[Crito]

> "A world where everyone speaks one language would be boring as fuck"

Diversity is great, but a world in which everyone can fluently converse with everyone else would be the exact opposite of boring. In fact, I would say that this sort of universal communication would be great because diversity is great; it would allow all of those different cultures to share their cultures with others, with greater ease.

Of course the best of both worlds is a world where everyone is multilingual, with everyone sharing at least one language with every other person. I think this is more likely than a world in which Arabic is the universal language. I think that the increasing coverage and accuracy of machine translation will create a synthetic/"soft" version of the universally multilingual scenario. Right now machine translation is still fairly shit (although still serviceable!), but I don't think that will be the case in 50 years.

[kreeben]

I would love a world where most people can communicate with everybody regardless of "native" tongue and that would prolly lead to a new golden era of mankind in creative and humanitarian areas. Not so much in science I suppose. They already talk to each other fine. The trend certainly seems to be english taking over. Which is fine since it is such an expressive language beatutiful in ways. All other major langs will probably remain and you guys will look kind of silly only knowing the "global" language but in time latin american culture will catch up with you and spanish and potrugeese will be your second lanugages. Maby they already are?