Pretty much everyone has heard of a “universal language”. The idea is so interesting that it’s gone viral, and not just in television series like “Firefly”, but also in politics. In fact, as some of you may know, we already have a universal language: Latin. The only problem with Latin is, however, no one can speak it natively.
So we find ourselves with a problem: if we want a universal language, we’re going to have to base it off of a pre-existing one. However, before we go and decide what language to keep, we need to think about whether or not we should even have a universal language.
They are extremely useful for getting ideas across (no more translating, or language based miscommunication), decreasing racial intolerance, and many other things, but they do have a downside; for there to be a universal language, there needs to be popularity in that language, and with popularity rising in one language, popularity decreases in another. In other words: having a universal language kills off other languages, and with those languages all of their history, and culture is killed as well.
Of course, one can attempt to translate it all, but the whole cause of the language's downfall is from a lack of popularity, meaning that hardly anyone will care then, but certainly many will care later (not necessarily for that specific language, but definitely for the whole of lost languages).
So the question is: is it really worth all of the wealth of the culture and history of all of the minor languages to have a single universal language?
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Its so interesting how languages come into being and change, and very rarely are raised from the dead (Hebrew). And to answer your question, in my opinion wide-spread language death seems a terrible loss though I wonder if it is realistic to think there's any (non-apocalyptic) way to avoid it. According to the Wikipedia entry on endangered languages, "While there are somewhere around six or seven thousand languages on Earth today, about half of them have fewer than about 3,000 speakers. Experts predict that even in a conservative scenario, about half of today's languages will go extinct within the next fifty to one hundred years."
ReplyDeleteNational Geographic has an interesting website on this topic- lots and lots of information on it, photos, videos, etc. From the home page "Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth—many of them not yet recorded—may disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and the human brain.
National Geographic's Enduring Voices Project (conducted in collaboration with the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages) strives to preserve endangered languages by identifying language hotspots—the places on our planet with the most unique, poorly understood, or threatened indigenous languages—and documenting the languages and cultures within them."
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/mission/enduringvoices/