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.

https://www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world#:~:text=1.,English (1%2C452 million speakers)&text=According to Ethnologue%2C English is,native and non-native speakers.

          • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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            5 months ago

            Our perception of it is also highly distorted due to the bubble we live in. Chinese are living in a different kind of bubble where everyone can more or less understand each other, as long as they stick to the written form. The languages may be different, but they are written using the same system, which makes communication possible. Also, the Great Firewall of China keeps Chinese people inside that bubble and foreigners outside it.

        • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          Awfully generous of the UK to go out of its way to respect Mongolia. I guess you gotta honor that Klingon code.

  • MudMan@fedia.io
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    5 months ago

    That’s not how language or communication work. Humans develop language in real time and in small cohorts. You are lucky if you can understand youth slang by the time you hit 40 and you want to force an artificial lingua franca on four billion people?

    Plus, who said language uniformity is a positive? Linguistic diversity is a feature, not a bug. Language is tied to culture, identity and a whole bunch of antrhopological elements. Entire ethnicities are defined by their language. It’s bad enough that US cultural imperialism has forced half the planet to watch the same movies and TV shows, why would we do the same with language? If you ask me, there’s way too much English out there as it is.

    • frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      It’s bad enough that US cultural imperialism has forced half the planet to watch the same movies and TV shows

      I have a comm for you

  • weeeeum@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Because for most of modern history, we were very isolated from the “outside world”.

    Other than the last 200 years, the best “internet” was a dude on a horse. Since groups of humans developed quite independently of each other, they developed their own languages. However in the modern age this is changing rapidly, with many languages and dialects coalescing into one, consistent, language. Additionally many countries have tons of English speakers which is a defacto “universal language”. Most big cities will have english translation for many signs and important documents.

  • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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    5 months ago

    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@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      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

      • Kalkaline @leminal.space
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        5 months ago

        Esperanto definitely isn’t a contender, but it’s design was to be a language that’s easy for everyone to learn and be the “universal” language. People have to speak it though, otherwise it’s not of much use to know it.

  • DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    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?

    • huf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      5 months ago

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

  • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    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 [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      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@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        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@lemmy.ml
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          5 months ago

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

          There’s no workaround for that trade-off.

          • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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            5 months ago

            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.

    • mamotromico@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      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@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      4 months ago

      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.

  • mx_smith@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Wasn’t there a language created called Esperanto that was supposed to be the world language.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • Tacostrange@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      Maybe it’s Interlingua. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua Most people who speak a latin based language already understand interlingua. That would be the best chance of getting a majority of the world on the same language. It would include a big part of Europe, all of South and Central America and half of North America

      • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        5 months ago

        Interlingua: Da nos hodie nostre pan quotidian,

        Esperanto: Nian panon ĉiutagan donu al ni hodiaŭ

        English: Give us this day our daily bread;

        We have our choice between Spanish Latin, Romanian Latin, or super complicated Latin that contradicts itself and absorbed things from everywhere at random.

        • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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          5 months ago

          or super complicated Latin that contradicts itself and absorbed things from everywhere at random.

          English borrowed a shit tonne from Latin & Romance languages, but it is at its core a Germanic language.

          To make a joke that still sticks with the facts, maybe something like “wannabe Latin”, or “that shitty Romeaboo language”.

    • frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      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@lemmygrad.ml
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      5 months ago

      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.

  • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

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

    • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      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@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        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.

      • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        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.