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| quote: | Originally posted by kadomony
Do you think the majority of the world will be speaking some kind of super-language at any point in the future? |
It could only happen under a very specific set of circumstances:- Population bottleneck/massive transmigration: In order to set the optimal conditions for this to happen, either a great share of the human population would have to disappear and leave behind just one small group (preferably from a rich monolingual country) to repopulate the planet, or migration between different countries would be so massive that local languages would soon become obsolete and we'd need a global lingua franca (more popular than English nowadays). You probably agree with me that both scenarios are pretty unlikely, though they are indeed possible.
It's hard to convince a whole population to change their language unless there's obvious advantages. If you speak Navajo, but everyone around you speaks English and has much more to offer than the stuff you can get in your village, you'd probably want to learn English... and, as your interactions with English speakers soar and your daily use of Navajo plummets, it's not surprising that you're going to forget Navajo sooner or later.
However, at least 65 languages are currently spoken by more than 10 million people. It's hard to believe any of these languages will become obsolete in daily interactions in the near future (I could only think of two scenarios to reduce the importance of these interactions, you can probably think of a few more);
- Global mass media: I sort of sound like a Londoner (with some sort of speech impairment, I must say), because it was the variety of English I was most frequently exposed to during my teenage years. Why? Because I had access to many programmes broadcast by the BBC and Channel 4 that were based in London - it was only natural that I'd try to speak the way they did. If everyone has access to the same sort of entertainment in a global lingua franca (like English), it's much easier to bring more linguistic cohesion to the world. However, this would have to be strong enough to become not just the preferred channel of communication among foreigners, but also the speech of choice amongst people from the same country (only in Hollywood do Russian spies speak in English among themselves);
- Even if all that happened: All right, suppose Canto-English became so popular we all ditched our native languages and decided to communicate only in this new dialectal hotness. It's hard to keep 7 billion people (or more) "synchronised" - at one point or another, people would start to sound different in different corners of the world either because they're less integrated or because they value their "local speech" more than what they hear on the media and, before you knew it, a new language would rise. That's why you can't understand my mother language: English and Portuguese came from a common ancestor spoken a long long time ago and lost contact ever since.
So, even if we all spoke the same language for a while, this linguistic equilibrium would be all too fragile.
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