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Comment by rofo1 | Hacker News Reader

The language of our time is English. There's just no disputing that. You can argue that it's because US won the cold war, and then indoctrinated the world via music and movies, and so on, and so on, but it doesn't change that fact.

We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress?

The point of using a language in the first place is to understand each other.

Everyone learning a new language that will just substitute English would be an immense waste of time.

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> You can argue that it's because US won the cold war, and then indoctrinated the world

Seems odd, surely you could argue it was because of British imperialism (which also brought English to the US)? The British empire once covered 1/3 of the globe, it seems far more likely a cause.

> Seems odd, surely you could argue it was because of British imperialism (which also brought English to the US)? The British empire once covered 1/3 of the globe, it seems far more likely a cause.

If this were the reason, then English should already have been the lingua franca in 1900. But it wasn't.

But the previous spreading of the English language by the English Empire certainly helped when the US emerged as one of the main beneficiary of WW2.

British empire was (almost) 1/4 - it was never close to 1/3 of the world.

Even at its peak, English language wasn't as widespread as now. The French language was, especially in 18th and 19th century, having substituted Latin.

After WW2, US absolutely dominated the world coming off as the only victor in WW2 (that's my personal opinion) and used their position to place English language as #1 language of the world (over time), undisputed. The end of the cold war cemented this even further.

We can argue that British imperialism helped somewhat, that I agree with.

> and used their position to place English language as #1 language of the world

I doubt it was intentional. Seems like it was a nice side-effect at most.

Why do they call it cold war, what do you think? They had wars either through proxy or through propaganda (aka. "culture"). Movies, music and books were big part of that war. Billions and billions went into the production and placement of them.

If that doesn't show intent, then I don't know what would :)

Don't get me wrong, I am actually impressed by it and gotta hand it to Reagan - winning a war without even firing a single shot.

Edit: I don't want to downplay the factor of oil and, but I feel like it's off topic here so that's why I don't mention it.

Hitchcock, almost the entirety of pre-hiphop popular music, a very big chunk of the "cultural pressure" behind the success of the English language did not come from America but from a small island nation that lost WW2 in all but name. American cultural influence is wildly overrated.

> The French language was, especially in 18th and 19th century, having substituted Latin.

Hence the use of the Latin term “lingua franca”

Not exactly - "Lingua Franca" was originally a trading argot/pidgen used by mediterranean traders with more of an Italian basis. Later it came to mean a generic term for "common language". Only centuries later did French became a lingua franca for European diplomacy.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca

It's true for India, British missionary schools popularised English (or should I say British English) in India on a large scale.

It is a bit paradoxical of course, since, as you pointed out, the British empire is the reason that the US speaks english. However, I would still argue that the US is really the reason English became widely spoken in Europe.

The British Empire dominated large parts of the world, but it never dominated continental Europe. English was not widely spoken or taught in Europe until the end of WW2, when American culture became highly influential (although the UK did have its part through pop music).

The final push for English came with the internet and thus again from the US, I think. In many European countries there is a big divide in terms of English proficiency between people who grew up in pre or post internet era.

It's vital small languages are preserved and that the world doesn't become monolingual. Communication is a funny word -- we often mean it to commuincate with others but often we communicate with ourselves in the present -- and to our furture selves -- e.g. code comments are often for your future self as well as other programmers.

People who speak different lanaguges litteraly "think differently" and diversity of thought is absolutely essential to humanity progressing.

It's been positied that "Asians are better at math" because their languages have a more logical naming system for numbers giving many a small early advantage that accumulates over time. Other languges possess other attributes that impart such advantages or disadvanges giving us diversity of thought so that we can have new ideas about things and new perspectives.

That's a fine opinion to have but I happen to have the opposite opinion. A thought has the same meaning in any language. And we actually waste energy in translation and slow humanities' progress with language barriers. I really do wish we all spoke the same language. I feel like I gain nothing by not being able to communicate effectively with some subset of people.

This is obviously not a very popular opinion of mine...

>I really do wish we all spoke the same language.

Just contemplate how if someone suggested all computer languges should be just become C because things would be easier.

It's even more important that we have diversity for natual languages imo -- after all onece you've a Turing Complete language one is the same as the next but we know how silly and inconvenient that would really be.

I'll bite.

Computer languages are more about building a machine than communicating a human idea. Human languages are more about human things. We're all human and therefore should speak the same language.

Computer languages are sometimes so similar and help you build a similar type of machine. Think of ruby, JS, python, etc. All work very similar internally. I really wish we could pick one language (in a particular domain, say scripting) and have a monoculture. It saddens me when libraries need to be rewritten N times. I don't think there's anything silly about it. Web browsers could have picked python instead of JS, Rails could have picked python, and we would have been better off for it.

It's just a silly accident of history that we have what we have today.

Think about hiring a team of people for you next programming project. They each speak a different language and none can communicate effectively. Doesn't sound so good to me.

We could all cherish and love our own native languages internally while relying on English abroad (and online). Those things aren't mutually exclusive.

What I'm saying is it's better that "some" people don't know English. I don't know what number constitutes or what % of people but by having some people -- for lack of a better word -- "corrupted" by English will have new perspectives. We need lots of languages and lots of combinations of these languages for a healthy world.

I say this as a monoglot English speaker. I have some French and Irish but both are very poor.

Languages drift apart, split and evolve. Even if by magic wand the whole world would start speaking perfect English now, in 100-200 years we will most likely have numerous versions of English. Each version would evolve depending on different enclaves of people around the world.

If I had a choice between being better at English and being better at my native language, I'd chose the latter. Realistically though it would be much easier to become less bad at a second language (lot's of low hanging fruit left) than to go from regular to exceptional in you mother tongue.

This! Diversity of thought is what separates us from mere robots. It what makes us non-linear and should be preserved!

People speaking different languages may think different, but most of their thoughts are lost because they can't be easily translated to English. Countries like Germany and France used to have global cultural impact, but today they are almost irrelevant because their work is not easily translatable into English. When was the last time a German or French book, or movie, or song was globally relevant? How many globally relevant works did the comparatively-sized UK publish in the same time?

> People who speak different lanaguges litteraly "think differently"

This widely held belief is absolutely not a proven fact. It's called linguistic relativity or linguistic determinism [1] and the strong form (language determines thought) has not been taken seriously by researchers in the field for a while.

The weak form (language can have somewhat of an impact on the way you think) has not been proven or disproven and is a topic of debate. You just state it as if it was known, even though the causal relationship of most examples you could name can easily be the other way around (culture / thinking affects how a language develops).

I'd argue that everyone learning and speaking the same language would have immense benefits for a global society. You can keep recordings in museums and linguistic researchers to keep a historical record of languages, just like we have for other tools and methods that we no longer have any use for.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

English has the advantage of being an easy language to learn (at least up to 80% proficiency): no genders, little conjugation, no declension.

The fact that it has so lany dialects that are frequently explored in popular media too means its a language that can be spoken poorly and still be understood. The listener bears some of the cognitive load and many other languages arent as advanced in this regard.

A Scottish accent in Parliament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4k8dR04TzA

A Geordie accent on a British broadcast tv show (Auf Wiedersehen Pet) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY4TT3VtR8o

It took me two years of working with a Scottish colleague to fully understand them.

"can be spoken poorly and still be understood"

That is only something that is easy for native speakers, though. The points a non-native speaker anchors in the speaking flow are completely different to the ones a native speaker does, and depend on the mother language, making the thousand "official" variations of native English quite a challenge.

I find far superior other languages approach of having a "high" form taught in schools that everybody native is supposed the speak and understand, and the dialects are left for home.

Yes, but it has the big disadvantage of a very irregular pronunciation. Other languages, like many southern European ones, seem to me to have much easier pronunciation. I am biased because I am Italian, but I am pretty sure that it is much easier for an Englishman with basically no Italian training to speak relatively correctly an Italian sentence than it is for me, after many years of studying and practising English, to properly pronounce English.

I would like this EU English to evolve in the direction of keeping a simple grammar and going towards a more regular pronunciation. Basically it would become a new form of Esperanto, except that differently from Esperanto it would actually have a viable path for many people to learn it.

I know I like to dream, but maybe...

To quote Paul Lewis [1]:

"English is the JavaScript of natural languages: easy to begin with, entirely bonkers, but used so widely you can't really avoid it."

[1] https://twitter.com/aerotwist/status/1129820477667586051

> The language of our time is English.

I take that as a powerful argument against granting it any official preference: English is doing fine with or without being forced upon anybody. That would just provoke organized resistance.

While English might be the language of "our time", I wonder for how long? With China's expansion and their almost 2.5 billion of people speaking Mandarin, I am wondering whether in the next 20 years we'd see a shift towards people learning Mandarin instead of English.

"We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress?" - Sorry but I have to disagree here. While I think it is important to study English, I am not convinced it would be a great idea to abandon other languages in favor of it. Languages are part of a culture and it's traditions. Abandoning the language might lead to a progressive death of certain cultural aspects of one's identity and that wouldn't be progress, imho, that would be the exact opposite.

> almost 2.5 billion of people speaking Mandarin

Where are you getting that number? Ethnologue [1] claims 1.1B speakers, 1B of which live in China, 0.9B being native speakers.

[1] http://www.ethnologue.com/21/language/cmn/

Unfortunately it was from the top of my head, and I should have checked beforehand. Thanks for correcting me!

Due to not having an alphabet and being tonal I highly doubt Mandarin is ever going to be the lingua Franca. It's just too hard for non native speakers to learn.

That's a drawback when you're catching up but an advantage when you are ahead!

> The language of our time is English.

And tomorrows language is mandarin. Let's not write off that 1.1B speakers. With the rate China is expanding its influence in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if in 100 years not speaking mandarin wouldn't look a bit odd.

There are many reasons why Mandarin will not become the next lingua franca, most importantly the writing system which unifies China but is even hard for Chinese to learn. As it looks now, it seems more likely that more and more Chinese will become fluent in English and that some English - possibly including a lot of Chinese loannwords - will be the most widespread language in the 100 years from now.

But I think you were downvoted for the wrong reasons, since otherwise the argument is fairly sound. Chinese influence is continually increasing world-wide. It's mainly the writing system that prevents a wider spreading of Mandarin, and the Chinese cannot give it up because it unifies their nation. Another possible scenario is that other languages of China die out even more quickly than they already do now, thus paving the way to full mutual comprehensibility via Mandarin, which would then allow a drastic reform of the writing system. However, this seems unlikely to occur within the next 100 years.

A drastic reform of the writing system happened 50 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters

For adults it is easy to move across the EU: you can work and socialise using in English.

But for children, and families, it is impossible. How can a child move and be expected to learn a new language immediately?

This seems like a huge disconnect. National governments need to start to offer (for parents that opt-in) primary and secondary education in English, with the entire curriculum and exams in that language as well.

Universities degrees are already offered in English, and at the very least fluency in the language is required to study most courses, since all of the articles, case studies and reference materials are in that language. It is time that that same flexibility was extended to the earlier years of education.

> How can a child move and be expected to learn a new language immediately?

I've seen children do this repeatedly and without any issue whatsoever, it is the adults that struggle.

Sounds like a dystopian future to me.

A dystopia where every human can speak to any other?

Imagine it was the other way around. There is a single language humans speak and someone suggests we should instead split in hundreds of non mutually intelligible ones. Why would any one want that?

Because it's more interesting I think. Like I find europe more interesting than USA because the cultures are more varied and a big reason for that is the language variation. Sadly we are becoming more homogenised already. Dialects are disappearing and it's becoming possible to speak English everwhere as well as to dine in MacDonalds.

Renato Constantino, Filipino historian, argues persuasively that children should be educated in their natal tongue. Largely a political essay, also discusses language issues like a child having to learn a language not spoken in the home before they can begin to learn.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7735/865e2ea8fd8d9662f3916f...

Education strives to transfer the knowledge and experience of those that have gone before to the next generation, so they don't have to start from scratch. As such, it is usually more efficient to do that in the language the recipient understands best, their natal tongue. But over the longer timespan of a human life being limited to your natal tongue will also severely reduce the amount of knowledge and wisdom that you have access to. Most countries address this by giving children in school compulsory lessons in other languages once they reach a certain minimum age. Children from multi-lingual homes have a distinct advantage here, their concepts are already mapped to multiple representations and they do not need to first translate what they want to say or hear into their mother language.

> National governments need to start to offer (for parents that opt-in) primary and secondary education in English, with the entire curriculum and exams in that language as well.

This already exists in many places. European countries are used to offering education in multiple languages. Multilingual schools or schools teaching in something other than the local language have existed for hundreds of years.

> We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress?

It's extremely offensive to suggest that English is progress and other languages are a 'regression'.

I think the progress part is about having a common language, not about this common language being English. If the common language was wolof, people moving back to their own (Spanish, French, German, whatever) would be regression, as now a discussion between French, Spanish and German people would be much much harder to have.

Well, the wording is rather clear that it was about English.

Note that the author stealthily added a precision to his comment (which originally ended at "why regress?") since then to make clear it was about having a common language. But he has not removed the offending part.

Adopting another language as our lingua franca when English is already filling that role would be a regression. It's not saying other languages are inferior per se, they might be superior. But using any other would be an inferior choice now. It doesn't mean we can't add local flavors to it.

I am a French native speaker and I also think we should just use English and move on as a species. Interpersonnal communication is hard enough that we don't need artificial complications. Let's tackle more interesting problems. Same reason we should use a single measurement units system, mains current standard, a single currency, etc.

'move on as a species'? How arrogant and offensive is that? Basically a cultural genocide.

A language carries with it a whole culture and history. Diversity enriches everyone.

English is only the smallest common denominator really, and it hurts to hear Germans speak English imprecisely, stereotypically, or plain incorrectly. I'm far from being a language nationalist or something, but I think the EU (parliament, comission) should take the opportunity to move away from English, and begin to speak and publish in the "Common Tongue" (German, French, etc.) instead.

The current "common tongue" of the world and the EU is English. It might be a hardly recognizable pidgin dialect and very different from the posh Upper Class English spoken in London, but there's nothing wrong with that.

But is hearing Frenchpeople speak German really much of an improvement? At least everyone's English is about equally broken.

There's just too much nuance lost. French has very particular words for concepts of state philosophy, politics, and law, and so has German (eg. yesterday's result saw the Green party's uprising, with their somewhat gender-mainstreamed and weaseled, but in any case special language), and other European languages as well I guess. English could be easily seen as the language of eg. finance-dominated Eurocracy, so using plain language also helps in not portraying EU institutions as "slaves to an international capitalist elite" or something, and give arguments to radical parties.

That's exactly why English is such a success. By losing nuance in the words but making up for it in the sentences the language becomes a lot easier to learn.

I'd much rather have the common language of the EU be English even without an English representation in the EU than to have to parse EU legal documents in French or German. The occasional contract is bad enough. At least with English there is a level playing field.

But a major practical concern is that after Brexit the EU doesn't have Common Law countries left (except maybe Ireland and Malta, but I don't know really). For law and contract texts, Code Civil (Napoleonic Law) will be even more prevalent than before. So I can't see a good reason to stick to English which is simply an awkward language for expressing continental civil law concepts when there's a very large body of law and court language use in the respective native language.

I really can't follow your argument. The EU laws are brand new and not usually connected to the civil code of the countries of the EU, who all have their own take on a lot of stuff. Case in point: the GDPR. The English text is used as the reference by the various countries that have now implemented it, there are translations but anything before the EU courts will most likely be conducted in English and use the English text. Regardless, those texts can be translated and nothing stops a country that is worried about its citizenry being unable to read the text to translate it.

I don't see any major influence of either common law or the Napoleonic civil code on the EU legislation, though the court process arguably has been influenced strongly by those principles.

> The English text is used as the reference by the various countries that have now implemented it,

Is it? All EU laws are published in the official languages of all members. Legally, there are no translations but 22 texts that have equal status and the same meaning.

Don't ask me what happens if the meanings turn out not to match exactly in a relevant way.

Has there been a case before the EU high court yet where there was a meaningful discrepancy between a local version and another that was deemed to be leading?

I've found an interesting text by the legal service of the European Commission that answers that question.

TLDR: That's why the EUCJ primarily relies on the intent of a law.

http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/legal_service/seminars/agjacobs_summ... ("How to interpret legislation which is equally authentic in twenty languages")

Thank you for digging that up! This also explains a couple of other things that I was wondering about.

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