this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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On the one hand, it's a shame to lose all those languages / dialects. On the other hand, the whole purpose of a language is communication, so the fewer distinct languages, the more people are able to speak with and understand each-other.
My guess is that it's a matter of time before everyone on the planet speaks a common language, and the odds are pretty good that language will be English. Which is a bit of a shame, since it's a pretty shitty language in many ways.
It'll be an English-Mandarin Chinese pidgin, like in Firefly.
Maybe, but Mandarin / Chinese isn't really used outside China. English has about 1.5 billion speakers, and over 1 billion of them speak it as a second language. Chinese has 1.1 billion speakers, but only 200 million speak it as a second language. It seems like the international langua franca is English.
Policies could change, and China could try to teach people Mandarin as part of the Belt and Roads initiative. But, right now, if you're trying to do business in other countries or with foreigners in your country, English is the most useful language to know.
That's not to say that future-English will necessarily be too similar to current English. I'm sure the more it spreads, the more it will change.
My personal favourite is the term lingua franca itself from when everyone (important) spoke French.
As in English is the lingua franca.
Latin for (roughly) English is the French.