I think (and hope) that as translation tech gets better, we'll see a renewed interest in local languages and dialects.
Once we see the benefit of being able to communicate freely with anybody, and losing the protective aspect of being able to communicate in a language others can't understand, I think people will lose interest in local languages and dialect?
Why learn them when you can just translate them when you need them? What do they bring, except some aesthetical pleasure? Given the work it is to translate materials to a language, it will stop to be done: let the automatic system do that for you!
Then, people will be able to mix and travel more, exchange more, and so they will.
In this env, and using translation again and again, people will start to pick up whatever language is the most common.
Eventually, what is not useful will diseapear, only artefacts that we can translate automatically, will remain.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shape...
We will develop different ways of thinking or improve the language we use.
I don't think there is anything in what we currently have that can compare to a united humanity. And this only can happen if we all can understand each others.
I also don't particularly see the usefulness or relevance of everyone speaking one language for the overwhelming majority of people. Do a Chilean farmer, a Mongolian oil worker, and an American programmer need to communicate with each other on a regular basis? And if they did, would this be worth replacing thousands of years of local culture and language?
Certain human languages are definitely more suited for certain topics; talking about music in Italian is no doubt richer than in English (especially considering that many English music words are just Italian imports.)
We'd also see ad-hoc private languages develop on the fly in between people or machines. This already happens on a micro-level, but technology would make it far easier to implement.
Seems like a beautiful future to me.
And the "richness of expression" argument doesn't really hold water in such a reality – if there are things that "can't be easily expressed in English that can be expressed in Chinese", then your magical auto-translator presumably won't be able to actually convey what you're trying to convey if you say it in Chinese and want it translated to English. If the translator can accurately express your meaning, then the initial premise is invalid, no?
I didn't say that there are things that can't be easily expressed, but rather that certain languages are better suited for expressing certain things, or at the very least, opinionated in particular desirable ways. We're talking about the form, not the content.
In any case, yeah, I might be mixing the idea of a cyborg that speaks/understands all languages with a universal translator machine. It seems like these two things will eventually coalesce, though.
There were a few campaigns where various western countries tried promoting their alphabets over native writing systems. Some succeeded (e.g. Vietnamese) and many others failed. Trying to completely change the language is an even bigger stretch. Places like India have a long history of English, but few Indian people speak pure British English. Most will throw a mix of perfectly pronounced English words in the middle of a sea of their local language. English doesn't have a clear path to domination despite it being spoken by so many people.
With electing Trump or voting for Brexit native English speakers do not seem to care much.
Ireland now has the biggest natively English speaking population inside the EU. More than ever the EU is a German-French organization.
English.
It'll be interesting to see the hybrid blend of English/Chinese/Spanish/Arabic that everyone learns in school.
Doesn’t India have its own English dialect - similar to the US, Australia, etc.?
There has been some synchronisation with other English locales due to the effects of globalisation, but not a great deal. Beyond that, it does have some deviations from British English as it was in the days of the Empire, mostly due to grammatical misunderstandings becoming common and thus standard, or linguistic patterns from local languages making their way into English; the two examples that spring most immediately to my mind (as an Australian currently in Hyderabad): “very less” instead of “very little”, and a gratuitous “only” suffix where other dialects would either omit it or place it earlier in a sentence.
Concerning fiblye’s point: in cities, you’ll hear a fair smattering of English words when people are speaking their local languages. In rural areas this happens much less.