English is on course to eat up smaller languages. Mass communication has brought the world closer together, and with that, diversity is lost. It’s too early to say whether it’s for better or for worse, but here we are.
Look at words like day, tag, dag and so on in the various Germanic languages. When you see that in English, the letter g morphed into y in a lot of words, it makes sense and of course we have to allow for some rather random spelling in the past and a great vowel shift or two. I live in Yeovil which was recorded as gifle (a fork in a river) in about 900. The nearby river Yeo seems to be named after the town which is named for its location on a feature of the river ...
These islands from 55 BC to 1066 AD became a revolving door to various invasions, some of which included Swedes and Danes generally as vikings, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Italians (Romans) and any other tom, dick or harry that could find a boat and fancied duffing up a few Britons and settling down and raise a few apples and chickens! When the Northmen - Norsemen - Normans ie Duke William of Normandy turned up in 1066 they eventually did the job properly and ... eventually became English themselves and simply gave the language a bit of a twist. For example we have both Saxon and Frankish (French) words for many things eg meat: cow and beef, sheep and mutton, chicken and errr chicken, pig and pork.
I think that because English has had so many influences in the past that it has developed a certain flexibility that many languages do not. It is also a relatively new language - only 1500 years old! I learned Latin at school for several years, along with French and lived in Germany for 10 years (off and on). English can be warped and twisted and generally abused and yet the meaning remains intact better than some other languages.
The ultimate irony here is that I am talking about the new kid language on the block on HN!
http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/
India, due to its deeply colonial state apparatus, is well on its way to losing most of its languages in the coming century. I think this is also the case with African nations - which might explain why the sub-continent (not just India) and Africa share so much in terms of human development indicators.
Oh, come on: you’re saying that teaching English to Indian students makes them illiterate in both their regional dialect and in English? You’re going to need to cite something like that, and a link that tries to correlate “poor countries often speak European languages” to “they’re poor because they’re not speaking whatever they originally used to” (instead of “their language is probably a byproduct of being colonized, and they’re poor because of that and not because European languages have some inherent linguistic deficiency”). And if we’re talking about anecdotal evidence, I suggest you take a look at the graduates of top “English-medium” institutions of India: many of them are multilingual.
Yes, it definitely has. Ireland has (optimistically) ~1-2% native Irish speakers.
Welsh is spoken by maybe 20-30% of people living in Wales. I couldn't find a number for native/fluent speakers, but it is certainly much less than that figure - probably similar to the Irish one.
Scottish isn't even a language. There are languages called 'Scots' and 'Gaelic'. Again, both a spoken by a small minority.
But by raw number of languages standardising on English is probably not ideal. Probably some hybrid of Chinese grammar, Korean alphabet and Latin pronunciations would have been my pick for example.
Orthography becomes irrelevant as soon as you use Hangul to write a language entirely different from Korean, which wouldn't have the same inflected forms.
You could hope for merging of communities that create an unified language, but whenever two communities are not completely merged, each will coin new words, the pronunciation will drift, etc.
That is because locutors create languages, not ruling bodies.
Examples of that include canadian french, and english as spoken in Europe, for which many words are not known to native english speakers.
Have some examples of these english words that native english speakers wouldn't know?
Even more of them can be found in business language, which did not become loan words.
Only occasionally is it used in a sense when a magnifying effect is implied.
You get a ruling body to declare a particular manner of speaking as the preferred one, mandate that it be taught to children in school and prevent anyone who speaks differently from appearing in mass media. After a generation, you have children who grew up speaking non-standard with their parents but standard with their peers in school. Many of them will speak standard with their children, so non-standard becomes something you use to speak to your grandparents. Then the grandparents die and almost everyone who speaks non-standard fluently doesn't use it regularly, so they forget. The next generation grows up barely aware that the standard way to speak is not the only way.
All of that doesn't completely stop natural language change from occurring, but it strongly constrains the range of possible variation. Locutors may create languages, but ruling bodies can tell them which language to create.
Because, being french, we actively do it, and it is an utter failure. People do not know the ruleset they were supposedly taught, new words largely come from the society as opposed to the institution, and thus the institution mostly acknowledges things after the fact.
From that pov, the thing you describe looks like a pipe dream.
Still, the descendants of emigrants who learnt the dialect of their parents can only understand the older generation, not their peers.
In a liberal democracy?
The Académie Française is responsible for defining the proper spelling of words and update the intricate grammar rules.
At some point the Éducation Nationale adopts the changes and requires that all children learn using the new rules.
Eventually style guides of major newspapers and TVs are updated as well.
This has worked mostly until the reform of the 1990s which is controversial. I think the Éducation has only recently started to enforce it (15 years later). Many publications still use or tolerate the old style. Microsoft office gives you two dictionaries to chose from.
So basically this has worked until people started to actively go against it...
And the language is explicitly standardized by the Accademia della Crusca.
Still you are not wrong, now that it is widely spoken, it is likely that the language will mutate quickly (and signs are already visible).