What Language Will the World Speak In 2115?

An anonymous reader writes: Throughout human history, different languages have emerged and died, waxed and waned in relative importance, evolved, and spread to new locales. An article in the Wall Street Journal considers what languages the world will speak a hundred years from now. Quoting: "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.

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. ... 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."

Comments

Re:Chinese that speak English

[PolygamousRanchKid]

The difference now is that quite ordinary foreigners learn English to become a support desk worker or software developer or work in an airport or the reception of a hotel and so on. Not to mention here in Europe in many large companies English is now the business language, no matter where you are. Or to put it conversely, if you can't work in English you've significantly limited your employment opportunities. The invisible hand of the market is pushing quite well on this one.

One more advantage of English . . . you can speak it extremely badly, and still make yourself understood. I was once in a cafeteria in scenic Austin, Texas, where a guy from China and a guy from India were talking to each other . . . in English. The English that they were talking would have given my 7th grade English teacher conniption fits, but the two guys managed to communicate with each other:

English is a fault tolerant language.

With a relatively small vocabulary, you can say a whole hell of a lot.

A simple language for simple minds.

It works.

Re:AC current maintained only by tradition?

[Rei]

For a given voltage and given mass of wire per unit distance, however, DC has lower losses (dramatically lower in some environments, such as undersea cables). It also is a lot more stable, you don't have to worry about frequency maintenance, off-sync grid interconnects, and a bunch of other stuff.

High voltage DC is still expensive to do but it's been getting a *lot* cheaper, and will probably continue to do so. For the time being, though, it's going to be confined to long high-power runs and undersea cables, situations that maximize its benefits and minimize the number of step-up / step-down stations required.

Re:Sure, sure English will rule the world

[deviker]

Epa, I'm Basque. I live in Spain. I've always been quite poor and unable to pay private education. I'm learning Chinese, I learnt English on my own reading manuals and aplication notes, using IRC, mail lists, newsgroups and watching series/movies mainly. Even though my English might be broken I use it everyday and had no problems with it.

I'm able to understand French without any problems (written and spoken and translate it to English as fast as I can move my vocal cords, in real time). I learned French only watching TV (Club Dorothee) without aid when I was a kid and my family and friends don't speak it.

Now I have to learn Chinese to work with embeded stuff because the comments on the leaked codes are in Chinese and the nearly non existent documentation comes in JPG or images inside PDF files and can not be automaticaly translated by a machine without using an OCR first (and being lucky). Learning Chinese It is not easy but can be done, I'm just older and it is not that easy because I don't have time to absorb their media fast enough but it is not harder than learning another programming paradigm.

I couldn't care less about the language, I don't even care for Basque, it just happens that I was born here but it is useless for tech jobs (unless someone wants to slack off working in education). Apart from tech, Basque will die because it is useless for flirting and basque people fuck less among them than hikikomori nerds (and I'm not refering to Idiocracy like movie problems).

My girlfriend is Italian and we use English between us, mainly because we are both too lazy to learn each other's languages with no other practical purpose for it and because we can undertand latin derived languages without dificulties when we have to meet each other's family (and because it is a good excuse not to talk with each other's parents :P ).

To sum up: "Resistence is futile, your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own"

Re:Quebec Language Police

[Rei]

Take a simple exemple: Geography this word was made in french from the greek words ge and graphy (earth and to write) this word was then imported in the english language during the XVI century

What's with all of this revisionist history? Seems like everyone is trying to take the opportunity to misattribute the coining of words to French. No, the French did not coin the word geography. The word geography was coined by the ancient greek philosopher Eratosthenes. The French took the word from the Latin geographia, who in turn took it from the Greek.

French is a romance language (use wikipedia to understand what it means)

Why not just explain to me what the word "cat" means is while you're at it? I'm sure I know far more about the flow of languages in Europe than you do. Without looking it up: tell me, which major branch of proto-Germanic has no modern descendents? Which modern eastern European language is related to Finnish? Which modern western-European language is not descended from PIE? Which languages apart from classic Greek has it been suggested that ancient Macedonian was related to? I can keep going.

and it is a basic feature of this language to use latin to coin its own words

But they're not coining these words. They're just taking them. And they take them regardless of the origin. Robot has a slavic origin. French? "Robot" (Icelandic: vélmenni). Tsunami is Japanese. French? "Tsunami" (Icelandic: flóðbylgja). Opossom comes from freakin Algonquian, but even that hasn't gotten them to pick anything more French than "Opossum" (Icelandic: pokarotta). Even the "Latin and Greek still count even though neither are understandable in French and Greek isn't even related" excuse doesn't remotely stand up to scrutiny.

The simple fact is, French does very, very little to what it's stereotyped as doing (re-coining international terms into French), while there actually exist languages that *do* change international terms.