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Comment by eveningcoffee | Hacker News Reader

I have many times wondered if the world would be a better place if we could unify our world to use a common language.

What horrifies me would be the horrendous loss of cultures that we will loose access to.

I like the idea of everyone using Esperanto as their second language. But there is a problem with incentives. Even the argument of political neutrality has its problems: someone has to be the first to seriously support the language, but at that moment the language would stop being perceived as neutral. (For example, if tomorrow EU would decide to use Esperanto as a neutral common language, and if the plan would actually work well, then people outside EU would see it as the language of EU, not as a neutral one.)

Also, sometimes people don't want to cooperate, but rather to out-compete their neighbors. Learning English or Chinese is more difficult than learning an artificial language -- but if you have already paid the costs of learning them, you have an advantage over your neighbors who got worse education. Making international communication too simple would take away the relative advantage of those who have already invested in the current one.

I doubt the world would be a better place. Different languages often go hand in hand with different cultures, trying to unify everything may not be a good idea to make the world better.

I believe the answer is that we must teach our children to be multi-lingual, at all costs, and eschew any and all cultures which, on the basis of the value they place on their own language, render other cultures words 'inferior'.

The spirit of the desire to render a world language is a good one. There are many ways this can be accomplished; at a personal level, it is made through the decision to honour every word, every symbol, every sign on Earth, with equality.

Guess French is out :/

You'd better start learning Chinese then!

There are more English speakers globally than there are Mandarin speakers. The number of people that can comprehend some reasonable amount of English is even higher. The Mandarin number is going to contract as China's population declines, the English speaking population will continue to expand perpetually. By comparison, half of the EU can speak English, and that figure is climbing. Less than 1% of the EU can speak Mandarin. The same premise holds for Africa and Latin America. In Latin America, Mandarin is such a rarely known language it's difficult to even measure its use against Spanish, Portuguese and English.

Few people in the rest of the world are attempting to learn Mandarin, because it's a very difficult language to learn and it has a limited cultural projection. The use case to learn Mandarin is primarily restricted to a subset of a subset of business. More people speak English in Asia outside of China, than speak Mandarin.

I'd highly encourage you to listen to this lexicon valley podcast, I am a bit skeptical on mandarin or cantonese or one of the other dialects of chinese taking over globally.

http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2018/0...

I was more trying to make the op think about the fact that their language might not be the universal one, and to think about how it might feel to be forced to learn some other culture's language, than to make a statement about mandarin Chinese specifically. It just seemed like a tone deaf statement to casually suggest that perhaps everyone else in the world could be forced to abandon their mother tongue.

Which 'Chinese'?

There is no such thing as a "chinese" language. Your statement is akin to saying "You'd better start learning european then".

China is a region with a far greater linguistic diversity than europe.

Plain "Chinese" commonly refers to Mandarin in English usage.

The CCP is trying to wipe out the other dialects as soon as possible, anyway.

> Plain "Chinese" commonly refers to Mandarin in English usage.

What we call "chinese language" has historically been cantonese as that's what we are mostly familiar with ( mostly via immigration ).

Most of us don't even know there are different chinese languages. I know I didn't until someone corrected me on social media.

Reminds me of a quip from Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw: "The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language."

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