[Rolling Bones]

Do you think everyone in the whole wide world will one day speak only one language?

English?

Mandarin?

Spanish?

[Albert Pujols]

Esperanto?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

[Chuckit]

Not in the foreseeable future.

[Dark Helmet]

William Shatner is ahead of the game.

[Rolling Bones]

Originally Posted by Chuckit

Not in the foreseeable future.

What about one day sometime?

[Rolling Bones]

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet

William Shatner is ahead of the game.

He changed the world. Yes.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Rolling Bones

What about one day sometime?

I'm not prepared to speculate about what happens in the far-off future when our descendants, having escaped to Venus from the overpopulated Earth, abandon their mortal bodies and become beings of pure thought.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet

William Shatner is ahead of the game.

A propos: Does anybody else here LOVE Boston Legal ?

-t

[Rolling Bones]

Originally Posted by turtle777

A propos: Does anybody else here LOVE Boston Legal ?

-t

William Shatner is the god!

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by Rolling Bones

Do you think everyone in the whole wide world will one day speak only one language?

No.

As long as we are humans, we will continue to fight and war against each other; and as long as we war against each other, we're not going to adopt our enemy's language willingly. By the time so many different combinations of allied countries and warring countries have passed that all countries have nonetheless managed to assimilate into the same language, we will long past have utter destroyed both ourselves and the planet.

Yes, I'm just one huge, shining ray of sunshine today.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by Rolling Bones

Do you think everyone in the whole wide world will one day speak only one language?

No. Conventional wisdom predicts that as people communicate more, their speech becomes more homogenous.

Actual linguistic studies have observed that in fact, the opposite happens, as regional/community/sociopolitical identity causes speakers to increase use of regionalisms.

In the U.S., for example, speech has been diverging, and two major shifts have been observed: the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (which causes "mad" to sound like "miad"), and the Southern Vowel Shift (which causes "Wendy" and "windy" to sound the same). Add to that that the other regions are not participating in either vowel shift, and that blacks aren't participating in the vowel shifts at all.

In Switzerland, Swiss German (which is a whole language, really, not a dialect) is spoken by just a few million people. Even though standard German is used in Switzerland for all writing, much business and government, etc., and Swiss German is supposedly "just spoken", Swiss German's use is actually spreading, rather than it being pushed out by standard German.


So while there are many linguists working to preserve (or at least document) the thousands of languages that have too few speakers to survive the next 50 years, overall linguistic diversity is at minimum going to be very widespread for the foreseeable future.

tooki

[Partisan01]

yes, I think eventually to do buisness in the world marketplace you'll have to speak either english or chinese

[Buckaroo]

English

[Captain Obvious]

Clearly it will be ebonics

[Andy8]

The word Putonghua means "universial language". Although Mandarin Chinese is the official national language of mainland China, the ethinic and regional dialects and languages are still thriving.

[cpt kangarooski]

Originally Posted by Albert Pujols

Esperanto?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

Bonvolu alsendi la portisto -- laŭŝajne estas rano en mia bideo.

[Cubeoid]

Once we get enslaved by the Chinese, you'll all see.