The World Language
We need a world language. It greases the wheels of commerce, education, science, medicine, and even Rock ‘n Roll. At the moment that language is English.
Dennis Baron’s recent blog posting provides his usual interesting take on this situation: http://illinois.edu/db/view/25/59351?count=1&ACTION=DIALOG.
The future may involve the development of new languages as English mingles with Japanese, Spanish, Hindi, or other languages. There is precedent for that — French, Italian, Spanish and others evolved from Latin, and a network of languages, in areas from India to Ireland, developed from Indo-European.
There is a balancing trend — the preservation of what Baron calls “boutique languages.” The European Union provides support for its hundreds of local dialects and languages, and there are universities and institutes in South America, Africa, and the United States to support indigenous tongues. As these languages thrive, perhaps the world will become more thoroughly bilingual.
Our decisions about which languages to promote, how to handle the development of English as the standard (or the choice of another language as a standard), and our support of now-disappearing local languages and dialects will have a seminal effect on political and sociological life, and on the future of the planet as well.
What will we do when we meet creatures from elsewhere in the solar system? Will we all be speaking a flexible, adaptable computerese by then? Will sign language suffice in the beginning? We won’t live long enough to know, but that is one of the many areas of life which we should be thinking about even if we know our descendants will be the ones to make the decisions.
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