The Implications Of Adopting A Worldlang

• Spoken Language Lingua Franca: Latin, French, English, and thousands of others.
• Written Language Lingua Franca: Classical Chinese Characters.
• Sign Language Lingua Franca: Great Plains Amerindian Sign Language.

There are multiple problems with Esperanto. It’s too Eurocentric, its grammar isn’t as simple as could be, it has unnecessary diacritic characters, its vocabulary for advanced words isn’t very consistent, its word class syntax is sometimes confusing. Many creole languages fare better on these characteristics.

It’s true that Esperanto already has a sizable community with an estimated ~65000 active users (most accurate estimate), but if a worldlang is going to have greater success and appeal across the entire world, then it needs to be less Eurocentric, so it’s better to start over.

Maybe, but not necessarily. Indonesian has complex honorifics, and its highly agglutinative morphology is a huge challenge for learning it, especially when a myriad of new words are being created every single day. The spelling, pronunciation, and grammar are pretty easy, but one should not underestimate that actually learning it is easier said than done. Another thing to consider is that the vast majority of the world’s population doesn’t speak Austronesian languages, so they would be completely unfamiliar with Indonesian vocabulary.

Personally, I’d say that Tok Pisin is the easiest language in the world for me to learn, since I’m a native English speaker and since Tok Pisin is an English creole. I once spent 10 hours learning Tok Pisin, and after that, my comprehension of Tok Pisin was already similar to my intermediate comprehension of Spanish, which I had studied for 4 years. A Tok Pisin based worldlang might be a good idea as a potential worldlang, given the current popularity of English.

A constructed worldlang could have a more rational design that’s better suited for the modern world. Most languages are emergent socially constructs that weren’t planned out. Most of modern civilization wasn’t rationally planned out either, since it arose from a set of collaborative and emergent caruses that each supported each other. Building a rationally planned constructed language to be the world’s lingua franca could be an additional step towards creating a more rational civilization.

• Most humans don’t speak English (~5-6 billion), and it would be easier for them to learn Globasa, Pandunia, or something similar instead.
• English has a more complex spelling, grammar, and vocabulary that takes more time to learn.
• English has a lot of silent letters, which can slow down reading speeds by decreasing the speed eye saccades. An efficient auxlang with no silent letters (or fewer depending on slight dialectical differences) could be created that would make it faster to read, write, print, and learn stuff. The amount of time and ink that it saves would add up over time.
• English is not politically or culturally neutral, from a global perspective.

I’ve argued that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is clearly true when the hypothesis and theory are clearly defined and explained. So, it’s largely pointless for logical languages to prove or disprove the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. There is thus no reason to make up random vocabulary that makes logical languages harder for a majority of the world’s population to understand than need be.

My main interest regarding constructed languages is to build a universal worldlang, namely for aesthetic, economic, and efficiency reasons. I also have some interest in logical languages, so my ideal conlang would be an international auxiliary language that also functions as a logical language. At the same time, I also believe that the logical syntax of the language shouldn’t make the language too much more difficult to learn, so conlangers would need to find a reasonable balance between these priorities.

No, and not by a longshot. In my opinion, the biggest problems facing humanity are:

1. Unregulated population growth.
2. Unregulated resource consumption.
3. Global fossil fuel and oil depletion.
4. Government debt and inflation in Western(ized) countries.
5. Demographic changes.
6. Pollution.
7. Climate change.

It’s not clear how a worldlang would help solve these problems, but I do believe that a worldlang could help with many more minor problems, for an optimal future for humanity. It’s also not clear how a worldlang is something that humanity needs in order to function.

No, cooperation is the foundation of civilization, not language. People who share a common language aren’t guaranteed to cooperate with each other. Likewise, it’s possible for people to cooperate with each other, despite not sharing a common language at all, depending on the context. If language really was the “foundation” of civilization, then how would one explain why people aren’t guaranteed to cooperate with each, even when they share the same language?

A common language is not the “foundation” for civilization, not anymore than agricultural methods, religion, culture, demographics, etc. You don’t need to share a common language with someone in order to be part of the same civilization. There are many translators and interpreters who make it possible for people to cooperate with other people in the same civilization, even if they can’t understand each other.

Civilizations form when people cooperate with other. People cooperate with each other when governments solve game-theoretic problems (murder, rape, theft, vandalism, etc). Language has nothing to do with this. Governments can solve game-theoretic problems among a population, even if most of the population doesn’t understand what the laws are. This happened all the time when Europeans established their colonies all over the world. Europeans established civilization in places that didn’t have it by forcing the native populations to cooperate with the colonists.

I used to believe this too, and I suspect that many worldlangers also overestimate the potential of a WAL to speed up scientific and technological advancements.

First, the ability to be rational and intelligent is not equally distributed among humans. There are huge intelligence differences between humans, especially when they’re from different races. For the most part, the vast majority of the most intelligent humans in the world already speak English or some East Asian languages. Humanity isn’t likely to move forward very far on science or technology, if the more intelligent races of humanity share a common language with the less intelligent races.

(Of course, that’s not to say that I believe in judging people based on their race, or that I’m a racial supremacist of any sort. I am mixed-race, I support equal rights for all humans, and I’ve made my position on equality between humans crystal clear.)

Second, it’s clear that technological progress has slowed down, and is unlikely to increase.

Third, it’s dubious that expanding education would cause significant technological advancements, since the demand for higher education is over-saturated. About half of all college graduates never apply the knowledge that they learned in college, and have jobs that are not related to what they studied. A lot of the research done these days is wasteful garbage.

Read More: A Rational Critique of Academic Research.

Probably not. Intuitively, it might increase literacy rates for speakers of languages that have writing systems that are difficult to learn, or no writing systems at all. Literacy increased in Korea after they replaced Hanja with Hangul, in Vietnam when they replaced Chữ Nôm with the Latin alphabet, and in China when they started using Simplified Chinese characters.

However, the most difficult writing systems to learn in the world are in East Asia, which is also one of the most literate and most intelligent regions in the world. Also, East Asian countries probably won’t ditch the writing systems of their native languages, just because a worldlang uses a different writing system, so they would still have to learn the systems and their high complexity.

For populations that have no writing systems for their native languages, they probably have lower intelligence due to a historical lack of civilization, which would be a greater barrier to achieving literacy than the complexity of any writing system.

Related: On the Propedeutic Value of Esperanto - Justin Kunimune.

It’s possible that an IAL could have unforeseen disadvantages, ones that we won’t know about until after we try this experiment in real life. I’m skeptical that spreading an IAL across the world would reduce cultural barriers across the world as much as its proponents believe. The contact hypothesis is mostly false. Enabling everybody to communicate with each other using an IAL might only increase the number of heated religious, etc arguments across the Internet, rather than unifying the world.

I think that building an IAL would be comparable to building the Internet. The people who built the Internet did so because they imagined that it would have lots of positive consequences for humanity. However, even if we argue that the Internet has been mostly positive for humanity, we can still argue that the Internet has also had unforeseen negative consequences that people did not predict back in the 80s and 90s. I think that building an IAL would have similar consequences. It would be mostly positive overall, but it would also have unforeseen negative consequences that people did not predict. One could try to rigorously, meticulously, methodically think about how an IAL would effect the world, depending on how it’s adopted and what it’s used for, but ultimately, the only way we can know how an IAL would effect the world is if we make it a reality and establish widespread usage.

Another problem is that the IAL would be created because it’s supposed to facilitate all these supposedly great things. That would probably have the effect of making the IAL more valuable than all the existing natural languages. There’s probably also a lot of people out there who feel no special attachment to their native languages in the modern world, including myself. If that is the case, then they might voluntarily choose to not teach their children, their native languages and just teach their children the IAL instead. If that happens and continues, then the IAL may continue to gain their speakers until it becomes the language of a majority of the world’s population or maybe even the entire world. Maybe the IAL could still persist as a purely second language, just as English exist within Nigeria, India, and other countries were English is exclusively a second language. However, it really depends on how the IAL is taught, people’s values, and how people feel about the IAL for their own language.

From a purely logical perspective, there’s no objective reason why we should prefer sharing a common language with the rest of the entire world.

Game Theory Question: Who would benefit if the world adopted a worldlang?

• Big nations like the US, UK and other nations with English as their national language? Not really…
• TESOL Teachers? Not really…
• Teachers of English, French and other national languages? Not really…
• Professors of all these languages, translators, interpreters? Not really…
• Multilingual people whose language knowledge is the basis for their profession and income? Not really…

Let’s suppose that a universal near-instantaneous language translator is developed, and that it functions similarly to the Babelfish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. It doesn’t exist yet, so we don’t completely know what it would be like, but here is a reasonable prediction for what it would be like:

• It would be connected to the listener’s ears and listen for non-native languages. When the native language(s) are heard, it isn’t activated.
  • It might even be implanted into human heads far into the future if the technology becomes available and practical. But when it first gets implemented, it would definitely have to be external component.
  • Typing and texting on machines should be easier to implement within existing computer and smartphone software. Content would be sent from the original language to the receivers, and the receivers would translate that into whatever language the computer user(s) understand.
  • It would need a decent CPU and speakers.
• It would need to instantaneously translate between about ~23 languages to cover over >50% of the world’s population, a few hundred languages for ~96%, and ~6000 languages to cover 100% of the world’s population.
• Even if the technology for such a thing does get developed, it would probably be far more expensive to produce it on a worldwide industrial scale, than to have everybody learn a constructed worldlang.

1. Learning a foreign language has cognitive benefits whereas having a computer translate for you wouldn’t have any cognitive benefits at all.
   • As living standards continue to increase around the world, and people live longer lives, mental disorders that don’t normally appear until the late stages of life (such as Alzheimer’s Disease and other types of dementia) will continue to become more prevalent.
     • Studies consistently show that monolingual people are more likely to get Alzheimer’s Disease at earlier ages than bilingual people, with a difference of five years on average.
     • Having a world of monolingual people who have to rely on machine translations to communicate with the rest of the world would slightly exacerbate the number of people who have Alzheimer’s Disease and such until a cure is developed for Alzheimer’s Disease and other diseases that can be delayed for some years by fluently speaking at least two languages.
2. If a computer is translating the language that it is hearing to the language that it is outputting through the speakers, there would inevitably be slight delays in the translations since languages have different word orders. For example:
   • Languages that differ in sentential word order among the subjects, objects, and verbs.
     • English versus Arabic/Gaelic/Cebuano/etc (SVO and VSO)
     • English versus Hindi/Russian/Turkish/etc (SVO and SOV)
     • Hindi/Russian/Turkish/etc versus Arabic/Gaelic/Cebuano/etc (SOV and VSO)
     • Et Cetera
   • Languages that differ in noun phrase word order: nouns, adjectives, numerals, etc.
     • English versus Spanish/French/Portuguese/etc (nouns and adjectives)
     • English versus Chinese/Finish (relative clauses)
     • English versus Korean (nouns and numerals)
     • English versus Swahili (nouns, adjectives, and numerals)
     • Et Cetera
3. It is likely that the only way to avoid the delay that will inevitably occur when a machine is translating languages is if humans eventually have bionic chips installed into their brains that allow them to instantly understand other foreign languages, but at that rate, humans might as well be communicating through some sort of telepathy if we have that kind of technology and that associated level of understanding about how the brain works.
   • There might not be a need to speak spoken languages or sign languages at that point. This would eliminate the language barrier between deaf and hearing people too.

Having everybody learn a worldlang would take time out of everybody’s lives to master until fluency, but it would probably be worth it if the worldlang is easy to learn. On average, it would probably take a couple hundred hours at most, depending on the person’s native language and other factors.

Conclusion: Maybe a universal language translators that is more advanced than Google Translate will eventually be developed in the future for most (or even all) humans languages, but the world will have to wait at least a few decades before that technology became available everywhere, if ever. Until then, a combination of multilingual people, Google Translate, and other AI language translators may suffice for humanity’s translation needs.