Poll: One world language?

[ProfessorLayton]

English because I'm American and lazy and don't want to learn a new language.

But didn't you learn anything from the tower of Babel? We aren't supposed to speak one language... or build tall buildings.

 

[nipsen]

Well, obviously it would have to be Norwegian. An at once beautiful and accurate language - that even when spoken by the most artistically inept individual will sound flowingly musical, and.. hey, I'm talking to you!

 

[ImpostorZim]

It would feel a little arrogant of me to say that English would be the world language eventually, but I can tell from experience that even here in South America, where for the most part it's either spoken in spanish or portuguese, the language is booming. I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being THE language one day.

 

[Ekonk]

I fear that it might be English.

 

[Midniqht]

Faroese would be awesome, but the world isn't cool enough for that.

Sadly, it's moving towards English.

 

[Baskerville]

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
I think that should clear things up.

YES!

 

[teh_Canape]

fuck english

Vulcan needs to be the world's language

also, the lack of spanish in the poll is disturbing, especially since it IS one of the biggest and eldest languages of humanity.... sort of

 

[TheTim]

English, or German because everyone always sounds angry =)

 

[Naeo]

I vote for an artificial/constructed language. All natural languages- English included- are very difficult to learn to speak fluently unless you've been speaking it for a long time or from a very young age. An artificial language can do away with all of that by having extremely simple (or at least extremely regular) grammar, vocabulary that draws from many languages so as to make it easier to learn the vocab, and a simple and easy to pronounce phonetic set.

That is to say, I vote artificial language because you can engineer/construct one to get around all the trickiness of natural languages. And by the time it morphs into a natural-language level of variation and people playing with syntax/words/whatever, more or less everyone will probably already be speaking it.

 

[deadxero]

The English language isn't extactly the best choice. It's actually one of the more over complicated, unintuitive languages there are. Think of every ridiculous word that is imposible to pronounce, phonetically, from the written word... silent letters, extra letters, homonyms... the English language is about like the old English measuring system, retarded.

 

[Nukeforyou]

i think we should refer to all as marklar.

 

[Plazmatic]

Lots of languages are dying off, you just need to like at the UK and the huge amounts of money they are spending to "save" languages like Gaelic and Welsh (?) to see that, but do you think we're moving towards a single one world language and would that be a good thing?

If so, which language should / will it be? Mandarin and Cantonese are both spoken by a lot of people, but then you've got English which is pretty much the de facto "lingua franca" (and isn't that a funny phrase when used in this context) of the business and digital world at the moment.

Or should we develop an artificial language like Esperanto (only you know better...)?

Um Op, are you ok?

First, why would hindi mandarin and japanese be up there? All three are confusing languages that have not been refined to base characters (like english and french, spanish latin/ greek based languages have) Though hindi would be the best out of those three, it is still way too illogical and hard to learn for it to be a world language.

Second, You put up French... why? who speaks French...? and who speaks Spanish? Compare, and you will see that there are a half a billion native speakers in Spanish, hundreds of times greater than that of French, even with non native speakers. There is no reason for French to be up there.

Third, while english is the current "lingua franca" it is not a very efficient and easy language to learn compared to others like Spanish, and Latin. I can see why you put that up there though.

Fourth, and final, Why, for the sake of all things logical and intelligent, did you NOT put up Latin.

Latin is the supreme of all languages on earth, by far the easiest and best for all mankind. This language can be easily picked up by all speakers of indo-european languages, and be more easily picked up by people who speak mandarin and Cantonese.

 

[Arquinsiel]

Imperial Gothic of course.

Low, high or mid?

 

[BENZOOKA]

Where's Volapük?

There will never be a world language. It may seem more optimistic for native English speakers, I assume, but no, there will never be one. End of story.

 

[Cuppa Tetleys]

Sorry to be predictable guys; English. A beautiful language with an extremely broad vocabulary, while being easily and clearly spoken with the simplest of lettering. Not the easiest to learn, mind, but it's so widely spoken across the world and most works of literature and film are in English so it's pretty much a no-brainer.

 

[tkioz]

Lots of languages are dying off, you just need to like at the UK and the huge amounts of money they are spending to "save" languages like Gaelic and Welsh (?) to see that, but do you think we're moving towards a single one world language and would that be a good thing?

If so, which language should / will it be? Mandarin and Cantonese are both spoken by a lot of people, but then you've got English which is pretty much the de facto "lingua franca" (and isn't that a funny phrase when used in this context) of the business and digital world at the moment.

Or should we develop an artificial language like Esperanto (only you know better...)?

Um Op, are you ok?

First, why would hindi mandarin and japanese be up there? All three are confusing languages that have not been refined to base characters (like english and french, spanish latin/ greek based languages have) Though hindi would be the best out of those three, it is still way too illogical and hard to learn for it to be a world language.

Second, You put up French... why? who speaks French...? and who speaks Spanish? Compare, and you will see that there are a half a billion native speakers in Spanish, hundreds of times greater than that of French, even with non native speakers. There is no reason for French to be up there.

Third, while english is the current "lingua franca" it is not a very efficient and easy language to learn compared to others like Spanish, and Latin. I can see why you put that up there though.

Fourth, and final, Why, for the sake of all things logical and intelligent, did you NOT put up Latin.

Latin is the supreme of all languages on earth, by far the easiest and best for all mankind. This language can be easily picked up by all speakers of indo-european languages, and be more easily picked up by people who speak mandarin and Cantonese.

Lets go in order.

1) The poll isn't what would be the best, but what is the most likely; Mandarin and Hindi are spoken by a lot of people, Japanese was included (and I said this in an earlier post) because of a slight bias I have from growing up in Australia during the 80s/90s when everyone assumed Japan was going to become the net great economic power house, and everyone was pushing for Japanese to be taught to kids.

2a) You'd actually be surprised at the number of countries that speak French, like the English the French had a large empire and a lot of countries still have that heritage.

2b) The lack of Spanish is an oversight, I'm Australian, so I have had very little exposure to Spanish, if I was from North America I might have included it, but I honestly didn't think about it, because my nation trades a lot with Asian nations so they came into my mind quicker then Spanish did. So oversight.

3) Again it's not a matter of what is the best, or the easiest, but the most likely; English as it stands is very wide spread as a secondary language.

4) Latin... do you actually speak Latin? There is a reason it died out, a wonderful language that should never be forgotten, but for every day use? No way in hell; it's also a ***** to learn. Considering there are no native speakers (that is someone who learnt it before another language) for it, we'd be far better of inventing a new synthetic language.

 

[3aqua]

English not only because its my only language its also has more words then any other language and is a concoction of french german latin and Italian

 

[ilion]

I prefer the Romance languages but English will serve... for now.

 

[Del-Toro]

Imperial Gothic of course.

I should probably brush up on my High Gothic I suppose. I don't want to sound like a commoner after all.

OT: English, since that's already everywhere. Chinese maybe, since they are poised to take over.

 

[MolotoK]

My native language is German but I have to agree that English will certainly be the world language.
It's already lingua franca in international business, science, engineering and most parts of internet and it's the most widely spoken language in the developed world.

It also has the advantage of being fairly simple to learn and even uses an unmodified 26-letter latin alphabet. (Most other languages in Europe have added a few letters to the latin alphabet)