Asklemmy

Waiting on my Universal Translator

I would imagine that there would have to be a really good reason to happen, and the default is millions of different (albeit slightly) languages amongst an equal number of small communities. It takes empires and states to force a unified linguistic project, which is not necessarily pursued in all cases. If you've ever had a group of friends sort of develop their own cant, imagine how quickly it could change if it was 150 people who only contacted outside traders five times a year.

Language and politics is a huge part of linguistics (e.g. "a language is a dialect with an army and navy"). Certainly, since nationalism began there has been concerted efforts to unify languages around the powerful members of a nation (France explicitly does this with a legal structure, English has elitism in social structures). The borders of languages are forced categories of fuzzy culturally evolved systems. Who decides the line between German and Frisian?

The short answer is "Why would there be such a broad language?". The default case is diversification, being able to talk to someone across the world might be convenient every now and again compared to being able to talk to your local community every day.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Esperanto

I don't know how much of those people who speak English only speak pidgin English. Which is to say, a very small vocabulary of no more than 100 words, which is really all you need to communicate to other people in most languages at a very very basic level. If those people were not accounted for, I would then suggest that the amount of people is much higher. The reason for it being that it's the global trade language. It's a spot that used to be occupied by French (thus the term Lingua Franca), and when the world was a lot smaller in the west, Latin. I don't know about the east. Anecdotally, there are people who only share some amount of English as a common language.

It may also depend in the modern age about how much of the written word, either literature or internet now, is written in other languages. Every language has its own pool of written words, and that amount has increased over time with the proliferation of the internet. Until more recent years a lot of stuff online hasn't been translated into other languages. Often times they're limited to the region in which they were made. Other times the pool of languages they've been a translated into is highly limited.

This is often true for video games which may have no more than a half dozen languages that it's translated into, with I believe Chinese, Japanese, and English being the most common. Probably also French and Spanish. It depends on the size of the game and the budget and all that kind of stuff. I also know that the thing that got translated first in a lot of cases is the Bible, and there are examples of bilingual Bibles out there. Because of course that's what got translated first whether we like it or not. I also happen to know that at the time that the Bible was first translated into common languages out of Latin it was a big deal, and that was centuries ago, back when Arabic was a big important language for scholars and the educated, as well as Latin.

Seriously the number of languages the educated used to be able to speak during the Renaissance was absolutely ridiculous for a modern point of view. Even some people from this day and age can be like that; I used to work with an older guy who spoke eight fucking languages. He was from Greece.

So there's my opinion, and if you want a reference any of that stuff feel free to look it up and see if I'm accurate. I haven't read anything about this for years and years, and my memory is average at best.

Also fun fact for anybody who wonders why Americans don't speak other languages; our country takes up a third or more of the fucking continent, everyone here speaks English, and one of our two neighbors is Canada, which also speaks English. I could drive for a thousand miles and not run into somebody who speaks another language. As a consequence people who move here from a foreign country that doesn't speak English and want to be able to interact with the locals is going to have to learn English, at least a little bit. And I've met plenty of people who get by fine enough barely knowing any English, just enough to get by. Are they fluent? Not by a long shot. But again that's what a pidgin language is; just enough to get by.

English (1,452 million speakers) First language: 372.9 million

This is already wrong, which means your entire premise is prob wrong

anglozone population = 510 million. I'm pretty sure more than 72% of that population speaks english fluently

People can learn more than one language. If you speak English you can learn Mandarin and increase the people you can communicate with by billions. There is no "one language" because people can know more than one language at a time

To use an analogy, if a culture is the lock, a language is the key, and some keys just don't fit certain locks.

We haven't been a global world for very long. And language takes very long to spread and become common.

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.

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.