point. (I recently pondered about the german word "jenseits" not in the sense of heaven, which it may mean, but rather as a pompous form of beyond). I agree with the FORTRAN 77 part. But this is a misleading example. This "small" language has a very specific audience in scientists and engineers (not even computer engineers). I think the point the top comment makes assumes we all wrote something like python with C and FORTRAN extensions used when appropriate.
• jlg23 10y ago
  > Imagine if the entire world spoke a single language. Would we ever want to invent new languages [...]? First: Very few languages are invented but a lot of individual languages fragment over time - the more widespread they are, the more they fragment[1]. Sranan Tongo[2] and Papiamentu[3] are two nice examples of new languages that were quite recently created by speakers of some dominant language. Influences mix, people adapt words from languages spoken nearby or just make up their own words and they stick. Second: Wittgenstein said that "the limits of my language are the limits of my world". Different languages allow us to think different concepts. Trying to translate something from one language into another that does not have a 1:1 translation is usually a very thought-provoking thing for me and forces me to reflect on my own culture. Great examples are the Japanese "tsundoku" (pile of unread books [4]) or the German "Feierabend" (the time after finishing work for the day). In summary: I think the desire to have one "global" language is only a technocrat's unrealistic dream and its pursuit would be the attempt to streamline thinking at the expense of everyone's culture and philosophical potentials. Rather, at least superficially, learn a few more languages. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1580745/English-will-fragment-into-global-dialects.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1580745/English-will-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sranan_Tongo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sranan_Tongo [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papiamento https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papiamento [4] http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/tsundoku-should-enter-the-english-language.html http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/tsundoku-should-enter-the...
• loblollyboy 10y ago
  I am learning Russian and was just thinking the same thing. That said, I think that the differences between Russian and English lead to a different way of seeing the world (you think in your language, and some ideas that are easy to convey in one language might be harder in another. That said, the vast majority of ideas will be easily expressed in any (universal). I think English is pretty sweet but wouldn't want to have to learn it.
• jugbandjames 10y ago
  It isn't necessary to have only one language for people to communicate. Humans are perfectly capable of learning multiple languages, and and it may even be good for a child's cognitive development to do so. It's also unlikely that it is possible to have one global language. People acquire language from the people they grow up around. They get it from their parents, friends, neighbors, etc (note that I omitted teachers). Even if everyone had the possibility to communicate with any other person in the world, from birth, they wouldn't, and so dialects would form and eventually become languages.
• khedoros 10y ago
  > Do you feel stunted or unsatisfied because your ancestors didn't pass their native tongues down to you? Yes, although I realize that I'm likely in the minority. That's why I started learning one of them at the first opportunity. I feel like it helped solidify one aspect of who I think I am. Learn a few languages. Learn the variations in connotation that different grammars provide. Learn that the way you structure your thoughts in one language don't fit naturally into another language. Language provides an imperfect conduit for communication, and every language is imperfect in a unique way. Knowing a few unrelated ones gives you a basis for comparison and contrast.
• hvidgaard 10y ago
  If the entire world spoke English, Spanish, or Chinese, we still wouldn't be able to understand each other. I live in Denmark, less than 6 million people, and I can pick two guys, put them in a room, and they would not be able to understand one another. They live less than 300 miles from eachother.
  • iaskwhy 10y ago
    You might be biased without knowing it because Danish is one of those languages with lots of dialects in such a small region. I only know this because my girlfriend used to live in Copenhagen and couldn't understand most people outside of the capital. Maybe most countries don't share so many dialects, I'm sure mine (Portugal) doesn't, it's pretty easy to understand most people here with the exception of the Azores Islands.
    • hvidgaard 10y ago
      I know Sweden and Norway are the same, but your point probably stands, as they are very similar to Danish.
• Mikhail_Edoshin 10y ago
  This line of reasoning implies there's a benefit in such economy and simplification. But is this really so? Take fonts, for example. One could argue that it would be better to have a single font and then maybe also simplify it to have fewer character shapes and width variations. But from what I see font development goes in an entirely different direction. There's more fonts developed every year, and they're getting more sophisticated, not less: they have much more ligatures, different variants of the same letter for different context, and so on. Or take the ideographic writing systems. There were many attempts to simplify them, limit the number of ideographs, simplify their shapes, but as the result we now have two Chinese writing systems (simplified and not) and the simplification of Japanese seems to have stopped and even went backward. Maybe it's not that simple to simplify things :)
  • majewsky 10y ago
    https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
• sametmax 10y ago
  +1. Yes, cultural diversity is good. But we have plenty of ways to have that without needing 1000 languages : - art; - food; - social constructs; - city organisations; - and slang if you really want your tongue to be part of it. We don't need to spend time and energy to save old ways of communication. Let's us it to make communication better now. What's more, anything that live eventually dies, which is something we need to learn to accept. Now we are already spending a lot of energy to save our bodies, and a bit of it to save other living creatures, and I'm on board with that. But saving languages seems a waste to me. Either the system will procude or derive the next linguistic generation, or it will merge the old ones, but all in all, this is something I'd gladly let natural selection kick in. At the very least, I wish we would all share a minimum of one language. I'm french, I consider my language much more efficient to describe things than english, but I'll be ok to just say "let's make sure everybody at least speak english" and be done with it. I travel a lot, and the language barrier has never once been a good thing. Best case scenario you have goofy confusion and laughters, worst case scenario you have hate. Now we don't need to eradicate the language diversity. But it's nor do we need to save it. It's ok to loose some of our knowledge. Yes, even books, stories, ways of thinking. Things die, that's how the system get balanced. (Plus when we will create galatical aliances with aliens, we will need a earthling language, so let's start now people !)
  • jackarg 10y ago
    You would willingly give up the french language if asked to and replace it with english? As a french person too, this is inconceivable for me. I don't think cultural identity is really possible without languages. French culture would not be the same french culture if everyone spoke English.
    • sametmax 10y ago
      It's not about giving up french, it's about letting it die if one day it's decaying. Not saving != killing.
  • jugbandjames 10y ago
    It's not always that "natural" of a selection. Many native Americans were basically kidnapped and forced to learn English. Governments in the past have intentionally tried to eradicate languages with the mistaken belief that one language is superior and more communicative and another is barbaric or degenerative. This still happens in the form of dialect prejudice, which is institutionalized in the American public school system. People tend to project their prejudice towards a particular group of people onto their language. This has been proven many times with dialect perception experiments. I think we have an obligation to preserve cultures and languages that have been eradicated due to ignorance and prejudice, and we need to learn from the past and stop trying to enforce linguistic standards in school. If a single homogenous language is necessary, it should emerge naturally. Having said that, languages do die naturally for socioeconomic reasons too, and I agree that it's unnecessary, and probably harmful to try to force people to use a language that they have no socioeconomic incentive to use.
• havefunwiththat 10y ago
  If this was intended to be a troll post, it was very successful. What you are advocating is, essentially, linguistic and cultural genocide. It's an appalling point of view. In all seriousness, I would suggest you learn another language, or maybe several, and then revisit your perspective.