One Global Language

[Nox]

I've heard that in the distant future, all the different ethnicities of humans will have interbred to such a degree that all humans will be a part of one giant ethnicity.

Could the same be applied to languages? In the distant future will all languages naturally merge into one? We're already starting to see languages borrowing words from eachother, and English being spoken across the globe, in that case will the Global language (if such a thing will exist in the future) be heavily influenced by English?

Just a thought I had :)

[ColonelCossack]

Doesn't something like that happen in 1984?

Hey by the way... Nice user title! :lol:

[thriller]

No, that won't happen. Think of the English language itself. There are many different accents and dialectics spoken that could easily break off into different languages in the future. And Spanish is starting to dominate English, which means more than one language is being spoken globally, so I doubt English will win, even if one language came about.

[Tablo]

I don't know if a global language would ever happen(it has sort of happened to an extent with trade languages like French, English, Chinese, and Latin at different times), but I feel like that would be really boring. It is fun to learn new languages and having some variety is nice. Whatever happens happens I guess.

[Tommy4ever]

Volapuk!

The lesser Esperanto.

[Nox]

I'm certainly not saying that there should be a global language, I'm just pondering the possibility of whether or not it is an inevitable outcome. Time is not a factor.

[Tablo]

I'm certainly not saying that there should be a global language, I'm just pondering the possibility of whether or not it is an inevitable outcome. Time is not a factor.
By global language do you mean there will only one langauge spoken everywhere or that people will be multilingual and speak their native language as well as a world wide standard language?

[Lenina Rosenweg]

I thought I was the only person who knew about Volapuk!



The drawbacks of English as a world language

http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/essential.html (http://home.ccil.org/%7Ecowan/essential.html)

[Dragovich]

English will probably be the closest to an global language.

[Sam_b]

Can't and shouldn't happen.

[Rss]

jatlh tlhIngan!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lJbXdRsKU0&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL58C0E9F5A04560E9

Such a beautiful language. <3

[Pioneers_Violin]

I've heard that in the distant future, all the different ethnicities of humans will have interbred to such a degree that all humans will be a part of one giant ethnicity.

Could the same be applied to languages? In the distant future will all languages naturally merge into one? We're already starting to see languages borrowing words from eachother, and English being spoken across the globe, in that case will the Global language (if such a thing will exist in the future) be heavily influenced by English?

Just a thought I had :)


I feel that IF we manage to maintain some sort of world-wide civilization, both are inevitable over time. Though it would take quite a lot of time and only if world-wide travel is commonplace.
If our current world-spanning "civilization" and transportation systems collapse, it becomes less likely.

English is a truly horrible language though. We're bound to evolve something better or at least adapt a better existing language. Perhaps bits of English will live on as languages borrow from each other.

Or perhaps English will be the deciding factor as in survival of the fittest or the next stage of Evolution... After all, the Internet and a lot of computer code is based upon English!
It just might work out that if you're not smart enough to grasp this confounding language you get left behind. But I doubt that outcome. :lol:

It's probably more likely that "Geek-Lish" English will live on as the exclusive, confounding language of computer programmers, much as Latin lives on as the exclusive, confounding language of the catholic church, lawyers and scientists.

[danyboy27]

If the mean of communication keep improving, we might get there eventually.

i wonder how an hybrid of chinese and english would look like.

[Nox]

If the mean of communication keep improving, we might get there eventually.

i wonder how an hybrid of chinese and english would look like.

That's exactly what I was just wondering :)

And to the poster above this poster, I definitely see it as an inevitable occurance in the future.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

I remember there was a movement decades ago that tried to add a new language to U.S schools.This new language was much easier to learn than English and supposedly is the easiest to learn still.Unfortunately I cannot remember the name of this language,only that it never gained popularity.

[Welshy]

If the mean of communication keep improving, we might get there eventually.

i wonder how an hybrid of chinese and english would look like.

With how technology is going translating between languages with out the use of people doing the translation will be come easier and more accurate. So there might be no real need for a universal language in the future because of that.

Also there's already been a hybrid of English and Chinese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Pidgin_English . These mixes (well not mix in the sense of Media Lengua: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Lengua) are quite common and can be rather interesting when they become Creoles.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

With how technology is going translating between languages with out the use of people doing the translation will be come easier and more accurate. So there might be no real need for a universal language in the future because of that.


No matter how good you can translate, it is likely to miss cultural and other deeper nuances of language, and therefore does not mitigate the need for a global language in order to realise the global culture and understanding necessary for human unification and brotherhood.

[Welshy]

No matter how good you can translate, it is likely to miss cultural and other deeper nuances of language, and therefore does not mitigate the need for a global language in order to realise the global culture and understanding necessary for human unification and brotherhood.

Well for official documents, handling business communications (not necessarily capitalist type of business, I just couldn't think of a better word) between linguistic areas cultural specifics won't pose to much of a problem. Also with in computational linguistics there has been quite a bit of work dealing with programs that can handle semantics in rather complex ways and so we should be able to create programs that should be able to handle cultural specifics associated with specific languages. Plus it's things like this that makes linguistics important and recording languages more important since the more we are able to find out the better we can apply this to communications technology in order to overcome the problems you are talking about. Plus for individual communication such programs wouldn't really be necessary as the individuals can decided what language is to be used.

EDIT: Also if there were to be one global language (ignoring the fact that this would be a very difficult and painful thing to accomplish) this language with about several hundred or a thousand years would probably diverge in several new languages. Languages just don't stay the same for a long period of time and eventually fracture. Even Esperanto which was created to be a global language has several different varieties and descendants based how past speakers felt a global language should look like.

[Nox]

I remember there was a movement decades ago that tried to add a new language to U.S schools.This new language was much easier to learn than English and supposedly is the easiest to learn still.Unfortunately I cannot remember the name of this language,only that it never gained popularity.

Esperanto?

Sounds like it. And it is pretty popular, it was invented over 100 years ago (I think) and has tens if not hundreds of millions of speakers. I believe it's kind of a pan-European language that incorporates letters, pronounciation, spelling and grammar from Latin, Germanic, Slavic and other European language groups.

I know that they teach it in some schools here in the UK.

[Welshy]

Esperanto?

Sounds like it. And it is pretty popular, it was invented over 100 years ago (I think) and has tens if not hundreds of millions of speakers. I believe it's kind of a pan-European language that incorporates letters, pronounciation, spelling and grammar from Latin, Germanic, Slavic and other European language groups.

I know that they teach it in some schools here in the UK.

I'm not sure it has that many speakers, but it has a couple thousand native speakers. One of which is George Soros, which makes Glenn Beck even more like a nazi for attacking on him since the nazis also went after Esperanto speakers.