Is the Tower of Babel still affecting us or something?

Edit:

We have 8 billion people, yet the best we could muster for the most total speakers of a language is under 2 billion, including non-natives…

  1. English (1,452 million speakers) First language: 372.9 million Total speakers: 1.4+ billion According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers.

https://www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world#%3A~%3Atext=1.%2CEnglish+(1%2C452+million+speakers)&text=According+to+Ethnologue%2C+English+is%2Cnative+and+non-native+speakers.

  • MudMan@fedia.io
    1·
    2 years ago

    That’s not how language or communication work. Humans develop language in real time and in small cohorts. You are lucky if you can understand youth slang by the time you hit 40 and you want to force an artificial lingua franca on four billion people?

    Plus, who said language uniformity is a positive? Linguistic diversity is a feature, not a bug. Language is tied to culture, identity and a whole bunch of antrhopological elements. Entire ethnicities are defined by their language. It’s bad enough that US cultural imperialism has forced half the planet to watch the same movies and TV shows, why would we do the same with language? If you ask me, there’s way too much English out there as it is.

  • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    You need a reason for a large group to choose to maintain a single language over over smaller groups creating their own.

    Look at Latin, it stayed mainly cohesive due to the Roman Empire and splintered off as the empire collapsed and the necessity for commoners to maintain communication across thousands of miles dwindled.

    English is the current lingua francia because the dominant nation has been speaking English for the past two hundred years and created a pop culture market that is both large and rich, creating a positive feedback loop making the market larger and richer.

    • Tacostrange@lemmy.ml
      1·
      2 years ago

      Maybe it’s Interlingua. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua Most people who speak a latin based language already understand interlingua. That would be the best chance of getting a majority of the world on the same language. It would include a big part of Europe, all of South and Central America and half of North America

      • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Interlingua: Da nos hodie nostre pan quotidian,

        Esperanto: Nian panon ĉiutagan donu al ni hodiaŭ

        English: Give us this day our daily bread;

        We have our choice between Spanish Latin, Romanian Latin, or super complicated Latin that contradicts itself and absorbed things from everywhere at random.

  • weeeeum@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Because for most of modern history, we were very isolated from the “outside world”.

    Other than the last 200 years, the best “internet” was a dude on a horse. Since groups of humans developed quite independently of each other, they developed their own languages. However in the modern age this is changing rapidly, with many languages and dialects coalescing into one, consistent, language. Additionally many countries have tons of English speakers which is a defacto “universal language”. Most big cities will have english translation for many signs and important documents.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 years ago

    For a tiny language, I really like toki pona, but it’s meant to be a minimal artistic language, more than an IAL (international auxiliary language).

    Last I checked tho, Globasa looks really interesting. The way that they add new vocabulary, and have a good representation of world languages, seems to work well.

    Esperanto is also good, but when my partner tried to learn it, they were weirded out by some of it’s quirks, like noun declinations based on whether it’s a subject or object, that seems unecessary.

    • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Yeah I feel that for better or worse Esperanto hasn’t reached a large enough mass to justify accepting its quirks and indo-eurocentrism, when we know we can do better now.

      • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
        1·
        2 years ago

        For sure. A dissapointing number of IALs have nearly all their vocab from european languages, but there are a few that try earnestly to source their vocab from a wide set of language families. Any global initiative for an IAL needs to have a global vocabulary set to have any hopes of being introduced.

        • frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml
          1·
          2 years ago

          If you choose vocabulary that is culturally neutral, then that vocabulary is not easily recognisable.

          There’s no workaround for that trade-off.

          • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
            1·
            2 years ago

            Recognizeable for whom, is the question. The majority of IALs to date have had a highly eurocentric vocabulary, so they can’t be recognizeable to even a plurality of the world.

            • frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml
              0·
              2 years ago

              Correct reasoning, incorrect facts.

              46% of the world speak Indo-European languages as a mother tongue.

              Can’t do better than that. No other option comes close.