I’m sitting in the terminal getting ready to get on an international flight. People are speaking so many languages around me, and it is amazing. I wish I could understand and speak to everyone. For better or worse, one day, everyone will share a language, but that language will be layers of the current languages in the world.
It reminds me of a study I saw on European Gypsy communities or, to be fair, Romani Communities. The study dissected the linguistic artifacts to retrace the origins of the secretive society. What they found was fascinating. At the root, they were able to tell the origins of the Romani language. They were from India. But, more than that, they were able to infer that they were of the Kshatriya caste, warriors. They could track the time down to an Asia Minor invasion where a large army repelled the invasion. It was the vocabulary. The base language and writing were from Sanskrit, but all vocabulary involving war and military were lifted directly from India during that time. All of the words dealing with agriculture were Persian. Metal working and industry, Byzantine.
A linguistic fossil record placing a whole peoples not only in locations but a narrative as to the color and shape of their daily lives.
One day, languages will converge. The human desire is to communicate. The internet is the universal tapestry for the stories of the individual. Decentralized society but in a common fabric. It necessarily undermines the concept of the nation state (I’ll get back to that thought another day).
I can imagine a single global language. Maybe fringes based on shared experiences. Certain peer groups will carve out an exclusive language for their purposes, but there will be a lingua franca of the internet that will then be the universal language on the streets of the world. It won’t be english or chinese or dutch. It will be an amalgam reflecting something about us we can’t yet perceive. When it happens, where will our words for joy and happiness come from? What language will be the language of our highest aspirations? Which will be the language of sorrow, anger and hate?
