this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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Why is there no global language that at least nearly half the world speaks (3.5 billion, I'm talkin', including non-native speakers) (lemmy.ml)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Is the Tower of Babel still affecting us or something?

Edit:

We have 8 billion people, yet the best we could muster for the most total speakers of a language is under 2 billion, including non-natives...

  1. English (1,452 million speakers) First language: 372.9 million Total speakers: 1.4+ billion According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers.

https://www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world#:~:text=1.,English%20(1%2C452%20million%20speakers)&text=According%20to%20Ethnologue%2C%20English%20is,native%20and%20non%2Dnative%20speakers.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

For a tiny language, I really like toki pona, but it's meant to be a minimal artistic language, more than an IAL (international auxiliary language).

Last I checked tho, Globasa looks really interesting. The way that they add new vocabulary, and have a good representation of world languages, seems to work well.

Esperanto is also good, but when my partner tried to learn it, they were weirded out by some of it's quirks, like noun declinations based on whether it's a subject or object, that seems unecessary.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Esperanto is also good, but when my partner tried to learn it, they were weirded out by some of it’s quirks, like noun declinations based on whether it’s a subject or object, that seems unecessary.

That sounds interesting. Esperanto has no noun-declinations, it's an agglutinating language, you don't bend words (= declination).

But what is barely resembling that what you mention is the two cases of the language, which is nominative and the so called "accusative". Which is adding -n to words to make them an object, depending on whether the verb of the sentence needs one or not. This case also is not just for objects, but also for directions, for measurements and time. That combination normally confuses the heck out of people.

Which is why there is also an in-joke in the Esperanto community "don't forget the accusative", because people forget it or apply it too often.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I feel that for better or worse Esperanto hasn’t reached a large enough mass to justify accepting its quirks and indo-eurocentrism, when we know we can do better now.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

For sure. A dissapointing number of IALs have nearly all their vocab from european languages, but there are a few that try earnestly to source their vocab from a wide set of language families. Any global initiative for an IAL needs to have a global vocabulary set to have any hopes of being introduced.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If you choose vocabulary that is culturally neutral, then that vocabulary is not easily recognisable.

There's no workaround for that trade-off.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Recognizeable for whom, is the question. The majority of IALs to date have had a highly eurocentric vocabulary, so they can't be recognizeable to even a plurality of the world.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Correct reasoning, incorrect facts.

46% of the world speak Indo-European languages as a mother tongue.

Can't do better than that. No other option comes close.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Aren't you Irish? You know the English colonizers did their best to wipe out the Irish language and replace it with the one you're advocating for right???

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

know the English colonizers did .... right???

Nooo I didn't actually know that and needed an enlightened person such as yourself to tell me 🙄🙄

Tá mé tinn de bheith ag glacadh comhairle stráinséara. Imagine some blan started lecturing you about haitian history and how it should affect your opinions, wouldn't you at least tell them to fuck off?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago

So why are you advocating for the displacement of the majority of the world's language families based on european languages popularity it gained through colonial displacement?

The majority of the world don't speak european languages.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago

Kind of wild that you use Haiti as an example here, considering the european genocide of the Taino people, as well as the european importation of african slaves, two groups that didn't speak european languages, and had their languages erased by the same process you're advocating for.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

https://xkcd.com/927/

Esperanto

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Is that the default situation is it??

You dreamed up a scenario and now are asking why it is not the case.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Tell me, where is this global language where it has 3.5 billion speakers, if not half? You've indicated it's not the case...?

Do you think I ask in bad faith, or do you ask in bad faith?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago

It is a somewhat naïvely-framed question, but also you could have just clicked downvote and moved on with your day.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I'd argue that by your own criteria, English is that language.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Less then a quarter of people speak English, so not even close.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world

Including people who speak English as a second language, estimates of the total number of Anglophones vary from 1.5 billion to 2 billion.

So you’re right: one quarter of people at most. Nonetheless that’s remarkable. Too bad it’s due more to subjugation than cooperation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Well fuck me sideways I thought it was more than that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

That's not how language or communication work. Humans develop language in real time and in small cohorts. You are lucky if you can understand youth slang by the time you hit 40 and you want to force an artificial lingua franca on four billion people?

Plus, who said language uniformity is a positive? Linguistic diversity is a feature, not a bug. Language is tied to culture, identity and a whole bunch of antrhopological elements. Entire ethnicities are defined by their language. It's bad enough that US cultural imperialism has forced half the planet to watch the same movies and TV shows, why would we do the same with language? If you ask me, there's way too much English out there as it is.