TECHNOLOGY MAKING THE WORLD SMALLER

With television and the internet, more and more people are exposed to more and more language. Even just visiting a chatroom on the internet, there’ll be influence from diverse languages in the chatters’ usernames. Hollywood ensures that English is widespread through movies.

Within individual countries, centralized television and expanded communication in general exert a moderating influence that counteracts the countries’ natural tendencies to diverge into multiple dialects. For example, if the United States were suddenly cut off from eachother and isolated, over a period of hundreds of years, the East Coast and West Coast would diverge from eachother linguistically until they were incomprehensible to eachother. But with technology as it is now, that isn’t going to happen. Instead, what dialect does exist, tends to slowly converge.

LANGUAGES DYING OUT

Some small languages are actually dying out, with younger generations using a more convenient lingua franca instead. In Ireland, for example, the state is doing whatever it can to preserve the Irish language, but the truth is English is used more and more.

With smaller languages weakening, the trend is toward a smaller number of languages each with more market share. Of course, these sort of changes take place on the scale of hundreds or thousands of years.

People generally don’t want to try learning every language in the world, because there are too many to learn. Imagine, however, if there were just two languages, say English and Spanish. Then it would be quite worthwhile to learn whichever one you didn’t already know, because it would take you from knowing half the languages in the world, to knowing all the languages in the world.

Continuing that example, if English and Spanish were the only languages, and the majority of the world learned them, then there would actually be only one language: Anglo-Spanish, the combination of the two languages (in the same way that English is largely a mutated combination of German, French and Latin).

GLOBALIZATION IN BUSINESS

With expanding technology, business also expands outward. Besides the sheer added language exposure, this also makes language learning a more and more lucrative endeavor. Over the course of centuries, that’ll apply pressure on the languages to converge.

In Tokyo, there’s English written everywhere, and even for Japanese place-names and people-names, there’s romaji, romanized Japanese. And it works the other way too: in airports which get lots of traffic to and from Asia, signs all have translations into the Asian tongues.

With globalization of the entertainment industry, language learning becomes chic and sexy. Hollywood is a perfect example. Another example is the video games and anime from Japan, extremely popular in the U.S.

CONVERGENCE OF CULTURE

Again thanks to technology, cultures are converging toward greater resemblance. Whereas in older ages, one nation might have radically different inventions and goods than another, increasingly these things are becoming homogenized. All but the most isolated languages will have words for computers now, for example, and those words will mostly be etymologically related.

THE ADIOS PHENOMENON

The word “adios” from Spanish, has become an English word. Most speakers of either language might still think of it as being Spanish-only, but please stop and consider what it takes for a word to be an English word. It’s not made English by the declaration of some English professor; rather, a word becomes an English word when a large number of English speakers understand it and can use it. And “adios” meets these requirements (at least among U.S. English speakers).

The same thing goes with lots of other words like, “hola”, “aloha”, “sayonara”. There are a particularly large number of these words from Spanish: most people know a handful of basic Spanish nouns, even if they don’t use them very often: “gato” means cat, “libro” means book, “agua” means water, and so on. It’s hard not to learn some of these basics, at least in the U.S.

And that’s not to even mention things like food names. Just go to any Chinese, Italian, Japanese, or Mexican restaurant.

BUT IS THIS ENOUGH?

Is this really enough, though, to merge the diverse languages of the world? I’ve been listing forces which encourage merging, but there are also forces which discourage it. Different languages have radically different sound sets and radically different writing systems. At the end of World War II, some attempt was made to Romanize Japanese, but it proved too difficult. Could it still be done? Maybe, but it would require a lot of changes to the language in the meantime. “Chinese” would be even harder, and I put Chinese in quotes because there are actually many different dialects of Chinese which are mutually incomprehensible.

In my opinion, it comes down to how well technology continues to develop, and the specifics of that technology. If the world somehow gets cast back into the dark ages, and nations become isolated, that will cause languages to diverge, undoing some or all of the convergence which has occurred. The longer and harsher the dark ages, the more the divergence; if it were bad enough and long enough, each state of the U.S. could evolve its own language, each incompatible with the others!

On the other hand, if technology develops too well, that could also hinder convergence: specifically, if we ever invent any kind of science-fiction quality portable translator devices, that would drastically reduce the incentive to learn/mix foreign languages.

IN THE MEANTIME…

Whether languages will converge or diverge, it’ll take place on a scale which makes our own meager lifetimes seem insignificant. So for now, let’s continue having lots of fun studying and learning the diverse languages of the world!