Re: World English (was: Fictional auxlangs as artlangs)

> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of Paul Kershaw
> I hold that it's nothing but naive (and ultimately dangerous)
> ethnocentrism to think that 21st United States society is so
> special in such a way that it will persist for so long that
> it will eradicate all the other languages in the world, when
> numerous other cultures experienced a period of near
> globalization (within the contemporaneous concept of
> "global"), only to eventually subside. We're already showing
> the signs of cultural age that lead to eventual demise, and
> we're nowhere near as old as Rome was when it finally
> subsided. Cultures come and go. I find it arrogant to assume
> that we will be any different.
It doesn't matter.  The U.S. is already beginning its decline. I'm not
saying American culture will take over, only the English language which
already has a much greater hold than Latin ever did, and Latin lived well
past the Roman Empire!  What has happened is the world has basically adopted
English as the global auxlang and set up a momentum that can't easily be
stopped.  I don't expect that to change even if after any shifts in
political or economic power.  People aren't learning English just to
communicate with large powers like the US or UK any more, they are now
learning it as an interlanguage to use in international trade, diplomacy,
etc.


> Besides, native languages survive within empires. British
> influence in its heyday was very significant in India, for
> instance, and yet while English remains a powerful language
> in India today, the native languages survived, enough to
> drive a successful push to rename Bombay back to Mumbai.
Survived yes. But with a billion people, it's going to take time before
English wears them down.

> Even
> though the Middle East was firmly ensconced within the Roman
> Empire, the Semitic languages survived, with the New
> Testament being written largely in Aramaic.
Different times.  They didn't have telephones, television, radio or the
internet back then to keep the whole thing together.

> The Soviets even
> made a concentrated effort to stamp out everything but
> Russian, with no success.
The Soviet system only lasted a little over 70 years.  Given a few more
generations they may have succeeded.

> I think you're assuming that the only real purpose of
> language is communication. Were that so, we'd have settled on
> a global language years ago. Latin, possibly, if not Greek
> (or Egyptian, or Sumerian). A lingua franca of the past would
> have taken hold.
No, they didn't take hold because time and distance broke them up.  That's
not the case today.  We now have modern media where television programs can
be broadcast to the whole world, or where someone can pick up a phone on one
side of the world and carry on a conversation with someone on the other side
of the world in realtime.  This wasn't possible in Ancient Egypt, Rome,
Athens or anywhere until very recent years.

> English certainly isn't the first language
> to have a go at that.
But it is in the right place(s) at the right time.


> But language has several other purposes
> that are at odds with linguistic globalization. For one
> thing, people have a great deal of pride in their native
> languages (that's what helped Ukrainian and other languages
> survive the Soviet Union, for instance). For another, as many
> people on this list know perhaps better than others, there's
> value in having a communication system that has "in group"
> and "out group" member identification (in some cases on this
> list, "in group" is one person :D ).
Again, there's the global trend toward a monolithic existence.  Once the
populations are all moved about and intermixed cultures will die out in
favor of some new gloabel superculture.


> After all, most of the European languages came from the same
> source. If language were only about communication, then we
> wouldn't have deviated so dramatically from that source that
> those languages are mutually unintelligible today. Sure,
> separated by space, we would have come up with different
> words for things that came along after the split, but the
> grammar wouldn't have changed, and the words for things we
> univerally had (like, say, water: Wasser, eau, agua, aqua)
> wouldn't have, either.
Again, this happened over a distance and over many centuries because people
were isolated from each other.  Technology is shrinking the world.


> We will never get to the point on this planet where there is
> but a single language spoken, not until we get to the point
> where there is but a single being capable of communication.
There will be idiolects and dialects, but I could see a single language
being in the world's long-term future.  There are only two things to stop
it.  One would be a practical machine translation system that's available to
anyone.  I can't see this happening for a very long time.  The other would
be something that breaks down global society and strips us of modern
commications technology and infrastructure.  That would have to be something
on the scale of a nuclear war, in which case there wouldn't be much left of
humanity anyway.