Why is there no global language that at least nearly half the world speaks (3.5 billion, I'm talkin', including non-native speakers)

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.

www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world#….

Melatonin,

Waiting on my Universal Translator

keepcarrot,

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.

AndrasKrigare,

https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/a00d8a8d-a9e9-4467-b7c4-455ff7500694.webp

xkcd.com/927/

Esperanto

brisk,

Lojban

Etterra,

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.

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

Because the world is not utopia, and individualism combined with a unipolar hegemon (UK before, USA now) made the division of society a feature and not a problem. Also, capitalism forces us to fake productivity and not have free time for ourselves to indulge in useless things like… learning more languages and cultures to become harmonious with more people. Wars and genocides are useful, you know… to fill the pockets of some white swines.

frightful_hobgoblin,

How did unipolar prevent a majority language?

How did wars and genocides prevent a majority language?

How is learning the majority language useless to your career?

BrownMinusBlue,

Comrade as to your point of unipolar hegemonie, wouldn’t the opposite be true? That because of imperialism more people speak the same language. Example would be how former English colonies speak the same language, like India and Pakistan have their own languages but they also speak English due to colonialism and neo colonialism.

TheAnonymouseJoker, (edited )
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

While colonialism created conditions that made it favourable to benefit from the coloniser’s language, the capitalist structure ensured a proxy form of colonialism never seen before in human history, where all forms of media and pop culture were hijacked. It is unique, and it is a perspective that only I have held and seen nobody talk about it, but Britain has utilised cricket as a tool of colonialism on Hindustan (post partition, India and Pakistan). It is part of reason why even after independence we continued to be silent, unlike China, who faced half as worse the fate as India, bounced back through Mao’s revolution.

Now, back to this proxy colonialism that never left most countries even after Britain left them, post WW2 the baton seemed to have been passed onto USA. The iron grip of capitalism and a unique cocktail (western pop culture infused with the invention of modern advertisement by Edward Bernays that abused psychoanalysis theories) and the vacuum of money and opportunities created by western imperialism ensured no matter how hard colonised countries were crippled, they would have only few choices left - starve and shrivel (DPRK post 1980s USA bombing), become proxy subservient to west (IMF/WEF initiative) or become subservient to west in the form of brain drain and human resource drain. This is purely my theory and how I think about things without ever having read a word of socialist literature.

The adoption of their language was just one step among many steps they probably worked long ago, or worked as time went on. I do think it was thought of long ago, similar to what Zionist Project is.

I am not sure, I may be just rambling here, but whatever I guess.

Hello_Kitty_enjoyer,

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

ImplyingImplications,

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

shinigamiookamiryuu,

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

victorz,

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

dessalines,

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,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

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,

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,

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

There’s no workaround for that trade-off.

dessalines,

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,

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.

dessalines,

Aren’t you Irish? You know the English colonizers did their best to wipe out the Irish language and replace it with the one you’re advocating for right???

frightful_hobgoblin, (edited )

know the English colonizers did … right???

Nooo I didn’t actually know that and needed an enlightened person such as yourself to tell me 🙄🙄

Tá mé tinn de bheith ag glacadh comhairle stráinséara. Imagine some blan started lecturing you about haitian history and how it should affect your opinions, wouldn’t you at least tell them to fuck off?

dessalines,

So why are you advocating for the displacement of the majority of the world’s language families based on european languages popularity it gained through colonial displacement?

The majority of the world don’t speak european languages.

frightful_hobgoblin, (edited )

So why are you advocating for the displacement of the majority of the world’s language families based on european languages popularity it gained through colonial displacement?

Same reason you are advocating wife-beating (i.e. I never said anything like that)

The majority of the world don’t speak european languages.

Correct. That’s was our starting point: there’s no language that the majority of the world do speak.

Indo-European is spoken by a 46% minority.

About 19% of the world’s population speak the Indo-Iranian branch alone. It’s by far the largest of the 8 branches by number of speakers. By number of languages (which includes tiny languages) it comprises about ⅔ of the family –

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/5813f77d-1a07-4663-afb3-14b498b2d02d.png

For example there are 884 million speakers of Hindi/Urdu + Bengali + Marathi + Gujarati + Odia + Punjabi in India, and Pakistan is almost all Indo-European (Indo-Aryan and Iranic).

Agus in theannta sin, tá Gaeilge (teanga Ind-Eorpach/Ceiltís) ag 0.0002125% den daonra domhanda!

dessalines,

Kind of wild that you use Haiti as an example here, considering the european genocide of the Taino people, as well as the european importation of african slaves, two groups that didn’t speak european languages, and had their languages erased by the same process you’re advocating for.

frightful_hobgoblin,

w pa ayisyen?

frightful_hobgoblin,

I never said anything approaching the words your putting in my mouth.

mamotromico,

When I was a teen I really wanted to learn Esperanto but never got around to it. Globasa seems extremely interesting though, maybe I’ll finally give one of these languages a try.

senloke,

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.

That sounds interesting. Esperanto has no noun-declinations, it’s an agglutinating language, you don’t bend words (= declination).

But what is barely resembling that what you mention is the two cases of the language, which is nominative and the so called “accusative”. Which is adding -n to words to make them an object, depending on whether the verb of the sentence needs one or not. This case also is not just for objects, but also for directions, for measurements and time. That combination normally confuses the heck out of people.

Which is why there is also an in-joke in the Esperanto community “don’t forget the accusative”, because people forget it or apply it too often.

HobbitFoot,

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.

moon,

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

Cute that you think it’s the U.S. and it’s little movies that are responsible for English being widely spoken, and not the bloody history of British imperialism being forced on half the planet

HobbitFoot,

I mentioned the bloody imperialism in the first half of the sentence.

moon,

deleted_by_author

    •
    HobbitFoot,

    I didn’t know the USA was a dominant nation two centuries ago.

    mayo_cider,
    @mayo_cider@hexbear.net avatar

    Every time this was attempted we chose the language of the worst colonizer at that time

    huf,

    “chose”. learning the language of the worst colonizer of your time’s always been economically advantageous

    JokeDeity,

    I would say there is. Body language. Just about any human you meet can understand body language.

    davel, (edited )
    @davel@lemmy.ml avatar

    I suppose, though very poorly in comparison to what we usually mean by language.

    This sparks an interesting question though: can two human strangers communicate with each other better than any other animals can, even when those two people have no language in common? I don’t think it’s so easy a question to answer. Probably they can in many cases but not in some others, depending on what is to be communicated. Whether there’s a bear nearby? How to coordinate an attack on tasty prey?

    Edit to add: Unlocking secrets of the honeybee dance language – bees learn and culturally transmit their communication skills

    Astonishingly, honeybees possess one of the most complicated examples of nonhuman communication. They can tell each other where to find resources such as food, water, or nest sites with a physical “waggle dance.” This dance conveys the direction, distance and quality of a resource to the bee’s nestmates.

    JokeDeity,

    I would argue yes, but not by a massive degree in my opinion. Every animal has body language and several things are shared amongst many of us, especially mammals. But yeah, I think our whole species would understand things like pointing at something or laughing or offering something with an outstretched arm, or a surprised face or a scowl.

    Melatonin,

    👍

    But don’t try this in many parts of the Middle East.

    👌

    And don’t do this in Brazil.

    JokeDeity,

    Yeah I specifically didn’t include hand signs in my other comment because that’s getting closer to sign language and many countries have unique hand signs. Smiling is also something not universal oddly enough.

    M68040,
    @M68040@hexbear.net avatar

    In a weird way, the development of advanced communications and coordination technology has only made it harder for anything to change in a significant way .

    DeathsEmbrace,

    You as a 8.1 billion population have to come together and decide as a group and the enact it. If we couldn’t even stop Covid which is still around you think we can do something like this?

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