
What Will the World Speak in 2115? - prostoalex
http://www.wsj.com/articles/what-the-world-will-speak-in-2115-1420234648?tesla=y&mod=e2fb
======
tokenadult
From the article: "By the time Esperanto got out of the gate, another language
was already emerging as an international medium: English." Yep. Esperanto is
toast as a world interlanguage compared to English. The number of new speakers
added to English each year just by natural increase of households in which
English is spoken as a home language is, matched for levels of proficiency,
comfortably greater than the total worldwide number of speakers of Esperanto.
(The same is true, of course, of Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish,
and Hindustani.) English is by far the language of choice in "interlanguage"
contexts, as for example when a native speaker of Korean travels to Taiwan (I
have seen this many times) or when a native speaker of Japanese travels to
China (I have seen this too) or even when educated native speakers of various
Sinitic languages meet up and some are not proficient in standard Mandarin (I
have seen this plenty of times too). The use of English as an interlanguage in
India alone (where mandating Hindi as the sole interregional language would be
very politically contentious) ensures that English will continue to grow and
thrive, even if the United States and Britain somehow disappeared from the
world. (I have been watching a lot of films from India recently, as my town is
blessed with more than one cinema that show current films from India, and even
in a movie set in India with entirely Indian characters, you will hear little
snatches of English embedded in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, or Malayalam dialog, and
you will always see signs in English in street scenes even of very rural
places.)

So, yes, what will the world speak only a century from now, as the article
asks? Plenty of other languages, for sure, and I for one am glad I devoted
years to learning Chinese and German and other languages, but there will be
more and more people speaking English in more and more places as the years go
by.

~~~
jodrellblank
On the other hand, Esperanto is the only constructed language to have got
anywhere at all, and is outlasting those smaller languages that are going
extinct every few weeks and those natural languages on life support kept
around by hobbyists with too much power, like Welsh.

It hasn't become a dominant inter language (yet), but it also hasn't failed,
and nothing has come along to change that Esperanto is dramatically less
effort to learn to usable levels than any evolved language.

~~~
tokenadult
_Esperanto is dramatically less effort to learn to usable levels than any
evolved language_

That is a frequent claim in the Esperantist literature, one I encountered when
I studied Esperanto, but it is dramatically untrue. There are very few people
who have taken up Esperanto who can communicate well with it even after much
effort. That's especially true for people of the majority of the world's
native language backgrounds.[1]

By the way, how would you write your whole comment in Esperanto?

[1]
[http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/](http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/)

~~~
jodrellblank
_By the way, how would you write your whole comment in Esperanto?_

I would struggle, because I'm not a fluent Esperantist; it would come out be
omething like:

Alian ideon. la Esperanton estas la sola konstruitan lingvon kio havas multaj
da parolistoj en multaj loĝoj. Ĝi ekzistas, dum ĉiu semajno aliajn malgrandajn
lingvojn mortas, kaj ĝi havas pli vivo ol tiojn denaskajn lingvojn kio vivas
de amatoristoj kun tro influo - ekzemple kimra lingvo.

La Esperanton neestas la plej uzata mondlingvon (nuntempe), sed ĝi ne mortas.
Nenio ŝanĝis la fakto ke vi povas lerni ĝin, ĝis vi bonparolas, en malpli
tempo ol iu denaska lingvo.

\--

[I dropped English idioms "on the other hand" \- which hand?, "have got
anywhere" \- languages don't go anywhere, some of the metaphoric stuff about a
language being alive and "on life support". If I've written it reasonably well
it should carry the same general meaning. Transliterating this comment back to
English:

Another idea. Esperanto is the only constructed language which has many
speakers in many places. It exists while every week other small languages die,
and it has more life than those native languages which live by amateurs with
too much influence - for example Welsh.

Esperanto is not the most used world-language (currently), but it is not dead.
Nothing changed the fact that you can learn it, until you speak well, in less
time than any native language. ]

~~~
tokenadult
I could surely learn Dutch to given level of proficiency faster than I could
learn Esperanto to the same level of proficiency. And what's really sad about
that for Esperanto is that learning Dutch would give me access to more
speakers in more places than learning Esperanto does.

~~~
jodrellblank
Why "surely"?

That's not a great comparison since Dutch is about as close as a foreign
language gets to English. And when you learn it you can only use it in the
Netherlands and some former colonies. More speakers yes, but ... More places?

~~~
tokenadult
You seemed to be quite confident in your use of the phrase "any native
language," so I immediately suggested a counterexample. As the Justin Rye
website, already linked above, points out, Esperanto is NASTILY hard to learn
for the native speakers of many languages. I by no means accept the statement
that Esperanto is easy to learn to a given degree of proficiency unless
someone shows me a well conducted study to that effect published outside of
Esperantist advocacy publications. (I know for certain that the United States
Army investigated using Esperanto as a language for the "aggressor" force in
war games, but that practice appears to have been abandoned. Other countries
at other times would have had sufficient interest in investigating an easy-to-
learn interlanguage that I have to conclude, on the basis of "extraordinary
claims require extraordinary evidence," that Esperanto is not especially easy
to learn for actual real-world use with persons who have other native language
backgrounds.)

~~~
jodrellblank
But why surely? What makes you suggest Dutch would be easier than Esperanto to
learn to fluency? Dutch looks as daunting as any other natural language to me,
whereas the simplified patterns in Esperanto make it much more attractive. No
more (goose->geese, but bed->beds). No more (swim->swam, but jump->jumped). No
more (row/row) spelling and pronounciation weirdness. (X/malX instead of X/Y)
dramatically reducing vocabulary to say the same thing. Looks much easier than
Dutch.

(Albeit not _Easy_ because how easy can it ever be to learn to say
_everything_ in another way?)

 _Other countries at other times would have had sufficient interest in
investigating an easy-to-learn interlanguage_

If they really had "sufficient" interest, they would have funded some
linguists and had an interlanguage designed from scratch, then mandated that
it be taught in their schools and _solved the problem_ [1]. Language work
requires minimal technology, minimal physical resources, and minimal space, so
funding from a government scale budget would be a non-issue ... so why haven't
they?

All of the central European governments with multiple neighbour countries
speaking different languages, international organizations like the EU, the UN,
WTO, ISO, any of these people -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intergovernmental_organ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intergovernmental_organizations)
\- which of them had _sufficient interest_ to _actually try and solve the
problem_ \- in whatever way, picking any of the myriads of constructed
languages or having their own designed and agreed upon?

Your suggestion is that they investigated Esperanto and found it too
difficult, right? But why haven't they done anything, except be happy that
English or French is good enough for them and ha ha sod the entire rest of the
world who find English and French difficult to learn to fluency.

[1] I conclude, either the problem of agreeing on a more-simple shared
language is unsolvable, or they didn't have "sufficient interest" in solving
it.

------
rmason
I think the article asks the wrong question. Surely by 2115 we will have a
perfect universal translator fluent in hundreds of languages.

Why learn Chinese or Hindi if your smartphone or perhaps your glasses will
seamlessly translate back and forth between your native language? The pressure
to learn a second language will be lessened greatly.

~~~
hrktb
Sometimes automatic translation seems to be the flying cars of computer
engineering.

In 2115 we might be able to technically do a very good approximation of it,
but it might not have much use except for very casual contexts.

I think it really comes down to controlling one's communication. For instance,
right now businessmen learning Mandarin are not cheaping on translator
services, they want a better understanding of someone's culture, the concepts
they think in, and want to speak in their own words.

Communication is and always will be extremely important, and as soon as there
will be enough stakes, the time we 'lose' in learning will always be worth the
gain in control.

Of course a universal translator would help for tourism and casual matters.
But I think for translating a menu, street signs or simple instructions we are
already having pretty decent applications and won't need to wait for another
century.

~~~
rspeer
As an example of how overly optimistic people have been about translation,
here's a page on Foresight Exchange (a long-running play-money prediction
market) where people have been betting on the probability of high-quality
machine translation by 2015, since 1995:

[http://www.foresightexchange.com/fx-
bin/Claim?claim=Tran](http://www.foresightexchange.com/fx-
bin/Claim?claim=Tran)

Even up through 2008, most people thought it was going to happen by 2015! Of
course the people who were more actively following AI knew that it wouldn't. I
probably doubled my fake money on FX, if only I could remember my login.

~~~
tga_d
Overly optimistic over the course of 20 years is one thing, but I find it
pretty difficult to believe that translation between major languages won't be
mostly solved in 100 years. The difference between what is available today and
20 years ago is already pretty impressive, but 100 years ago we didn't even
have the theoretical underpinnings of a computer, let alone a machine capable
of any kind of automated, generalized translation. Unless machine learning
developments or computing power comes to a screeching halt, I can't see any
insurmountable roadblocks.

That isn't to say I agree with the sentiment that efficient and accurate
translation will make English obsolete. Pretty much every major programming
language, along with things like URLs and markup, requires using ISO Latin
characters found on a QWERTY keyboard, which greatly limits the power of a
major class of contenders. English just happened to be the lingua franca at
the time that cultural globalization allowed for a language to keep that
status long past the nation that made it such stopped being a super power
(which, of course, may or may not happen to the US in the next 100 years).

~~~
hrktb
I think translation isn't an isolated problem. I mean by that that we might
not be able to solve translation alone, and probably will need an almost exact
machine reproduction of the human thinking process to correctly translate
something.

For any mildly complex concept, heuristics, context analysis, pattern matching
and word databases won't be enough to match two exact sentences in different
languages. Even a sentence like 'I felt sick watching him treating his partner
this way' will need an extreme lot of intelligence to correctly parse and
convey in a different language.

If in 100 years AI really reaches the holy grail and we have actual artifical
intelligence, translation will be a solved problem. Now, will we be able to
reach that goal in 100 years ? I hope, but that's not a given I think.

------
natrius
I don't know how people will communicate in 2115, but I can't imagine a 2115
where every human doesn't know every language without any effort at all. How
can a discussion of life that far in the future not mention how computers will
shape it?

~~~
elnate
[http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3576#comic](http://www.smbc-
comics.com/?id=3576#comic)

------
eddielee6
Prediction: Everyone speaks in JavaScript

~~~
burritofanatic
Nooooo!

Drops to my knees, camera zooms up and out. Roll credits.

~~~
sp332
It's OK, you can just speak C and emscripten will turn it into JS for you.
Good luck reading what anyone else writes though...

------
qianyilong
I really don't like how tones are presented as a confounding item like
irregular verbs. Tonal languages essentially just take advantage of extra
bandwidth that was ignored by most european languages.

They are hard for western learners but only because we are unused to treating
tonal information as important.

In fact because of tones and limited pronunciations available I have found
that I feel Chinese is more tolerant of bad or variant pronunciations than
english(Assuming you can get tones right but there are really only 5 tones to
learn). Tones just make a few more bits available for error correction.

As background I have studied chinese for 8+ years and lived in asia for a
couple of years as well.

~~~
themodelplumber
We use tones in English, too. Is it TACO Bell, or Taco BELL? Either one can
get you laughed out of the room in refined company, depending on your peer
group.

~~~
dragonwriter
I'm not sure what you are trying to communicate with the capitalization there,
but what it _suggests_ to me is more stress/accent than tones; those aren't
the same thing.

------
sbmassey
I don't think the loss of a language without a literature is much of a loss,
really.

Also Navajo, though grammatically odd to speakers of Indo-European languages,
contrary to the article does not seem to only have irregular verbs.

~~~
eveningcoffee
I think that quite contrary - when language without literature is lost then
everything about this language - traditions, knowledge, history, is lost
forever (unless anthropologists manage to save some bits of it).

~~~
gizmo686
Not nessasarily, the people could continue to pass down the
traditions/knowledge/history using another language. If a language with
literature is lost, then you loose just as much of those things, as well as
the literature (because no one can understand it). Of course, having
literature increases the chances of having a rossetta stone.

------
rokhayakebe
I have a different opinion. I think people will stick to their languages, and
some will die naturally.

However, one _new_ language will emerge. It will be a set of 500 to 1000 words
that anyone can learn and use to communicate world wide.

Similarly to a programming language, this one will be limited in words and
easy to pick up. This language will act as a framework, giving the essential
people would need to have basic communication. 500 to 1000 words.

~~~
jodrellblank
Your hundred year prediction is already more than a hundred years out of date.
Welcome to 1880's Bialystok in not-yet-Poland, and the birth of Esperanto.

Here we are in 2015 and the one hundredth annual Esperanto Congress is coming.

The reasons approximately nobody speaks Esperanto now, are the same reasons
nobody will speak your universal language in 2115.

~~~
BillChapman
I see things differently. I see Esperanto as a remarkable success story. It
has survived wars and revolutions and economic crises and continues to attract
people to learn and speak it. Esperanto works. I’ve used it in about seventeen
countries over recent years. I recommend it to anyone, as a way of making
friendly local contacts in other countries.

~~~
jodrellblank
I think it's odd for people to argue that "it failed" when it's the only
language to have started from scratch and taken off at all; there's no
precedent to compare it with - how long "should" a language take to go from
non-existent to popular?

------
kmfrk
The article is not getting a good reception at /r/linguistics:
[https://np.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/2r4853/what_the...](https://np.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/2r4853/what_the_world_will_speak_in_2115/).

------
seivan
I sure hope not Arabic :-/ As a minority we will be fucked.

------
walterbell
No mention of cross-language icons, signs and emoji?

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MisterMashable
We will all speak Schwiitzerdüütsch or at least be able to spell like we speak
it.

