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> Imagine a world where every piece of poetry, novel or literature would be forced to be written in English. Our literature would be much poor and many new points of view would be dismissed just because "not enough Anglo Saxon" In such a world “written in English” wouldn’t imply “Anglo Saxon”, just as today, it doesn’t imply “British” anymore. I think people would be better off if they all spoke the same language. Reason is that, statistically, the best literature is written in a language with many writers. So, if you grow up monolingual speaking a minority language, the best stuff you can read won’t be as good as the best stuff written in English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, etc. The worst stuff you can read won’t, either, but nobody reads that stuff (some may argue Hollywood is the exception that proves the rule) Getting there will have pain points, though. Going cold turkey would cut off people from their culture (imagine children not being able to read what their parents wrote). However, a few centuries of bilingual education would, IMO, be a fairly smooth way to get there. People would no longer be able to read what their forefathers wrote, but that already is the case with most languages (few people can read Middle English fluently, for example) That’s all assuming the “English” people would speak would be universally intelligible, though. That’s far from guaranteed to happen. Subcultures with their own words and grammar changes would still form. |
This has some problems related to the resulting intellectual monoculture.