What if everyone spoke English?
Suppose in a few decades, everyone in the world spoke English. Would that be a bad thing?
Some people have strong opinions about “language death,” to the point where there are several different entire ideologies devoted to the preservation of minority (or even much larger) languages. See the language ecology movement, or see EU policy on promoting minority languages.
I’m not totally convinced that it would be a bad thing. A recent article argued the same thing. The article argues that because differences in language are generated by a combination of fairly arbitrary geographic separations and predictable linguistic operations that differences are unlikely to reflect deep cultural attitudes. If languages are randomly generated, it seems that preserving them is fairly unimportant.
It’s true that some modern researchers have found an area of interaction between language and thinking, but it’s not the sort of thing that would produce radically different ideas or differences in predictions. It’s things like whether we envision time as a vertical list or as a horizontal line or whether we envision tables as male or female. Hardly the sort of diversity of thought that we need to take broad steps to preserve.
But imagine the benefits of everyone speaking one language. We could easily view and interpret the perspectives given by news authorities in other countries. International business would become far easier, as would international travel. Moreover, I think we’d feel more like a single human community, strengthening the crucial sense of empathy that seems lacking in a lot of our foreign policy attitudes.
Finally, it would open far more exchange and competition between cultures; I think right now there’s a linguistic lock-in for many cultural ideas and possible life projects. Many children today simply aren’t exposed to all of their potential options because they only speak the language of their home country. I think it would do a lot to improve their lives.
It’s not implausible to think that we’d be better off with a single global language, and it’s not implausible to think we might get close in a few generations from now.
