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.
I’d argue that by your own criteria, English is that language.
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.
Erm erm, one sec.
~Love is the Universal language~
Ok you can crucify me now xD
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I don’t know how much of those people who speak English only speak pidgin English. Which is to say, a very small vocabulary of no more than 100 words, which is really all you need to communicate to other people in most languages at a very very basic level. If those people were not accounted for, I would then suggest that the amount of people is much higher. The reason for it being that it’s the global trade language. It’s a spot that used to be occupied by French (thus the term Lingua Franca), and when the world was a lot smaller in the west, Latin. I don’t know about the east. Anecdotally, there are people who only share some amount of English as a common language.
It may also depend in the modern age about how much of the written word, either literature or internet now, is written in other languages. Every language has its own pool of written words, and that amount has increased over time with the proliferation of the internet. Until more recent years a lot of stuff online hasn’t been translated into other languages. Often times they’re limited to the region in which they were made. Other times the pool of languages they’ve been a translated into is highly limited.
This is often true for video games which may have no more than a half dozen languages that it’s translated into, with I believe Chinese, Japanese, and English being the most common. Probably also French and Spanish. It depends on the size of the game and the budget and all that kind of stuff. I also know that the thing that got translated first in a lot of cases is the Bible, and there are examples of bilingual Bibles out there. Because of course that’s what got translated first whether we like it or not. I also happen to know that at the time that the Bible was first translated into common languages out of Latin it was a big deal, and that was centuries ago, back when Arabic was a big important language for scholars and the educated, as well as Latin.
Seriously the number of languages the educated used to be able to speak during the Renaissance was absolutely ridiculous for a modern point of view. Even some people from this day and age can be like that; I used to work with an older guy who spoke eight fucking languages. He was from Greece.
So there’s my opinion, and if you want a reference any of that stuff feel free to look it up and see if I’m accurate. I haven’t read anything about this for years and years, and my memory is average at best.
Also fun fact for anybody who wonders why Americans don’t speak other languages; our country takes up a third or more of the fucking continent, everyone here speaks English, and one of our two neighbors is Canada, which also speaks English. I could drive for a thousand miles and not run into somebody who speaks another language. As a consequence people who move here from a foreign country that doesn’t speak English and want to be able to interact with the locals is going to have to learn English, at least a little bit. And I’ve met plenty of people who get by fine enough barely knowing any English, just enough to get by. Are they fluent? Not by a long shot. But again that’s what a pidgin language is; just enough to get by.
Wasn’t there a language created called Esperanto that was supposed to be the world language.
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.
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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?
Waiting on my Universal Translator
We haven’t been a global world for very long. And language takes very long to spread and become common.
To use an analogy, if a culture is the lock, a language is the key, and some keys just don’t fit certain locks.
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 don’t think it’s so easy a question to answer. Probably they can in many cases but not in some others, depending on what is to be communicated. Whether there’s a bear nearby? How to coordinate an attack on tasty prey?
Edit to add: Unlocking secrets of the honeybee dance language – bees learn and culturally transmit their communication skills
Astonishingly, honeybees possess one of the most complicated examples of nonhuman communication. They can tell each other where to find resources such as food, water, or nest sites with a physical “waggle dance.” This dance conveys the direction, distance and quality of a resource to the bee’s nestmates.
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.
Yeah I specifically didn’t include hand signs in my other comment because that’s getting closer to sign language and many countries have unique hand signs. Smiling is also something not universal oddly enough.
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?
