Is the Tower of Babel still affecting us or something?
Edit:
We have 8 billion people, yet the best we could muster for the most total speakers of a language is under 2 billion, including non-natives…
- English (1,452 million speakers) First language: 372.9 million Total speakers: 1.4+ billion According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers.
English (1,452 million speakers) First language: 372.9 million
This is already wrong, which means your entire premise is prob wrong
anglozone population = 510 million. I’m pretty sure more than 72% of that population speaks english fluently
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Comrade as to your point of unipolar hegemonie, wouldn’t the opposite be true? That because of imperialism more people speak the same language. Example would be how former English colonies speak the same language, like India and Pakistan have their own languages but they also speak English due to colonialism and neo colonialism.
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How did unipolar prevent a majority language?
How did wars and genocides prevent a majority language?
How is learning the majority language useless to your career?
Kial ne esperanto?
I just now googled it so it might be wrong but… two million isn’t close to half the world population.
two million isn’t close to half the world population.
Simple solution: just kill 8106 million and it will be
Esperanto definitely isn’t a contender, but it’s design was to be a language that’s easy for everyone to learn and be the “universal” language. People have to speak it though, otherwise it’s not of much use to know it.
Estas pli da ni ol oni eble pensus
Redakto: TIU ĈI FADENO ESTAS NUN LA POSEDAĴO DE LA UNIVERSALA ESPERANTO-ASOCIO
You as a 8.1 billion population have to come together and decide as a group and the enact it. If we couldn’t even stop Covid which is still around you think we can do something like this?
That’s not how language or communication works. Humans develop language in real time and in small cohorts. You are lucky if you can understand youth slang by the time you hit 40 and you want to force an artificial lingua franca on four billion people?
Plus, who said language uniformity is a positive? Linguistic diversity is a feature, not a bug. Language is tied to culture, identity and a whole bunch of antrhopological elements. Entire ethnicities are defined by their language. It’s bad enough that US cultural imperialism has forced half the planet to watch the same movies and TV shows, why would we do the same with language? If you ask me, there’s way too much English out there as it is.
It’s bad enough that US cultural imperialism has forced half the planet to watch the same movies and TV shows
I have a comm for you
I would say there is. Body language. Just about any human you meet can understand body language.
👍
But don’t try this in many parts of the Middle East.
👌
And don’t do this in Brazil.
I suppose, though very poorly in comparison to what we usually mean by language. This sparks an interesting question though: can two human strangers communicate with each other better than any other animals can, even when those two people have no language in common?
I would argue yes, but not by a massive degree in my opinion. Every animal has body language and several things are shared amongst many of us, especially mammals. But yeah, I think our whole species would understand things like pointing at something or laughing or offering something with an outstretched arm, or a surprised face or a scowl.
In a weird way, the development of advanced communications and coordination technology has only made it harder for anything to change in a significant way .
Every time this was attempted we chose the language of the worst colonizer at that time
“chose”. learning the language of the worst colonizer of your time’s always been economically advantageous
For a tiny language, I really like toki pona, but it’s meant to be a minimal artistic language, more than an IAL (international auxiliary language).
Last I checked tho, Globasa looks really interesting. The way that they add new vocabulary, and have a good representation of world languages, seems to work well.
Esperanto is also good, but when my partner tried to learn it, they were weirded out by some of it’s quirks, like noun declinations based on whether it’s a subject or object, that seems unecessary.
When I was a teen I really wanted to learn Esperanto but never got around to it. Globasa seems extremely interesting though, maybe I’ll finally give one of these languages a try.
Yeah I feel that for better or worse Esperanto hasn’t reached a large enough mass to justify accepting its quirks and indo-eurocentrism, when we know we can do better now.
For sure. A dissapointing number of IALs have nearly all their vocab from european languages, but there are a few that try earnestly to source their vocab from a wide set of language families. Any global initiative for an IAL needs to have a global vocabulary set to have any hopes of being introduced.
If you choose vocabulary that is culturally neutral, then that vocabulary is not easily recognisable.
There’s no workaround for that trade-off.
Recognizeable for whom, is the question. The majority of IALs to date have had a highly eurocentric vocabulary, so they can’t be recognizeable to even a plurality of the world.
Correct reasoning, incorrect facts.
46% of the world speak Indo-European languages as a mother tongue.
Can’t do better than that. No other option comes close.
Aren’t you Irish? You know the English colonizers did their best to wipe out the Irish language and replace it with the one you’re advocating for right???
I never said anything approaching the words your putting in my mouth.
know the English colonizers did … right???
Nooo I didn’t actually know that and needed an enlightened person such as yourself to tell me 🙄🙄
Tá mé tinn de bheith ag glacadh comhairle stráinséara. Imagine some blan started lecturing you about haitian history and how it should affect your opinions, wouldn’t you at least tell them to fuck off?
You need a reason for a large group to choose to maintain a single language over over smaller groups creating their own.
Look at Latin, it stayed mainly cohesive due to the Roman Empire and splintered off as the empire collapsed and the necessity for commoners to maintain communication across thousands of miles dwindled.
English is the current lingua francia because the dominant nation has been speaking English for the past two hundred years and created a pop culture market that is both large and rich, creating a positive feedback loop making the market larger and richer.
English is the current lingua francia because the dominant nation has been speaking English for the past two hundred years and created a pop culture market
Cute that you think it’s the U.S. and it’s little movies that are responsible for English being widely spoken, and not the bloody history of British imperialism being forced on half the planet
I mentioned the bloody imperialism in the first half of the sentence.
You alluded to the US imperialism of the past 200 years, but not the British who have undoubtedly done more to spread the language
I would imagine that there would have to be a really good reason to happen, and the default is millions of different (albeit slightly) languages amongst an equal number of small communities. It takes empires and states to force a unified linguistic project, which is not necessarily pursued in all cases. If you’ve ever had a group of friends sort of develop their own cant, imagine how quickly it could change if it was 150 people who only contacted outside traders five times a year.
Language and politics is a huge part of linguistics (e.g. “a language is a dialect with an army and navy”). Certainly, since nationalism began there has been concerted efforts to unify languages around the powerful members of a nation (France explicitly does this with a legal structure, English has elitism in social structures). The borders of languages are forced categories of fuzzy culturally evolved systems. Who decides the line between German and Frisian?
The short answer is “Why would there be such a broad language?”. The default case is diversification, being able to talk to someone across the world might be convenient every now and again compared to being able to talk to your local community every day.
Waiting on my Universal Translator
Lojban
We haven’t been a global world for very long. And language takes very long to spread and become common.
People can learn more than one language. If you speak English you can learn Mandarin and increase the people you can communicate with by billions. There is no “one language” because people can know more than one language at a time
