Language is the world’s biggest means of communication. Why then, is there not a universal language so that people could understand each other flawlessly everywhere? Foreign affairs concerning all types of matters would be made much simpler. However, we would lose parts of every culture, except for one. Now the question becomes, is it worth sacrificing so much historic culture to make life a little easier; or would having a universal language take away from part of the experience of traveling, working, and studying abroad.
Many modern languages weren’t spoken thousands of years ago. There are “Language Families” meaning that many modern languages all evolved from an older language. According to Merritt Ruhlen there was one language that began all the languages. His findings are based on comparing similarities of different languages and language families. It is proven that we have a common ancestor from Africa “Early Modern Homo sapiens” states that, “Current data suggest that modern humans evolved from archaic humans primarily in East Africa”. If this is true it would be that the mother of the language families is an old African language.
The language families have blossomed into “6912 living languages listed on the Ethnologue language database”. The English Language as a Global Force informs that only Mandarin is spoken by more people than English. Judging by the large quantity of people in Asia, I think it would be fair to say that English is the widest spreading language in the world today. English is taking the world by storm so shouldn’t it them be the universal language? How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think? By Lera Boroditsky says that proven by tests Boroditsky has been involved in that Stanford University and MIT, the language we speak effects the way we see the world. This would be a reason to have a universal language. If we view things similarly wouldn’t it be much easier to solve conflicts of all kinds. On the other hand, there would be less diversity in the world and ideas, inventions, and some creativity would be lost.
Technology is widely programed in English. “The birth of the Internet in an English speaking country has also had a huge impact on this global evolution of the language, with almost 80% of the worlds’ digital information now stored in English.” Is stated in The English Language as a Global Force they bring up the point that the computer languages are based from English. Undeniably this gives English speaking countries and people an advantage with technology and “communicating with the world as a whole.” To conclude, if everyone, English or any language, spoke in a common tongue there would be no one to a disadvantage because of the language they spoke. This could accomplish an array of amazing new thing
Collaboration would be easier than ever. Being able to share ideas with people who are of different dialects is near impossible without a third party. If everyone could easily learn about what others are trying to invent or improve, technology and many other things could develop much faster. People wouldn’t have to take their time getting whatever formula right that someone else has already perfected it. The world could be farther along in terms of technology, medicine, learning abilities and pretty much everything you could think of. It would be much better if the inventers of the world weren’t restricted by communication.
On the contrary, what are the effects of English being so widespread? “I find myself annoyed when Americans tour the world expecting to be understood whenever they speak in English.” States Terri Dip, author of Should English be the Worlds International Language? He goes on to say it is even worse when people from none English speaking countries go to other none English speaking countries and attempt to communicate in English. He believes that, “the prevalence of English is one of the biggest reasons the majority of America’s youth know next to nothing about the outside world.” At first I couldn’t help to be offended by this statement. How does this man know what I know? And then I realized it is true. Many Americans, not age group specific, only know one language, and although you can learn about other countries and say you know all about it, you may know facts but you know nothing of how their culture truly is until you experience it.
Before writing this, I was thinking of the advantages and disadvantages of having a universal language would be. And for obvious reasons, the loss of culture was the biggest bullet point of a disadvantage. And in my opinion, and I discovered also in many others, this would be a huge loss in the world. “If you speak multiple languages, you start to see things in many more shades because some concepts just cannot be translated, directly or indirectly.” States Dip. He continues on to describe how when translating phrases and words from language to language it doesn’t always make much sense from one to the other. He sums it up perfectly by saying, “Our different languages have shaped who we are, our history, our heritage, our culture, our identity. Why should the world have one language when it can have many?” An article by Janafadness called English is NOT the “International Language” really caught my attention because it features a Youtube video of a boy saying why he thinks that English might by very useful for some things, but go out of the tourist attractions and step into the average life of people from other countries, many do not know English, or do not know it well enough to have a full on conversation.
So, in the end, there is no real conclusion. There are just many different opinions that all make very valid and reasonable points, making the topic that much harder. Not one of the citations are wrong in their thinking, but not all of them agree. The topic of an international language has many shades of grey. Whether it will ever happen or not is unknown at this point, but all I can offer in my personal opinion. It was much harder to find reasons of why not to have an international language then why to have one but I hope there will never be one. The consequences are too great for the advantages to ever overtake them.
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