[juhanima]

Thank you, sir, for your honesty. While mother tongue is surely a big part of a person's identity, any language is also just a means to an end. Some linguistics suggest that entire peoples have switched languages in the past in just a few generations for the utility and convenience. Kalevi Wiik for instance.

Not being an avid learner of languages, I have personally always liked the idea of an universal language. English seems to be closest to the spot at the moment. It seems that Esperanto has its most avid supporters in China these days, because they would like the luxury of having to learn just one western language.

Still, every language is also a cultural artifact the loss of which would be a bummer. Today we cannot read the writing of Rapa-Nui, the Easter Island, which is sad.

The recently deceased Finnish writer Matti Mäkelä once talked about the idea of two languages: the language of the heart and the language of trade. The former you speak to express the deepest thoughts and the latter to make deals with all of the people in the world.

Maybe sometimes in the far-away future we will all speak two languages, the heart-language and the trade-language. I don't care if the latter is English or Chinese or anything else as it's just about trade and utility. For poetry and confessing my love I have another language.