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I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, yes, it's a pity to see a cultural artifact like a language fade away. I get that. But on the other hand, hav

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, yes, it's a pity to see a cultural artifact like a language fade away. I get that. But on the other hand, having the world Balkanized into thousands of mutually incomprehensible linguistic ghettoes is a bad thing, because it makes it harder to get things done on large scales. Things would just be easier if we spoke a manageable handful of languages.

marten-de-vries 9y ago
There's a middle road, you know: being bilingual. To run with the Icelandic example, you'll be hard pressed to find someone who speaks it but not English. Where I live, there's also a local language (Frisian) spoken beside the 'bigger' language (Dutch). And here too, lots of people speak English. Or if not, you might get lucky with German.
- Retric 9y ago
  That's the first half of a language dying. If everyone speaks Dutch and it's on signs and menus etc then learning Frisian has limited value.
  - marten-de-vries 9y ago
    I don't think so, or the language would have died out already. I'd argue it's more about whether children learn it as their primary language. Also, because of concerns of linguistic extinction, similar to the ones mentioned for Icelandic in the article, you see somewhat of a counter-movement as well. This caused e.g. a special status of the language by law (see e.g. [1]), and also: * it's a mandatory school subject * you are entitled to using it in government interactions, e.g. in court * a small part of the public television is in Frisian, and there's also a regional tv/radio channel using it exclusively * place name signs are often at least bilingual, and sometimes Frisian-only. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Charter_for_Regional_or_Minority_Languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Charter_for_Regional_...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - Retric 9y ago
      This stuff is not that fast. Give it 3-5+ generations. The tipping point is IMO what language people start conversations with. That shifts language skills and feeds off it's self.
    - dkarl 9y ago
      I'd argue it's more about whether children learn it as their primary language. I'd say even that can't accomplish much by itself, which is why the other things you listed are so important. A lot of Mexican-American kids in my hometown spoke exclusively Spanish at home, and now as adults if you ask them if they can speak Spanish most of them say "not really." They're embarrassed if they have to speak Spanish with someone from Mexico who has an adult vocabulary and a sophisticated grasp of the language. When your education, media, and social life is entirely in English, you end up so much more capable in English that that's all you want to speak. Even with their friends who also spoke Spanish at home, if the context of the conversation was their English-language schoolwork or an American band or an American TV show, it was more natural to talk about it in English; if there was somebody present they didn't know, it was safe to assume they spoke English; et cetera.
  - davidy123 9y ago
    The local language is likely to have a lot of associations and nuance. Common languages can lead to cultural collapse; the world becomes less rich. "Chinglish" (bad translations) are one extreme outcome of this, but it's not always funny or trivial.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  A generation ago, Dutch minority dialects & languages were really discouraged and some were nearly killed. Kids were disciplined in school for using them. A generation before that, British accents/dialects^ actively suppressed to give way to standard (King's) English. I think there were almost no advantages to this dialect killing. Small minority dialects are at a danger of dying out, not crowding out the bigger languages. This is how all of europe worked for hundreds of years. My Grandfather grew up speaking yiddish (german dialect) in school, czech in town & Hungarian at school. These are completely unrelated and individually difficult languages. He later went to college in German & Latin, later on English. He spoke 10 languages in total, most fluently. I knew him in a language that he learned in his 40s. This was normal in his day. They weren't afraid of languages then. Anyway... if your "home" language is a tiny, local one. There is no danger that you will be monolingual in a commercially useless language. You will speak a big language too. Speaking 2 makes the 3rd one easier to learn. ^more on the dialect end of the spectrum than most people realize.
  - ocschwar 9y ago
    Jersey Dutch died out completely in the US, without any suppression by the government. Cajun French is on its last legs despite government support. And it was purely the result of broadcast radio.
    - _emacsomancer_ 9y ago
      The US culture/society also tends to kill off non-English languages. Spanish is large enough and with a 'renewable' resource of Spanish speakers from other parts of the Americas that it manages to survive, but other languages do not fare as well.
      - schoen 9y ago
        I don't think that's quite right. Chinese is a notable counterexample in a lot of places, as well as Vietnamese and Tagalog and some others. But Spanish definitely has a more universal geographic distribution in the U.S. than any other non-English language. This article and map were pretty interesting: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/language_map_what_s_the_most_popular_language_in_your_state.html http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/langua...
- smitherfield 9y ago
  But is it a sustainable road? French-Canadians have been complaining for many years that Montreal's "bilingual" neighborhoods become English-speaking in a decade or so, and "French-speaking" neighborhoods become bilingual. And this is despite extensive government efforts to encourage or even enforce the use of French. You can see the same trends in Catalonia, Wales, Ireland, etc. Where the government intervenes in the opposite direction, the transition can be much more rapid. Visiting Strasbourg (in Alsace, France), people's surnames, street and place names, and the local cuisine are all German, but nobody speaks a word of it. It was amazing (and slightly depressing) to see how in 2-3 generations a city could forget the language it spoke for nigh-on 1,500 years. The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if Dutch were considered a dying language 50 years from now.
  - graeme 9y ago
    Strasbourg was French from 1681, then German in 1871, then French in 1918. Then only briefly German in WWII. So it wasn't German very long, only 50 years. As for Montreal, it will be interesting to see how the city evolves. I notice more English in my neighbourhood than when I moved in (8 years ago). But, there is also more French in the old anglo neighbourhoods of the west. One factor is that a lot of "allophones" are perfectly fluent in both English and French. When you add in the francophone tendency to switch to English when dealing with anyone who shows even a whiff of not being a native francophone, a lot of francophone majority neighbourhoods may see English conversation. (I'm perfectly fluent and speak French in public. But for the life of me I can't francophone friends to speak French. I think they all want to practice their English. Also, the Quebecois that care about Anglicization probably don't move to urban montreal)
    - smitherfield 9y ago
      “Germany” hasn’t been a country very long, only since 1871, but an identifiable German culture has existed since Roman times. German (or precursors) was spoken in Alsace for well over a millennium before declining and dying out in the 19th and 20th centuries.
  - Balero 9y ago
erispoe 9y ago
Icelanders pretty much all speak english. Having a common language does not mean having a single unique language.
mbid 9y ago
Do we really want billions of people who all talk the same, think the same, and have the same values? I don't see how that could possibly be a good thing. The world is already bleeding ridiculous amounts of accumulated knowledge and wisdom. It may be true that the average person today knows and understands more about the world than the average person in the past, but we all know the same things today.
- krapp 9y ago
  Just because people share the same language, it doesn't mean they think the same, or share the same values. Many people around the world speak English, but they don't become culturally American or British because of it.
  - mbid 9y ago
    Yes they do. Look at popular music around the world. It's all slight variations of American popular music. I don't think this is only because of the dominance of English, but the two phenomena are definitely symptoms of the same disease.
    - drharby 9y ago
      This is a massively flawed conclusions for so many reasons
    - Balero 9y ago
      Well yeah, looking at popular music will do that. There's a massive amount of advertising money to make it popular. Look at the less forced genres of music. Rap in the USA, Grime in the UK, similar but different. The UK has a very different type of indie (named from coming from an independent label) music. And Country is only popular in the USA. If you have a quick look on the surface it can be similar, but if you look deeper, where it matters, then the variation is there. That said, I do think having more languages is better, a more diversified ecosystem is more likely to survive. And from my point of view, it's more interesting to live in.
bbctol 9y ago
Considering how many Icelanders speak English at quite a high level, they seem perfectly capable of contributing to large scale projects around the world. Conversely, diversifying languages, cultures, and geographic locations seems like a more stable strategy for ensuring long-term human survival, compared to a fragile monoculture.
throwaway7645 9y ago
I'll be that guy that brings up Esperanto. I don't speak it fluently yet, but know it faaar better than Spanish which I have years of formal instruction in and have been exposed to a lot of Latin American culture. The important point is I've gotten very comfortable with Esperanto with only < 50 hours of learning. When around the house I can think of small things in Esperanto without trying. Esperanto was invented to be an easy auxiliary language to easily allow the world to communicate. It is against language imperialism.
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  > Esperanto was invented to be an easy auxiliary language to easily allow the world to communicate. It is against language imperialism. It is only a rather recent development, since roughly the 1960s, that the Esperanto movement has advertised itself as a force against language imperialism and as purely an international second language for everyone, one that supposedly “protects” their native languages. Some Esperantists have criticized this change in marketing as simply trying to jump on the anti-imperialism and anti-globalization bandwagon just to get more attention for Esperanto. L. L. Zamenhof himself hoped that Esperanto – or at least something like it – would eventually replace all world languages, because he saw those differences between peoples as purely a negative thing. (Just like his Homaranismo was an attempt to level out religious differences with a single spirituality that hopefully would be taken up by all.) Zamenhof’s own writings and his lifelong efforts show that he did not really care for cultural diversity as many people today would understand it and hope for.
  - schoen 9y ago
    I appreciated our discussion on this point in a thread a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15521817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15521817
tmountain 9y ago
It'd also be easier if everyone painted all their houses the same color, ate the same foods all the time, and lived in a universally cookie cutter world, but that'd be terribly boring. Culture is embedded into language, and suggesting that we should standardize on a handful of languages for the sake of convenience places very low (or maybe no) value on cultural preservation. As someone who's been working very hard for the last two years to become bi-lingual, I had no idea how much I'd learn about my own native language from studying a different language, and incidentally, I've learned a ton about the underlying culture of the target language I'm learning. Every time a language dies, we lose a another piece of our global cultural tapestry, and I think that's a loss that's hard to quantify.
- gruez 9y ago
  >It'd also be easier if everyone painted all their houses the same color, ate the same foods all the time, and lived in a universally cookie cutter world, but that'd be terribly boring. not a fair comparison. learning a second language takes much more resources (time and money) than having different paint colors or food choices.
  - tmountain 9y ago
    Putting energy into cultural preservation of languages (learned at birth in the case of the article), is a different proposition than asking someone to learn them from scratch later in life. The question boils down to what is worth saving and investing in, and why we place value on those things.
- thefounder 9y ago
  You can't experience much of that said culture without learning the language and something tells me you don't speak more than 3 languages so you end up with houses painted in 3 different colours while the rest are hidden in a dark wood.
- nitwit005 9y ago
  > places very low (or maybe no) value on cultural preservation. All the cultures that exist today will die, no matter what actions we take today. People see cultural continuation, but if we hopped in a time machine and went back 100 years, none of us would fit in. I understand the urge to preserve things we appreciate, but it's not possible to preserve living things.
chicob 9y ago
It's not like people resentfully segregate from each other just because they speak different languages. Languages evolve, change, innovate and sometimes they go extinct. Latin disappeared with the downfall of the Roman Empire (although it is still used in the Vatican, including ATMs), but paved the way for many romance languages. Even Navajo saved lives during WWII. Like species, we know they're condemned to eventual extinction. But who likes seeing something disappear forever? Many translations are impossible to make because different languages allow for different meanings, metaphors and concepts. Their coexistence is actually beneficial and adds something to human culture. If one would apply that reasoning to programming languages, the programming landscape would suffer terribly. E só para enriquecer um pouco este comentário, aqui fica uma linha na minha língua materna!
- groovy2shoes 9y ago
  Latin emphatically did not disappear with the fall of the Roman Empire. Classical Latin was preserved not only by the Roman Catholic Church, but also as the lingua franca of all educated discourse in the West into the 18th century (at least!). Initially, this was probably because education was typically provided by the Church, yet its use persisted after the Protestant Reformation and through the Age of Enlightenment before learned folk began to variously adopt French, German, and eventually English. Classical Latin aside, sermo vulgaris ("the common speech"—"Vulgar Latin") never died so much as it evolved over time into our modern family of Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Occitan, Catalan, Romanian, Dalmatian, Sardinian, …; the list goes on, but I'm sure you get the idea. I think that, in the context of what I'm seeing throughout this thread, (and to be clear, this isn't directed at you specifically) before we worry that English will establish some sort of linguistic hegemony over the globe, we should first consider the processes by which some language or another comes to dominate international communication in such a way, and likewise the processes by which such an "auxiliary language" comes to be replaced eventually by another. I contend that the main reason English now serves the role once served by Latin is because the Anglosphere currently has much influence on the sociopoliticoeconomicocultural stage, yet it is not currently without rival on this stage. A century from now, it could happen that everyone will be learning Mandarin Chinese or Arabic or something else altogether. Perhaps Esperanto will finally take off. Returning to Latin for a final thought: throughout medieval Europe this side of Macedonia, all educated people could read, write, and speak Latin, and no doubt they found that these abilities came in handy from time to time. Notwithstanding, it remained in place as a second language, reserved for specific situations and purposes, and they continued to employ their native language in their day-to-day activities—after all, we still have English, Irish, Gaelic, Scots, French, Dutch, German, Polish, Spanish, &c., &c. in the present. These are not the same languages that were spoken in the Middle Ages, nor are they the same languages that were spoken 100 years ago, but, as you pointed out, languages evolve and change.
Bromskloss 9y ago
> having the world Balkanized That makes it sound like such a division is something that is happening now, being _done to_ the world, even. Rather, of course, the world _is_ already diverse like that, and what is happening, if anything, is a homogenisation.

marten-de-vries 9y ago

There's a middle road, you know: being bilingual. To run with the Icelandic example, you'll be hard pressed to find someone who speaks it but not English. Where I live, there's also a local language (Frisian) spoken beside the 'bigger' language (Dutch). And here too, lots of people speak English. Or if not, you might get lucky with German.

Retric 9y ago
That's the first half of a language dying. If everyone speaks Dutch and it's on signs and menus etc then learning Frisian has limited value.
- marten-de-vries 9y ago
  I don't think so, or the language would have died out already. I'd argue it's more about whether children learn it as their primary language. Also, because of concerns of linguistic extinction, similar to the ones mentioned for Icelandic in the article, you see somewhat of a counter-movement as well. This caused e.g. a special status of the language by law (see e.g. [1]), and also: * it's a mandatory school subject * you are entitled to using it in government interactions, e.g. in court * a small part of the public television is in Frisian, and there's also a regional tv/radio channel using it exclusively * place name signs are often at least bilingual, and sometimes Frisian-only. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Charter_for_Regional_or_Minority_Languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Charter_for_Regional_...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 9y ago
    This stuff is not that fast. Give it 3-5+ generations. The tipping point is IMO what language people start conversations with. That shifts language skills and feeds off it's self.
  - dkarl 9y ago
    I'd argue it's more about whether children learn it as their primary language. I'd say even that can't accomplish much by itself, which is why the other things you listed are so important. A lot of Mexican-American kids in my hometown spoke exclusively Spanish at home, and now as adults if you ask them if they can speak Spanish most of them say "not really." They're embarrassed if they have to speak Spanish with someone from Mexico who has an adult vocabulary and a sophisticated grasp of the language. When your education, media, and social life is entirely in English, you end up so much more capable in English that that's all you want to speak. Even with their friends who also spoke Spanish at home, if the context of the conversation was their English-language schoolwork or an American band or an American TV show, it was more natural to talk about it in English; if there was somebody present they didn't know, it was safe to assume they spoke English; et cetera.
- davidy123 9y ago
  The local language is likely to have a lot of associations and nuance. Common languages can lead to cultural collapse; the world becomes less rich. "Chinglish" (bad translations) are one extreme outcome of this, but it's not always funny or trivial.
dalbasal 9y ago
A generation ago, Dutch minority dialects & languages were really discouraged and some were nearly killed. Kids were disciplined in school for using them. A generation before that, British accents/dialects^ actively suppressed to give way to standard (King's) English. I think there were almost no advantages to this dialect killing. Small minority dialects are at a danger of dying out, not crowding out the bigger languages. This is how all of europe worked for hundreds of years. My Grandfather grew up speaking yiddish (german dialect) in school, czech in town & Hungarian at school. These are completely unrelated and individually difficult languages. He later went to college in German & Latin, later on English. He spoke 10 languages in total, most fluently. I knew him in a language that he learned in his 40s. This was normal in his day. They weren't afraid of languages then. Anyway... if your "home" language is a tiny, local one. There is no danger that you will be monolingual in a commercially useless language. You will speak a big language too. Speaking 2 makes the 3rd one easier to learn. ^more on the dialect end of the spectrum than most people realize.
- ocschwar 9y ago
  Jersey Dutch died out completely in the US, without any suppression by the government. Cajun French is on its last legs despite government support. And it was purely the result of broadcast radio.
  - _emacsomancer_ 9y ago
    The US culture/society also tends to kill off non-English languages. Spanish is large enough and with a 'renewable' resource of Spanish speakers from other parts of the Americas that it manages to survive, but other languages do not fare as well.
    - schoen 9y ago
      I don't think that's quite right. Chinese is a notable counterexample in a lot of places, as well as Vietnamese and Tagalog and some others. But Spanish definitely has a more universal geographic distribution in the U.S. than any other non-English language. This article and map were pretty interesting: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/language_map_what_s_the_most_popular_language_in_your_state.html http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/langua...
smitherfield 9y ago
But is it a sustainable road? French-Canadians have been complaining for many years that Montreal's "bilingual" neighborhoods become English-speaking in a decade or so, and "French-speaking" neighborhoods become bilingual. And this is despite extensive government efforts to encourage or even enforce the use of French. You can see the same trends in Catalonia, Wales, Ireland, etc. Where the government intervenes in the opposite direction, the transition can be much more rapid. Visiting Strasbourg (in Alsace, France), people's surnames, street and place names, and the local cuisine are all German, but nobody speaks a word of it. It was amazing (and slightly depressing) to see how in 2-3 generations a city could forget the language it spoke for nigh-on 1,500 years. The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if Dutch were considered a dying language 50 years from now.
- graeme 9y ago
  Strasbourg was French from 1681, then German in 1871, then French in 1918. Then only briefly German in WWII. So it wasn't German very long, only 50 years. As for Montreal, it will be interesting to see how the city evolves. I notice more English in my neighbourhood than when I moved in (8 years ago). But, there is also more French in the old anglo neighbourhoods of the west. One factor is that a lot of "allophones" are perfectly fluent in both English and French. When you add in the francophone tendency to switch to English when dealing with anyone who shows even a whiff of not being a native francophone, a lot of francophone majority neighbourhoods may see English conversation. (I'm perfectly fluent and speak French in public. But for the life of me I can't francophone friends to speak French. I think they all want to practice their English. Also, the Quebecois that care about Anglicization probably don't move to urban montreal)
  - smitherfield 9y ago
    “Germany” hasn’t been a country very long, only since 1871, but an identifiable German culture has existed since Roman times. German (or precursors) was spoken in Alsace for well over a millennium before declining and dying out in the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Balero 9y ago

erispoe 9y ago

Icelanders pretty much all speak english. Having a common language does not mean having a single unique language.

mbid 9y ago

Do we really want billions of people who all talk the same, think the same, and have the same values? I don't see how that could possibly be a good thing. The world is already bleeding ridiculous amounts of accumulated knowledge and wisdom. It may be true that the average person today knows and understands more about the world than the average person in the past, but we all know the same things today.

krapp 9y ago
Just because people share the same language, it doesn't mean they think the same, or share the same values. Many people around the world speak English, but they don't become culturally American or British because of it.
- mbid 9y ago
  Yes they do. Look at popular music around the world. It's all slight variations of American popular music. I don't think this is only because of the dominance of English, but the two phenomena are definitely symptoms of the same disease.
  - drharby 9y ago
    This is a massively flawed conclusions for so many reasons
  - Balero 9y ago
    Well yeah, looking at popular music will do that. There's a massive amount of advertising money to make it popular. Look at the less forced genres of music. Rap in the USA, Grime in the UK, similar but different. The UK has a very different type of indie (named from coming from an independent label) music. And Country is only popular in the USA. If you have a quick look on the surface it can be similar, but if you look deeper, where it matters, then the variation is there. That said, I do think having more languages is better, a more diversified ecosystem is more likely to survive. And from my point of view, it's more interesting to live in.

bbctol 9y ago

Considering how many Icelanders speak English at quite a high level, they seem perfectly capable of contributing to large scale projects around the world. Conversely, diversifying languages, cultures, and geographic locations seems like a more stable strategy for ensuring long-term human survival, compared to a fragile monoculture.

throwaway7645 9y ago

I'll be that guy that brings up Esperanto. I don't speak it fluently yet, but know it faaar better than Spanish which I have years of formal instruction in and have been exposed to a lot of Latin American culture. The important point is I've gotten very comfortable with Esperanto with only < 50 hours of learning. When around the house I can think of small things in Esperanto without trying. Esperanto was invented to be an easy auxiliary language to easily allow the world to communicate. It is against language imperialism.

Mediterraneo10 9y ago
> Esperanto was invented to be an easy auxiliary language to easily allow the world to communicate. It is against language imperialism. It is only a rather recent development, since roughly the 1960s, that the Esperanto movement has advertised itself as a force against language imperialism and as purely an international second language for everyone, one that supposedly “protects” their native languages. Some Esperantists have criticized this change in marketing as simply trying to jump on the anti-imperialism and anti-globalization bandwagon just to get more attention for Esperanto. L. L. Zamenhof himself hoped that Esperanto – or at least something like it – would eventually replace all world languages, because he saw those differences between peoples as purely a negative thing. (Just like his Homaranismo was an attempt to level out religious differences with a single spirituality that hopefully would be taken up by all.) Zamenhof’s own writings and his lifelong efforts show that he did not really care for cultural diversity as many people today would understand it and hope for.
- schoen 9y ago
  I appreciated our discussion on this point in a thread a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15521817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15521817

tmountain 9y ago

It'd also be easier if everyone painted all their houses the same color, ate the same foods all the time, and lived in a universally cookie cutter world, but that'd be terribly boring. Culture is embedded into language, and suggesting that we should standardize on a handful of languages for the sake of convenience places very low (or maybe no) value on cultural preservation. As someone who's been working very hard for the last two years to become bi-lingual, I had no idea how much I'd learn about my own native language from studying a different language, and incidentally, I've learned a ton about the underlying culture of the target language I'm learning. Every time a language dies, we lose a another piece of our global cultural tapestry, and I think that's a loss that's hard to quantify.

gruez 9y ago
>It'd also be easier if everyone painted all their houses the same color, ate the same foods all the time, and lived in a universally cookie cutter world, but that'd be terribly boring. not a fair comparison. learning a second language takes much more resources (time and money) than having different paint colors or food choices.
- tmountain 9y ago
  Putting energy into cultural preservation of languages (learned at birth in the case of the article), is a different proposition than asking someone to learn them from scratch later in life. The question boils down to what is worth saving and investing in, and why we place value on those things.
thefounder 9y ago
You can't experience much of that said culture without learning the language and something tells me you don't speak more than 3 languages so you end up with houses painted in 3 different colours while the rest are hidden in a dark wood.
nitwit005 9y ago
> places very low (or maybe no) value on cultural preservation. All the cultures that exist today will die, no matter what actions we take today. People see cultural continuation, but if we hopped in a time machine and went back 100 years, none of us would fit in. I understand the urge to preserve things we appreciate, but it's not possible to preserve living things.

chicob 9y ago

It's not like people resentfully segregate from each other just because they speak different languages. Languages evolve, change, innovate and sometimes they go extinct. Latin disappeared with the downfall of the Roman Empire (although it is still used in the Vatican, including ATMs), but paved the way for many romance languages. Even Navajo saved lives during WWII. Like species, we know they're condemned to eventual extinction. But who likes seeing something disappear forever? Many translations are impossible to make because different languages allow for different meanings, metaphors and concepts. Their coexistence is actually beneficial and adds something to human culture. If one would apply that reasoning to programming languages, the programming landscape would suffer terribly. E só para enriquecer um pouco este comentário, aqui fica uma linha na minha língua materna!

groovy2shoes 9y ago
Latin emphatically did not disappear with the fall of the Roman Empire. Classical Latin was preserved not only by the Roman Catholic Church, but also as the lingua franca of all educated discourse in the West into the 18th century (at least!). Initially, this was probably because education was typically provided by the Church, yet its use persisted after the Protestant Reformation and through the Age of Enlightenment before learned folk began to variously adopt French, German, and eventually English. Classical Latin aside, sermo vulgaris ("the common speech"—"Vulgar Latin") never died so much as it evolved over time into our modern family of Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Occitan, Catalan, Romanian, Dalmatian, Sardinian, …; the list goes on, but I'm sure you get the idea. I think that, in the context of what I'm seeing throughout this thread, (and to be clear, this isn't directed at you specifically) before we worry that English will establish some sort of linguistic hegemony over the globe, we should first consider the processes by which some language or another comes to dominate international communication in such a way, and likewise the processes by which such an "auxiliary language" comes to be replaced eventually by another. I contend that the main reason English now serves the role once served by Latin is because the Anglosphere currently has much influence on the sociopoliticoeconomicocultural stage, yet it is not currently without rival on this stage. A century from now, it could happen that everyone will be learning Mandarin Chinese or Arabic or something else altogether. Perhaps Esperanto will finally take off. Returning to Latin for a final thought: throughout medieval Europe this side of Macedonia, all educated people could read, write, and speak Latin, and no doubt they found that these abilities came in handy from time to time. Notwithstanding, it remained in place as a second language, reserved for specific situations and purposes, and they continued to employ their native language in their day-to-day activities—after all, we still have English, Irish, Gaelic, Scots, French, Dutch, German, Polish, Spanish, &c., &c. in the present. These are not the same languages that were spoken in the Middle Ages, nor are they the same languages that were spoken 100 years ago, but, as you pointed out, languages evolve and change.

Bromskloss 9y ago

> having the world Balkanized That makes it sound like such a division is something that is happening now, being _done to_ the world, even. Rather, of course, the world _is_ already diverse like that, and what is happening, if anything, is a homogenisation.