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.
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
Is that the default situation is it??
You dreamed up a scenario and now are asking why it is not the case.
It is a somewhat naïvely-framed question, but also you could have just clicked downvote and moved on with your day.
Tell me, where is this global language where it has 3.5 billion speakers, if not half? You’ve indicated it’s not the case…?
Do you think I ask in bad faith, or do you ask in bad faith?
Because for most of modern history, we were very isolated from the “outside world”.
Other than the last 200 years, the best “internet” was a dude on a horse. Since groups of humans developed quite independently of each other, they developed their own languages. However in the modern age this is changing rapidly, with many languages and dialects coalescing into one, consistent, language. Additionally many countries have tons of English speakers which is a defacto “universal language”. Most big cities will have english translation for many signs and important documents.
I’d argue that by your own criteria, English is that language.
Less then a quarter of people speak English, so not even close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world
Including people who speak English as a second language, estimates of the total number of Anglophones vary from 1.5 billion to 2 billion.
So you’re right: one quarter of people at most. Nonetheless that’s remarkable. Too bad it’s due more to subjugation than cooperation.
Awfully generous of the UK to go out of its way to respect Mongolia. I guess you gotta honor that Klingon code.
Nowadays it’s probably also because of the dominance of American culture, especially online.
Well fuck me sideways I thought it was more than that.
There’s like 1.2 billion English speakers, including non-native speakers, tho? the OP asks for like 3.5 billion or somethin’… since population globally is 8 billion…
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
Wasn’t there a language created called Esperanto that was supposed to be the world language.
I really like esperanto as a project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
It had a lot of support with early 20th century anarchists who saw it as a way to make people less nationalistic and prone to their domestic propaganda.
Maybe it’s Interlingua. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua Most people who speak a latin based language already understand interlingua. That would be the best chance of getting a majority of the world on the same language. It would include a big part of Europe, all of South and Central America and half of North America
Interlingua: Da nos hodie nostre pan quotidian,
Esperanto: Nian panon ĉiutagan donu al ni hodiaŭ
English: Give us this day our daily bread;
We have our choice between Spanish Latin, Romanian Latin, or super complicated Latin that contradicts itself and absorbed things from everywhere at random.
or super complicated Latin that contradicts itself and absorbed things from everywhere at random.
English borrowed a shit tonne from Latin & Romance languages, but it is at its core a Germanic language.
To make a joke that still sticks with the facts, maybe something like “wannabe Latin”, or “that shitty Romeaboo language”.
Erm erm, one sec.
~Love is the Universal language~
Ok you can crucify me now xD
👉👌
Even the Tower of Babel cannot take this from us.
😏? 😉? 👍 🫦🍆✊👅💦💦🤤😪
Who needs a language
We have NTT DoCoMo to thank for that.
geography is a bitch
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?
I would say there is. Body language. Just about any human you meet can understand body language.
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.
👍
But don’t try this in many parts of the Middle East.
👌
And don’t do this in Brazil.
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.
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?
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.
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
