Will a 'world language' evolve over time?

I always think you can completely confuse non-natural English speakers with the word 'mine' - "that mine there is mine, but the mine next to my mine isn't mine", and so on

Anyway, doesn't everyone in the world dream in English? lol!
 
An English-speaking friend of mine once volunteered at a telephone counselling service in Japan. It was mostly used by expats, but quite a few Japanese would also call them despite the service being English-language. They explained that they found it easier to express their emotions in English (ie a foreign language) than in Japanese (their native language) because such expression was unacceptable in Japanese culture. So by switching languages they switched mindset- although I guess it also helped that they knew they were speaking to Westerners.

A similar example concerns Korean airlines (think I read this in one of Har Joon Chang's excellent books). Following a plane crash, it was found from the cockpit voice recorder that a more junior crew member had realised something was wrong with the plane, but was unable to express himself assertively enough to the captain. The airline therefore ordered that in future English should be used (despite all their crews being Korean). This was to facilitate better communication between junior and senior crew members.

English is a very "democratic" language compared to many others- for example we only have one form of the second person pronoun (you). Most European languages have two forms, one familiar and one formal, thus in French there's a word "tutoyer" meaning "to speak to someone using "tu" instead of "vous". But the interesting thing is that lower-grade office workers increasingly use the word "yourself" rather than "you" when speaking to potential customers. For example, "we would like to set up a meeting with yourself". Strictly speaking this is nonsensical, because "yourself" is a reflexive pronoun, but in this case "yourself" is used a sort of substitute "polite" form of the pronoun. In a hundred years time it may have entered the official grammar, and kids will be told off for not addressing teacher as "yourself". Alternatively, we could have had a Socialist revolution, and "yourself" may be ridiculed as a relic of the class system to be used only by Telegraph readers, monarchists, and similar cranks.
 
Incidentally, Benny Lewis's "Fluent in 3 months" blog contains loads of fascinating info and discussion about languages. Also found a forum about languages generally (forget the URL) with a fascinating discussion about "Mutual intelligibility". The thread was started by an American guy who had a Czech-speaking friend who'd lived in the USA since she was 15. This woman could hold a basic conversation in most Slavic languages despite not having studied any except her own. The ensuing discussion was very contradictory, but mostly consisted of speakers of different Slavic languages maintaining that they could NOT understand other Slavic languages.

My own conclusions from this discussion were as follows.

1) Peoples' ability to understand languages similar but not identical to their own is very variable. Therefore, saying that two languages are "70% mutually intelligible" is meaningless- it depends who's talking and what about. English-speakers find the concept of "mutual intelligibility" difficult to grasp, precisely because English has no "official" languages with which is it mutually intelligible. So it's an unfamiliar idea for us for a language to be "foreign" yet understandable.

2) Ability to understand a similar language will depend largely on intelligence, since its largely about intelligent guesswork based on context.

3) Another big factor would be psychological- ie, how anxious do people feel in the presence of a foreigner? And this in turn is largely cultural- does the speaker distrust or even hate foreigners generally, regarding them as spies, infidels, or parasites? Does their culture think it's OK to mock peoples' mispronunciations or grammatical errors- in which case they'll be inhibited from speaking themselves for fear of making errors?

4) How much practice do they have in all of the above? People in remote rural areas may never meet anyone with a different dialect, whereas in big cosmopolitan cities they're surrounded by them and learn early to make sense of different modes of speech.

5) Finally, language is very political. Apparently when Bulgaria and Macedonia were negotiating about something, the Macedonians insisted on having a translator, whereasthe the Bulgarians made a point of not using the translator but replying to the Macedonians in Bulgarian (which the Macedonians could understand perfectly well).
 
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The Ace said:
Of course, it goes without saying that my natural Scots is virtually incomprehensible to some people - leading to the argument that most Scots are bilingual to a degree, switching between dialect and, 'BBC English,' at will.
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The only reason Scots was traditionally regarded as a dialect rather than a language is because Scotland was (for the last 200+ years) not an independent country. Many official "languages" are as mutually intelligible as English and Scots. Personally I don't find Scots that difficult- then again from age 18 I was working with colleagues who routinely spoke in Jamaican patois.
 
I suspect that there will never be a global language that is the first language of nearly all humans, but there may be a global language that is the first and more often the second language of humanity.
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Tower, thy name is Babel. ;)
 
Grimward said:
Tower, thy name is Babel. ;)
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:D Toward the end of that story is this wonderful line, which could be a thinking point for any S.F. book. "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." (Genesis 11:6) --- Makes you think, doesn't it?
 
Are you kidding? If there is one world language we all would be poorer. Everyone would be forced into following the hive mind, and we would be controlled by the grammar Nazis. We would be judged by mono-culture of super human genetically engineer perfect androids which would evoke death to you for having the slightest variation in genetic flaws such as a slur or dyslexia and for being in any way different. One error and you would fall from grace forced into slave camps to write grammatically correct jargon and political propaganda. No change would be allowed in the system and all things becoming static/rote would mean an existence of zombified living death.

So if you like that sort of thing, you can join the Vulcans, Androids, and Big Brother from 1984. OR you could say there is already one language in the world and it's called LOVE. Cue Beetles "All You Need is Love," flowers, and rainbows. (Might I add the Pretty Dancing Girls from Benny Hill :D )

I am going to go get another beer... :p
 
Now that I am a little less drunk. I thought I 'd apologize and try to keep the conversation going. :D

Some points to note: Language evolves over time. If you look at any of the older texts outside you own lifetime you'll see how hard it is to understand language over time. The terms and words change over time due to evolution in culture. Take "Thee" and "thou" for example. It is no longer used in modern English, yet it was common a few hundred years back.

Ideas also evolve, and new political parties arise. Slang is used by youth and underdogs to break free from the power of authority figures, finding freedom in secrecy. In hostile conflicts secret codes are used to keep vital info secure. Language as a tool that always needs a level of protection for more sensitive or high priority issues; thus hierarchies and politeness. Yet it is interesting that modern English tries to do away with these such hierarchies to create a common standard English form. But then the question is how does one prioritize information?

Just a note in regards to Zaibatsu as an idea is quite fascinating. Actual Japanese has four alphabets it uses. Japanese is structured in a way which allows you to understand which part of the sentence is a noun and verb and how the verb is inflected/modified visually by the type of alphabet used. So would there be different alphabets, Russian mixed in for example, to develop Zaibatsu?

Also with revolutions in communications technology the common population base of a language grows. When you can communicate to a large audience more people understand the "in" lingo. Just like watching a popular show, people catch new phrases and sayings due to the cultural influences.

Even with a standard world language there is the problem of comprehension and understanding. Dialects evolve over time, and local accents influence communication between people from different parts of the world.
 
Parson said:
:D Toward the end of that story is this wonderful line, which could be a thinking point for any S.F. book. "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." (Genesis 11:6) --- Makes you think, doesn't it?
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It makes me think uncharitable thoughts about the Almighty if that's his reason for destroying the tower.
 
JonH said:
It makes me think uncharitable thoughts about the Almighty if that's his reason for destroying the tower.
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Well that's what the Bible says. The probable implication is that there is "no evil" that humanity wouldn't put themselves to accomplish. But that does read something into the text. I like to think that in the end humanity's potential will be realized and it will be wonderful.
 
River Boy said:
Doubt it, but I hope the human race becomes resourceful enough for each individual to be fluent in 3 or 4 languages. This is entirely possible if there is a focus on second-language learning in the early years period, when our minds can still be trained to become fluent.

Countries like Germany have shown this to their advantage, and in many other regions, including poor countries, you'll find adults fluent in several languages. For some reason here in the UK there is no support for it from education ministers or bodies, even though we'd all have brighter prospects as a result. People who speak more than one language tend to have stronger brains in many other areas, even if they never leave their own country.
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I see this as more likely. A tourism vendor I met in Stockholm spoke five languages (Swedish, Norwegian, English, French, and German). And according to my uncle who felt like jokingly testing him in four, he spoke them very well and without hesitation. I am not sure where the Anglo-American disregard for emphasizing early age multilingualism has come from, but it is one of the largest things I regret about my U.S. education (besides the general quality as a whole). Especially when I meet people from other countries and see how multilingual they tend to be. It is always a bit embarrassing to be standing there like fool until they all realize they need to switch to English so I can understand what is going on.
 
I suspect that most English speakers can't speak any other language because there is no need for it.

Speaking for myself, currently I can only speak English; but there was a time way back when (preteen!), during which I was bilingual in English and Afrikaans, as was my sister who is about three years younger than me. Why Afrikaans? Well, we were living in South Africa at the time...

Somewhat later, I was reasonably fluent (understandable, at any rate) in French and could probably still make a reasonable stab at translating French text. Vocabulary might be an issue. And because of the extremely rusty Afrikaans, I might be able to manage after a short while in Dutch. I say might, because Afrikaans has simplified syntax compared to Dutch and is liberally sprinkled with loanwords from various African languages.

So that's me, and I don't think I'm all that unusual. English only for now, but would be able to adapt to at least two other languages reasonably quickly if I had to. I think.
 
the beauty of learning another language is that you learn new ways of expressing yourself. As each language has its own unique way in which you can express.
 
There are enough troubles in the world with people not speaking the same language. I dread to think how much worse this would be if we could all realise or understand what others were saying about us.
 
Only about 1/3 of China speaks Mandarin. I don't know how many in China can speak English.
Because of Technology and all the incompatible native languages, popularity of English in India is rising faster than ever.

English is now the universal language and all main stream programming languages use English nouns and verbs (Properties/Variables/Constants, Functions/Actions/Procedures).
I've edited programs written by people with other language than English as their native language, Basically I only had to use "google translate" for comments, though programmer created named variables and parameters are usually in mix of English and the other language.

"google translate" is a bit tricky at times and misleading. It uses the "rosetta stone" brute force method rather than parsing, grammar, AI etc imagined for 40 years. They took loads of EU documents as their initial "Rosetta Stone" as these use all the official EU languages to say exactly the same thing. Hence I find, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Arabic, Farsi (Iranians) and Hebrew hard (via Google). The Irish is poor. But partially because a lot of Irish is poor!

Strange fact ... The closest living languages to the Celtic family are Arabic and Hebrew. Unlike Arabic and Irish (Irish simply adjusts spelling of English words), Hebrew has developed "modern" words for keyboards etc that are actually used.

(Irish & Scottish Gaelic are very close to allow mutual understanding. Manx, Cornish and Welsh hard to impossible for Irish speaker. Manx adopted English Spelling rules, so the written language is a bit harder for Irish speakers unless they read it as if it's English! I find Irish pronunciation almost impossible from the written word, though I do know some rules, but the pronunciation of vowels is completely different in Ulster and Munster)
 
I believe that with the advent of true global communications we will gravitate towards a common language. This is already happening with English being the universal technical lingua franca (for example it is the only language used internationally for air flight control). We are still very much in the early days of global communication as, for most of us, it only dates to the rise of the internet; maybe 15 years, which is nothing. Whilst English might not be spoken by the largest number of people globally it is spoken by the largest number of different nationalities.

Personally I believe this to be inevitable; it might take 100 years and the final language might be somewhat different to the English in common use today, but maybe not as different as you might expect. Slang additions to English come and go but the core language doesn't really change all that much (I have no problem at all reading and understanding books written a hundred and fifty years ago, though I may find the structure a little different and some of the words that have fallen into disuse). Different languages, dialects etc. evolved through isolation which is largely gone in this brave new world of ours.

Current local languages will continue to be used for quite some time, I'm sure, but are likely to go the way of languages like Gaelic or Welsh; marginalised with less people using them (despite the best efforts of enthusiasts). There were a series of street interviews done with teenagers in the Hebrides (main stronghold of Gaelic) a few years back. Amongst other things they were asked whether they used Gaelic to speak amongst themselves. The almost universal answer was 'no, we use English to chat amongst ourselves and only really use Gaelic when talking to our grandparents.'

I do think it is rather sad but I also think it is inevitable. And for those of you who condemn the English for not learning other languages and for the English speakers who feel guilty about it, remember that pretty much throughout the world everyone is constantly exposed to English through music, film, TV, books, internet and radio (particularly the BBC World Service) whilst English speaking people mostly have very little exposure to other languages. It is inevitable that we look bad linguistically.
 
paranoid marvin said:
There are enough troubles in the world with people not speaking the same language. I dread to think how much worse this would be if we could all realise or understand what others were saying about us.
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Interesting thought. My intuition on this goes the other way. The better we can communicate with each other there is more chance for understanding and compromise. If you will pardon a Biblical allusion. One of the verses about the tower of Babel has God saying "The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." (Gen. 11:6) At the vary least this says that people in antiquity thought speaking a common language was a great asset.
 
Parson said:
Interesting thought. My intuition on this goes the other way. The better we can communicate with each other there is more chance for understanding and compromise. If you will pardon a Biblical allusion. One of the verses about the tower of Babel has God saying "The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." (Gen. 11:6) At the vary least this says that people in antiquity thought speaking a common language was a great asset.
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I agree that it should be a great asset, and would be if the majority if the human race was understanding and willing to compromise. Unfortunately many people aren't , and quite often use religion as a reason for not being so.

To paraphrase, it is better to be ignorant of another's language and think them disparaging of us than to understand them and remove all doubt.
 
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