Re: World Lingos

Mike Adams wrote:
> But Portugese and Italian are combined with European Spanish
> especially are basically the same lingo, just for political reasons are
> called Languages, versus Dielects.
Portuguese is pretty intelligible with Spanish, especially easy for
Portuguese-speakers to understand Spanish, a little more difficult the
other way around, but Italian and Spanish are definitely distinct
languages.  I could see Portuguese assimilating to Spanish, probably
influencing Spanish in turn, since all the major Portuguese-speaking
regions are adjacent to Spanish-speaking regions.  But, Italian would
probably remain distinct for some time.  I see no likelihood of Italian
dying out any time soon, in a few centuries, who knows?  But not any
time soon.  Same with most of the European languages, and languages
everywhere that are spoken in more-or-less monolingual areas (like
Japanese, for instance).

> Arabic is spoken if not as a primary lingo, but as a religious Auxlang
> by a large percentage of the worlds population, many who are now slowly
> growing in the US as well as worldwide.
In many ways, Arabic is a family of languages united by a common written
language.

> I will admit there maybe some room for inclusion, but I was basically
> going on realistic current conditions, or likely potential lingos for
> world domination in the next 100 years.
My guess is that a few languages (probably pretty close to your list)
will be used as regional lingua francas (as, indeed, they've already
started to become), and a large number of very small languages will die,
but most of the world's larger languages will survive for some time.

> I know some possible over generalizations, but ... Is it realistic?
I don't think so.  At least not in the foreseeable future.  Who knows
what the world of 3000 might look like, but the world of 2100, I think,
will preserve all of the larger (like, over a million speakers)
languages now used.  Of course, there's no doubt that current regional
lingua francas will continue to increase in use.

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