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by yosito
2885 days ago
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I agree with you, but I think this makes more sense to someone in Europe where being multilingual is the norm. In the US, a lot of people only speak English which leads to at least two objections to this idea. First, and this is the objection I grew up with, many people see it as unfair to require everyone in the world to speak "our" language. And second, this is the one that concerns me more these days, is that being monolingual makes it harder to understand your neighbors even if they've learned the same language as you as a second language. In the US, we're extremely intolerant of people who have varying dialects or accents in English. In addition, if you don't speak a second language it's hard to be aware of which figures of speech and other idioms you may be using that make your own communication less clear. Ultimately, I think we'll end up with English being the common language of humanity. We're already more than half way to that point in terms of geographical regions where one can communicate using English. And though it's not a perfect language, it's pretty well suited to wide scale usage since it's got a large vocabulary and relatively simple grammar. But I don't think having English as a universal language will be without problems. |
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Yes, it's unfair. But we have more important problems. If humanity ends up picking up chinese I'll spend 10 years learning it. I don't care. A common language trumps those issues.
> . And second, this is the one that concerns me more these days, is that being monolingual makes it harder to understand your neighbors even if they've learned the same language as you as a second language.
You mean harder than the current situation where most people can't understand each others at all ?
> Ultimately, I think we'll end up with English being the common language of humanity.
If we don't make it so it's not going to be certain.
It's also too much of a slow process, and not enough of a formal one.
All those debates, all those arguments always ignore the big picture for some local smaller issues. Sometime you gotta bite the bullet and move on.
I'd say pick anything, I really couldn't care less. Klingon if you want.
But english is just the most likely candidate to succeed, being used in business, diplomacy and tech.