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What the World Will Speak in 2115

#1
C C Offline
http://www.wsj.com/articles/what-the-wor...1420234648

EXCERPT: [...] Science fiction often presents us with whole planets that speak a single language, but that fantasy seems more menacing here in real life on this planet we call home—that is, in a world where some worry that English might eradicate every other language. That humans can express themselves in several thousand languages is a delight in countless ways; few would welcome the loss of this variety.

But the existence of so many languages can also create problems: It isn’t an accident that the Bible’s tale of the Tower of Babel presents multilingualism as a divine curse meant to hinder our understanding. One might even ask: If all humans had always spoken a single language, would anyone wish we were instead separated now by thousands of different ones?

Thankfully, fears that English will become the world’s only language are premature. Few are so pessimistic as to suppose that there will not continue to be a multiplicity of nations and cultures on our planet and, along with them, various languages besides English. It is difficult, after all, to interrupt something as intimate and spontaneous as what language people speak to their children. Who truly imagines a Japan with no Japanese or a Greece with no Greek? The spread of English just means that earthlings will tend to use a local language in their own orbit and English for communication beyond.

But the days when English shared the planet with thousands of other languages are numbered. A traveler to the future, a century from now, is likely to notice two things about the language landscape of Earth. One, there will be vastly fewer languages. Two, languages will often be less complicated than they are today—especially in how they are spoken as opposed to how they are written.

Some may protest that it is not English but Mandarin Chinese that will eventually become the world’s language, because of the size of the Chinese population and the increasing economic might of their nation. But that’s unlikely. For one, English happens to have gotten there first. It is now so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort. We retain the QWERTY keyboard and AC current for similar reasons.

Also, the tones of Chinese are extremely difficult to learn beyond childhood, and truly mastering the writing system virtually requires having been born to it. In the past, of course, notoriously challenging languages such as Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Arabic, Russian and even Chinese have been embraced by vast numbers of people. But now that English has settled in, its approachability as compared with Chinese will discourage its replacement. Many a world power has ruled without spreading its language, and just as the Mongols and Manchus once ruled China while leaving Chinese intact, if the Chinese rule the world, they will likely do so in English.

Yet more to the point, by 2115, it’s possible that only about 600 languages will be left on the planet as opposed to today’s 6,000. Japanese will be fine, but languages spoken by smaller groups will have a hard time of it. Too often, colonialization has led to the disappearance of languages: Native speakers have been exterminated or punished for using their languages. This has rendered extinct or moribund, for example, most of the languages of Native Americans in North America and Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Urbanization has only furthered the destruction, by bringing people away from their homelands to cities where a single lingua franca reigns.

Even literacy, despite its benefits, can threaten linguistic diversity. To the modern mind, languages used in writing, with its permanence and formality, seem legitimate and “real,” while those that are only spoken—that is, all but a couple hundred of them today—can seem evanescent and parochial. Few illusions are harder to shed than the idea that only writing makes something “a language.” Consider that Yiddish is often described as a “dying” language at a time when hundreds of thousands of people are living and raising children in it—just not writing it much—every day in the U.S. and Israel.

It is easy for speakers to associate larger languages with opportunity and smaller ones with backwardness, and therefore to stop speaking smaller ones to their children. But unless the language is written, once a single generation no longer passes it on to children whose minds are maximally plastic, it is all but lost. We all know how much harder it is to learn a language well as adults.

In a community where only older people now speak a language fluently, the task is vastly more difficult than just passing on some expressions, words and word endings. The Navajo language made news recently when a politician named Chris Deschene was barred from leading the Navajo nation because his Navajo isn’t fluent. One wishes Mr. Deschene well in improving his Navajo, but he has a mountain to climb. In Navajo there is no such thing as a regular verb: You have to learn by heart each variation of every verb. Plus it has tones.

That’s what indigenous languages tend to be like in one way or another. Languages “grow” in complexity the way that people pick up habits and cars pick up rust. One minute the way you mark a verb in the future tense is to use will: I will buy it. The next minute, an idiom kicks in where people say I am going to buy it, because if you are going with the purpose of doing something, it follows that you will. Pretty soon that gels into a new way of putting a verb in the future tense with what a Martian would hear as a new “word,” gonna.

In any language that kind of thing is happening all the time in countless ways, far past what is necessary even for nuanced communication. A distinction between he and she is a frill that most languages do without, and English would be fine without gonna alongside will, irregular verbs and much else....
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#2
Yazata Offline
This is an interesting article. Thanks for posting it, CC.

(Jan 6, 2015 05:42 AM)C C Wrote: http://www.wsj.com/articles/what-the-wor...1420234648

EXCERPT: [...] Science fiction often presents us with whole planets that speak a single language, but that fantasy seems more menacing here in real life on this planet we call home—that is, in a world where some worry that English might eradicate every other language. That humans can express themselves in several thousand languages is a delight in countless ways; few would welcome the loss of this variety.

The problem with the one-language vision is that languages are associated with whole cultures. The idea that the world will eventually be better off with one language is kind of like saying that it would be better off with one culture. Actually, the champions of globalization, both left and right, do kind of make that assumption. The problem, obviously, is that all but one language and culture would have to disappear. There's a hint of cultural genocide in that idea.

Quote:Thankfully, fears that English will become the world’s only language are premature. Few are so pessimistic as to suppose that there will not continue to be a multiplicity of nations and cultures on our planet and, along with them, various languages besides English. It is difficult, after all, to interrupt something as intimate and spontaneous as what language people speak to their children. Who truly imagines a Japan with no Japanese or a Greece with no Greek? The spread of English just means that earthlings will tend to use a local language in their own orbit and English for communication beyond.

Which would seem to put anyone who isn't a native English-speaker at a disadvantage, since they would have to master two languages while the native English-speakers would only need one.

Quote:But the days when English shared the planet with thousands of other languages are numbered. A traveler to the future, a century from now, is likely to notice two things about the language landscape of Earth. One, there will be vastly fewer languages.

Many of the world's languages are spoken by tiny tribal groups in remote places, the last remnants of paleolithic and neolithic humanity. As they become assimilated into the more advanced cultures around them, their distinctive languages disappear. Other tiny languages are restricted to remote valleys in the Himalayas or something like that. I think that most of these languages are doomed whether or not English (or some other language) achieves world hegemony. It's kind of a world-wide disaster that nobody seems interested in or concerned about, except a few anthropologists who are scrambling to study and record them before they are gone for good. Languages are a big part of our inheritance from the distant past and we are losing most of them.

Quote:Two, languages will often be less complicated than they are today—especially in how they are spoken as opposed to how they are written.

I'm less sure about that. It's true that trade languages do simplify over time, losing many of their more arcane grammatical features. But I haven't seen any sign that English is being replaced worldwide with some kind of international pidgin English. Of course English already has a stripped-down grammar compared to many other languages, lacking the weird genders that foreign words often have, for example. There are fewer cases in English. But English has made up for that simplicity in having a whole horde of exceptions that speakers have to learn. We speak of 'a table' but 'an idea'. Maybe there's a grammatical rule governing the a/an distinction, but if so I don't know what it is. It seems to me to just be something that people learn through use. (We can often spot non-native speakers because they make errors with those kind of things.)

Quote:Some may protest that it is not English but Mandarin Chinese that will eventually become the world’s language, because of the size of the Chinese population and the increasing economic might of their nation. But that’s unlikely.

Chinese never seems to have spread very far beyond China, and there doesn't seem to be much evidence that it's doing so now. There are large Chinese-speaking minorities in Southeast Asia, but these are mostly overseas Chinese.

There's one interesting feature of Chinese that does make its worldwide spread more likely though, namely the fact that its writing system is ideographic to some extent, and rather distinct from spoken Chinese. That's how the spoken Mandarin, Cantonese and other Chinese dialects can be distinct mutually-incomprehensible languages, while all of their speakers write using the same Chinese characters that all of them can understand. So it's conceivable that people in North America in 2100 might be quite proficient with written Chinese characters, even if they still use spoken English (or maybe Spanish by that time) among themselves.

Quote:Also, the tones of Chinese are extremely difficult to learn beyond childhood, and truly mastering the writing system virtually requires having been born to it.

I agree regarding spoken Chinese's tonal features. And yeah, becoming really good with Chinese characters, to the point that one can translate ancient Chinese philosophical texts or something, would require more knowledge of the language than most people will likely acquire. But I believe that it's possible to get by pretty well in daily life with no more than 1,000 Chinese characters or so. That's not a herculean task, especially if kids start learning them in elementary school. Stringing them together properly as Chinese do might be another story. So the way that Americans in 2100 use Chinese characters might not be unlike the crude and ungrammatical English that many foreigners have today as a second language, except that it would necessarily be written rather than spoken.
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