First, let me point out that, despite what most people probably think, English is not the most spoken language in the world. Not by a long shot. Mandarin Chinese is spoken by something like 950 million people - roughly one-sixth of the entire Earth's population. Coming in at close ties for second and third are Spanish and English, with roughly 332 million and 322 million speakers, respectively.
That being said, I'm amazed by this idea that languages are literally disappearing. It's interesting to think of the extinction of something as intangible as a language, but there are literally languages in the world that only one person speaks. And once that person dies, that's it.
Another interesting finding by the study is what areas of the world are seeing the fastest disappearance of languages:
- Northern Australia
- Central South America
- North America's upper Pacific coastal zone
- Eastern Siberia
- Oklahoma and the Southwestern US (seriously, Oklahoma??)
Australia has 231 spoken languages - and it's the least populated continent in the world! (No, I'm not counting Antarctica). There are 113 languages in central South America alone. And when you consider how many years it takes a language to form and develop, it seems weird that they would literally come down to one speaker left.
So what does this mean? Is this just a necessary artifact of the small world that we now live in? What will these numbers look like in a hundred years? Are we converging to a world where most everyone speaks a handful of languages? Based on a very rough calculation, I'd say a little less than half the planet's population speaks one of ten or eleven languages. So in a century, will it be 90%, or more? Will everyone be speaking English, the language of international commerce and the Internet? Or will it be some international hybrid of Chinese, English, some Romantic languages? I hope the cursing's in German - German's great for cursing.
And what should I teach my children? Should I focus on languages that are useful here, like Spanish and French? Or should I teach them to live truly internationally, by learning Chinese, Bengali, Hindi and Arabic?
Or maybe it's just time to go to bed...
3 comments:
As a Firefly fan, I think maybe Josh Whedon has it almost right. The most common language for communication will be an English-like dialect with smatterings of Chinese added in for seasoning. Of course, Firefly and Serenity were made for the North American market, so the English dialect is pretty close to American standard.
Did your sources count the number of people who spoke any of the language, or did it count mother tongues?
Another angle...how long before someone ties speech recognition (hard) to machine translation (less hard) to speech generation (easy) to make a "universal translator" like in Star Trek?
I know, I know, his name is Joss Whedon. So I can't type already. Sometimes my fingers even say things I didn't think I knew.
Great minds really do think alike: as I wrote that I was thinking of Firefly and it's English-Chinese hybrid.
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