What's Next in the World of Language?

Why do we speak so many languages? A seemingly redundant question, yet the answer is not so obvious. According to the Bible, every human living on Earth used to be able to understand each other, until the day they decided to construct the tower of Babel, a device to “reach the heavens,” thus eliciting the wrath of God. Linguistic diversity is the Lord’s punishment sent to humans so that we can no longer speak to those outside of our small subgroups. Whether one has faith in this origin myth or not, it is worth noticing that the general view, held by academics and the public alike, is that modern languages can be traced to some ancestral “common tongue,” which through time broke down into languages that became more and more differentiated as people migrated to different habitats, led unique lifestyles and ceased coming into contact with other groups.

In fact, according to many linguists, there were fourteen to sixteen of such “parental languages,” which branched out into the 5000 plus languages that we see today. Depending on how one defines “the largest family,” - by the number of languages originating from it or the number of current speakers - the Proto Niger-Congo, with 1,538 languages, or the Proto Indo-European, with more than two billion speakers, would take the top spot. It is interesting to note how geography might have influenced the breaking up of languages; the Niger-Congo family has three times the number of languages as the Indo-European, yet the number of speakers is only one-fourth that of the later.

Yet with the advance of the industrial age, we have been seeing what almost looks like the reverse of this language diversification process. Of course, there are still new languages and dialects being created across the globe, and even the individual vernacular tongues that are in existence right now have shown no signs of ceasing to evolve. However, the breaking off of languages into smaller subgroups is less common, as the current social mobility means that mountains, rivers and deserts are no longer barriers significant enough to isolate sections of the population for a long time, giving rise to distinct languages or even just dialects. The most recently-created languages -  Afrikaans, South Africa’s national melange of Dutch, German, English, Portuguese, French, Bantu, Khoisan, and Malay, Light Warlpiri, a pidgin of English and the Warlpiri indigenous tongue, and the notorious, “man-made” Esperanto, are all products of combination, rather than differentiation. To facilitate cross-cultural communication, whether it be in discomfiting situations where colonists force their presence upon once peacefully isolated tribes, or where trade brings people of different nationalities together in a common space, modern languages follow an organic trajectory of merging together, taking some elements from each original tongue.

The artificially-created Esperanto is a particularly interesting case. The brainchild of Ludovik Zamenhof, a Polish Jew with the dream of engineering world peace, it is officially the most popular constructed language, with 2000 native speakers in 120 different countries. Zamenhof was inspired to create a “universal language” from his childhood experiences growing up in a community which “consisted of four diverse elements: Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews,” as he later wrote in a letter to a friend. Attributing all of the local hostilities to a lack of understanding between the different groups, he spent the rest of his life working on Esperanto. Considering Zamenhof’s lofty aim of building a language to be spoken by all humans across the globe, Esperanto is incredibly limited in the array of languages it incorporates; employing the conventional letters of the Latin alphabet, it has a vocabulary that essentially mirrors that of a Romance language, with some hints of Germanic tongue and a Slavic phonology. Its creator boasted that “the most uneducated man could learn this language in a week;” he was right, as long as the learner was European.

Even if Esperanto had truly managed to draw elements from the representatives of all  fourteen language families, the chances that a product constructed by a single individual would ever be embraced by the thousands of different cultures in the world are exceedingly slim. Engineering a language to “unite all peoples” is a nice thought experiment, but so bound to fail in real life it is almost laughable. For mixing languages together like assembling legos inevitably takes away from the beautiful complexity of each, a complexity that arises from centuries of culture and history;  even the organically created pidgin tongues, no matter how advanced their lexicon, will always be deemed inferior to the original languages they draw from.

So, at least for the foreseeable future, us humans will hold on to different ways of indicating earth, sky, sun, and completely confound each other. However, as globalization continues to spread, the needs for a simple means of communication between peoples of different nationalities is not likely to go away. Whether this will lead to a gradual “convergence of language,” as different dialects become standardized, and linguistic subgroups merge back into something reminiscent of the proto-languages they originated from, remains to be seen, perhaps by generations far succeeding ours. What is more likely to happen though, indeed what is already happening at a dizzying pace at the present moment, is that one dominant language, one mainstream tongue will grow in its role as the global lingua franca, and slowly command all peoples, no matter their native tongue, to master its usage if they desire a chance to be heard, a chance for advancement in all pursuits, be they commercial or academic.

I have never felt this truth more saliently than while looking up words in the dictionary to complete my op-ed.