a universal language

The Tower of Babel is a powerful story — human arrogance brought low by divine retribution.  If we had not attempted to reach God we might all have been speaking the same language.

There have been attempts to regain the pre-Babel state with contrived universal languages such as Esperanto.  And it is argued that humankind almost reached it in the Middle Ages with Latin, although this was a very different kind of universality.  The rich and powerful and educated shared a common language in the bit of the world that mattered from a European point of view.

Linguistics tells a different story to explain the diversity of languages.  If you suppose that you have a group of people speaking the same language and by some magic you impose a mountain range right down the middle of the group, then you will end up first of all with two dialects, then with two different languages.

The reason for this is that each group responds to different pressures for change — partly external pressures, partly internal.

The external pressure is the physical and social environment.  Let us suppose that one side of the mountain is desert and the other is rainforest.  And one group is a democracy and the other is a dictatorship.  Undoubtedly the lexicon required by each group to express their circumstances is going to be markedly different.

There is another force at work which is not nearly so obvious or dramatic.  On each side of the mountain the communities make day-to-day decisions on language issues which arise naturally from the language system in which they operate.  Let’s say that the hot topic one each side of the mountain happens to be the use of protest as a verb, as in to protest a decision. One side of the mountain decides in favour of the verbal use, the other decides against it.

There is a suggestion that English might, by sheer weight of numbers of speakers, achieve the critical mass needed to take over the world.  This is entirely speculative since we are still a long way from such a state of affairs and there are other contenders for this role.

Would it be desirable for English (or any other language) to achieve this kind of dominance? Some would argue that this is analogous to a beautiful flower becoming a weed with devastating effects on the language ecology of other habitats.

If the world did speak with one language, would the cost matter? Would it bring about greater understanding, harmony and peace? I have my doubts.