The Race to Save 'Contact Languages'
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bbc.com
Language documentation doesn't completely change the social environment, but can indirectly enhance the language's prestige, e.g. by devising a writing system that then gets adopted in education and media and by raising awareness that "different" doesn't necessarily mean "wrong". It also means that children who grew up without learning their parent's mother tongues but want to learn them later in life can use the material collected as part of language documentation for studying.
In response (our dialects having had an army) where before those countries had been taken as arbitrating the prestige forms of their languages, there's been a revival of local dialect. We don't have an "RP": politicians in 2020 will of course use a prestige register in speech, but don't bother to hide their dialects.
(Written language has an orthography, taught in school. But most people I know treat SMS/chat as an oral, not literate, form. In german this results in idiosyncratic spelling, in french, "langage SMS")
Too bad in France there was a policy of linguistics cleansing which effectively destroyed dialects and non-French languages as fast as in two generations. Of course there are other factors as well, like marriages in-between people of different regions.
PS. 3 bises > 2 bises ... but on the other hand, if it weren't for you all, we wouldn't have verlan :-)
PPS. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6e/d4/b0/6ed4b0c84ac892dc5b9d...
> Enslaved people developed a hybrid language that sailed from Africa to the Caribbean and—unbelievably—back again.
[1] https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley/2020/09/the-englis...
This example also shows, however, that the category of contact languages is rather fluid. Afrikaans is not an outrightly obvious example of one. While the grammar is fairly simple - and very little like that of Dutch - the vocabulary us almost exclusively Dutch.
So it could be a creole - albeit one with the vocabulary almost exclusively from one of the contributing languages, which is extremely rare. But it could also be an offshoot of Dutch that had its grammar simplified and adapted to surrounding languages without picking up more than a handful of words from those same languages - which is also unusual.
All this to say contact languages come in many forms - and, like the article says, should be studied because they teach us how language works.
The article says peoples cultural or ethnic identity are at risk, "an entire tradition can die with them" but it seems more that the culture has changed and the language is no longer useful. Long ago I watched a TED(x?) talk on the topic and the thrust of the speakers argument is that there are concepts that simply cannot be conveyed in other languages, but even at the time it seemed like a specious argument. There are loan words that are common in the English language and I don't think anyone is eager to replace with a 'native' word.
After having written the above the only reason I can think of is traditional songs that are passed down orally, which would be a loss I admit. Interested to learn something in the comments that I've probably overlooked.
We tell stories and jokes, explain feelings and share joy and pain all through language. It's more than VC pitches!
If my language goes, it takes with it centuries of poetry and literature. And the link it provides to the past, not just historically but in place it takes in the evolution of languages in this part of the world.
I can see and understand the value in having a lingua franca, but the argument does miss the point that we're human before anything and our language is intertwined with that.
Common? Like most of them! For example, a huge number of words have a French origin due to the Norman conquest. A long list of Native American words have found their way into (American) English. English adopts words from other languages with wild abandon.
How many of these are not place names?
Words like teepee and squaw don't really qualify as loans in my eyes. They're native words, sure, but they are used exclusively in talking about the natives.
Chocolate and barbecue ultimately trace back to indigenous words, but they didn't come from indigenous languages. They came from Spanish. (Compare "adobe", the material common in the American Southwest -- there is a theory that this word can be traced back to Ancient Egyptian. Is it a loan from Ancient Egyptian? No.)
Animal terms are similar to the first category, but feel more like they're genuinely a part of the language. Skunks are called skunks in every context; tents are usually called tents, not teepees.
Mario Pei in "The Story of the English Language" estimates that 1700 English words have an American Indian origin.
People create languages to communicate on an as-needed basis. And languages that aren't needed anymore or that are supplanted by other forces fall away.
Language is not a finite resource. Language is not equivalent to culture, and even if it were, culture is not a finite resource.
I'll be thrilled if every language in the world disappears except for one, and we all communicate in it. I don't care which one, although ideally it'll be a simple or logical one, like Indonesian/Malay, with a writing system like Hangul.
I wouldn't even be bothered if it's my own culture disappearing if the upshot is the global efficiency gain of everybody speaking, reading, and writing in ways that everybody else instantly understands, without the need for multi-lingual versions or translation software or human translators.
People who want to still do learn latin or Ancient Greek or Sanskrit. And even if they couldn't, the trade-off is still worth it times a thousand.
What about the mental exercise and developmental benefits of being bilingual? As a multi-lingual person myself, I recognize this. But there's no reason your other languages have to be from a particular culture or can't be constructed languages.
I'm guessing bilingual English/Korean kids or bilingual Spanish/Toki-Pona kids get all the same benefits, regardless of the particular language pair.
But a single language? In one sense sure, it’s a dream, but it would be a sad one. In my adult household, my kid, my wife and I used three and sometimes four languages continuously because some things are simply hard to express in the language a sentence may have begun with, or because we simply use a certain one to discuss certain activities or topics. Many of our friends are the same, though not necessarily with the same set. And why not?
As a bilingual person yourself I assume you do the same. You would really be willing to give that up?
=== Separately: languages are human artifacts but are barely consciously invented; rather they are emergent, so can provide insight both into social systems and even into neural systems (consider people with no way to express right/left). Or to use two of your examples: agency is quite important in English (“I dropped the plate”) compared to, say, Spanish (“The plate fell”). Just looking at this leads to experiments to see how linguistic choices affect decision making, emotion, and the like.
IMO: Language is emergent. The fact that you often switch language mid-sentence, or use different languages in different contexts, demonstrates this.
I vaguely remember hearing somewhere that English became popular because it was easy to adopt words and phrases from other languages. I suspect that even if we (all people) had a point where we all spoke a single language, our general emergent behavior means that new words, phrases, and dialects would naturally emerge.
Of course- this, plus geographic separation, is the reason we have so many languages today.
But technology and mass media bring to bear forces against language fragmentation that were never seen before historically.
Find me a great programmer, anywhere in the world, who can't carry on a fairly competent (not deep obvs) conversation in English. One would necessarily have to read docs in English, or use programming language keywords in English, or even interact with a global community of other programmers in English.
If you extend that into every other industry and school, it's feasible for the entire population of the world to be native-level in 1 global language, and for that competence to be maintained for hundreds or thousands of years.
Like the Marain language in Iain M. Banks' Culture series.
These days, though the border regions tend to have a lot of bilinguals, the languages are distinct and people a few miles on either side of the border may not Have a common tongue at all.
As for language keywords: do you need to speak Italian to play music or do you simply know what “da capo a la fine” means?
I worked with one. They were a Windows driver developer. We were desperate, because there aren't a lot of Windows driver developers anymore.
This is a thing English speakers like to say but all languages do this, and in particular imperial languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian) have reason to do it a lot. Language is so important and so intensely used that all the corners are long since knocked of; no one language is hard for kids to learn and it is equally as easy/ hard to adapt a loan word in any language.
Also I hear English speakers (I am one btw) talk about English having an unusually large vocabulary. They have clearly never seen an Italian dictionary!
The C compiler I wrote in the 80's could produce error messages in several languages. I was pretty proud of it. But nobody used that capability, they preferred the English messages. A huge problem was finding someone bilingual in English software jargon and X software jargon.
So yeah, one spoken language for programming is more efficient.
Also, the D programming language accepts foreign language identifiers. Does anyone use that feature? I'm sure someone will say they do, but they are a very tiny, tiny minority.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/official-bilingualism-c...
There are more important things like producing documents only once, and presenting ideas only once. I went to a fully bilingual university, and every brochure and every sign and every everything was produced and printed twice.
Then there are the huge things: right now there are 7000 languages, so any given person only gets to enjoy a tiny fraction of the cultural product produced by those 7000 speakers.
There'd be a massive gain in the efficiency of consumption if some random shepherd in Nepal had a blog that some random doctor in Mexico could read natively and be inspired.
Or if some kid rapping in Bucharest about his problems were natively understandable to some kid listening in Brazil.
In the mode where we're all so many pillars of atoms walking about, what difference does one language more or less make?
The psychology of the argument is more fascinating than the argument itself.
But "losing a language" (losing all the users except those studying it) could lead to some loss of the convey of certain unique culture (that can only be represented accurately in that language)
Having one language only is either (1) A group of people forcing every people in the world using it or (2) All people in the world are willing to give up using all other languages
For (1), it's not what myself and many people want as it means our freedom is taken away.
For (2), I think it's unlikely to happen as different languages have different specialties in representing some concepts. Having one language only probably means some concepts cannot be well communicated.
I can speak Cantonese (Hong Kong version), English and read some Japanese (enough for my games & comics). I would never give up any of them.
We make up new words and new grammar all the time. At some point we needed to encapsulate what a "boomer" is, and we didn't need to turn to another language that specializes in boomers.
When there's enough utility in encapsulating a multi-faceted concept into a single word or phrase, we get there.
If we needed to describe 50 different types of snow on a regular basis, we would.
It isn't as though there's any barrier in one language for coming up with new concepts compared to any other.
This may seem more efficient to the OP but we’re not talking about a common official language being known by all, but a single language displacing all others for the purpose to homogenise a country that consists of many cultures into a single one.
So it’s important to say: language is not only a tool but a reflection of culture, identity, and your part of society. We can learn a lot about people by learning their languages, and the disappearance of a language is always significant.
You can still have approximately the same root culture even with a completely different language as the daily driver. Jewish history is a good example of this.
If I could snap my fingers and eliminate all languages except for one, and have all cultures adjust/evolve to use that language instead, I'd do it. Not because we wouldn't be losing anything, but because the loss would be 1000x worthwhile.
Not really. Cantonese and other languages not part of the fifty-odd official standard languages of China aren't taught in most schools, but that doesn't mean Mandarin has completely taken over. With the exception of big cities that have seen a lot of recent migration (e.g. the number of Shanghainese speakers has grown with the Chinese population boom, but the number of migrants has grown even more, so now it's a minority language in Shanghai itself) if you listen to a random conversation between locals, you'll be more likely to hear a non-Mandarin language than Mandarin.
It's also not that non-Mandarin languages are completely excluded from official use, they're just called "dialects" instead of languages. For example, schools in Xiamen started teaching the local Hokkien in 2010 (a few years after a similar policy change in Taiwan) and most small TV stations have programs in the local language (especially traditional plays and songs).
Those changes are unlikely to lead to phasing out official use of Mongolian in China anytime soon. (E.g. on the Mongolian version of the website of the government of Inner Mongolia: http://mgl.nmg.gov.cn/U_index.html )
I think you're also missing that the Chinese government's language policy is not driven by a single aim. Making the populace predictable and controllable are reasons for the central government to prefer a single language and culture, but trade with Mongolia and tourism where visitors get to experience living in traditional Mongolian yurts, listening to traditional Mongolian songs and riding horses in the traditional Mongolian way are strong economic incentives for the government of Inner Mongolia to retain the Mongolian language and culture.
As you note, Cantonese is not being extinguished in all parts off mainland China.
As a partial explanation or theory, consider that the human brain is the most advanced pattern-matching engine in the known universe. Human relationships are emergent patterns shared between these machines as they operate during a finite lifespan and attempt to uphold a lineage of life through the ravages of time, turning into culture. Language is a configuration of a set of those machines which has survived long enough to uniquely capture a signaling and information-sharing medium with a unique set of rules, which is also a key to a culture among a generational network of the pattern-matching machines, a network which had enough shelter to survive for generations. This culture may have useful knowledge, and certainly contains universes of beauty and meaning.
You don't have to agree. But there are certainly those who would recognize the beauty and importance of preserving the delicate, invisible, beautiful power of language structure.
What OP is proposing is literal genocide. As you said, language is "a key to a culture," and so many such cultures—and, therefore, the lives of their adherents—have been wiped out or critically threatened by more ruthless, or opportunistic groups. A good example is the notion to "Kill the Indian, Save the Man," as practiced by Canadian Residential Schools.
Those were acts of genocide meant to erase the productive knowledge of a sovereign people, to erase their child-rearing, agricultural, architectural, and textile methods. To destroy their educational line and skillsets, to make them dependent on the new colonial regime, its modes of production, its agricultural tools and paradigms.
It's genocide, and to destroy the language is the quickest way to perform it, by immediately cutting them off from their informational archives, be they written or oral.
I haven't advocated for the genocide of Ancient Rome either.
People can still speak or study whatever dead languages or textile methods they like, even if every person in the world suddenly becomes a native Swahili speaker and all future cultural products are created in Swahili, as in my imaginary example.
It’s enough to disagree with an opinion (as I do), without aggressively rounding it up to a criminal act.
I think there are plenty of ways to assume positive intent, without leaping to the preposterous conclusion that the GP would bring about their preferences through genocide.
While it would be hyperbole to characterize OP's cavalier attitude toward others' cultures (verging on xenophobia) as a genocidal crime—or even as a direct recommendation of such—it is not hyperbolic, I hope you agree, to characterize it their post as encouraging a perspective which does NOT recognize linguistic/cultural genocide as aspects of a horrific crime.
It amounts, frankly, to the same thing as logging into this website and professing a complete disinterest in the survival of a given people. (I can use no examples, here, in good taste, so you'll have to recall in your own mind the names of any group who have been victims of genocide in the past, or who might plausibly fall victim in the future.)
> leaping to the preposterous conclusion that the GP would bring about their preferences through genocide.
I agree. It would be preposterous to suggest that the GP were about to pick up a hammer and saw to build an extermination camp. I am suggesting not that linguistic erasure would be performed through an act of physical genocide, but that the ends themselves constitute genocide.
Again, I understand you to be saying "GP is not proposing we deliberately exterminate languages," and I agree. I would not characterize them as, ostensibly, doing so. However, given the socioeconomic forces at play in the world, our history of extractive colonialism[1], etc. it's evident to me that there are people in the world who wake up every morning to perform a job that is actively eroding minority cultures and languages. There are still Nahua in Mexico. There are still Ha'aku in the States. These people have been brutalized by government policies, and corporate exploitation, alike.
To log into this website and profess a disinterest in whether their language dies is to profess a disinterest in whether these people—beleaguered not by natural, but socially constructed forces—retain their cultures, the loss of which constitutes genocide. GP, therefore, seems to be flippantly professing a horrific comfort with genocide. They seem to be suggesting that, should we see any languages going under, that we ought to stand idly by which, as Edmund Burke notoriously asserted, is all it takes for "evil to triumph."
0. https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-alm... 1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/187149.Open_Veins_of_Lat...
I'm frankly astonished to see this on HN of all places, where I'd kind of assume everyone who's been around here a year or two has at least heard of "programming languages" and the fact that even 'failed' languages have frequently had extensive lessons and valuable tidbits for others. All languages humans use exhibit strong path dependency and network effects. We don't necessarily speak them because they're general optima, but rather it's heavily a matter of what others speak and the history leading up to this point. Certain groups of people who happened to speak certain languages happened to be extremely successful at key times, and here we are.
But language shapes thinking to some extent and tends to bake in a certain amount of existing societal thinking, relationships, and thus practices of how to be social beings and make things work. They represent part of fruits of independent real world experiments in culture amounting to hundreds of thousands to billions of man years. That's not something to throw away so lightly. To the extent that we aren't in fact sure what "the best approach" is, or if there is one, or for that matter whether the future may bring different circumstances that require different adaptions, it's useful to keep around stuff that represents a huge amount of condensed information on something that worked even if we aren't entirely sure what to do with it right now. Our future selves/descendants will have more powerful tools with which to find new useful things.
You also set up a false dichotomy where frankly hilariously (or not so funny depending on who you ask) minimal resource expenditure on language preservation is somehow a threat to world efficiency or something. Really?
Edit to add: FWIW, software itself follows this logic too. Yes, sometimes a true total redo is useful. But there is a reason that a fetish for rewrites has been cited as a huge risk for decades [0] at this point. Working software years or decades old by definition inherently embodies a huge amount of hard learned lessons and wisdom. Some of which may be obsolete sure, but it can be very very hard to tell what is valuable and what isn't without going through all the same edge case breakages yet again. There's a lot there from people who are now gone and that may not be documented at all beyond the code. That's not to say everything is worth saving per se, but neither should it be dismissed without extreme care when it represents the collective effort of much time or many people or both. Particular since old stuff tends to be small and very cheap and easy at this point to preserve. It's hard to predict in the present what people decades/centuries down the line will find most interesting and be most curious (or desperate) to learn about us.
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0: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Have my upvote. Not because I agree but because you managed - quite elegantly compared to many other "unpopular opinion" answers - to get others to write down good questions.
There’s also zero evidence to support the idea that speaking the same language makes people less likely to fight each other. Some of the most destructive wars have been fought amongst people that speak the same language and dialect.
Personally, I find the idea of a one-language world horrifyingly dull. Should we all consume the same food, wear the same clothes, think the same thoughts? It’s the opposite of a rich, diverse world. I’m hoping that translation tech will allow niche and obscure languages to flourish.
I speak 2 of those pretty natively and I'd disagree.
If you were to snap your fingers and everybody in Russia suddenly spoke English, all other things being equal, the culture would remain largely the same. Russians would still be Russians.
Sure there'd be a lot less formality among government workers than today, but otherwise life would go on just as it has before. Authors would still write about the same subjects in Russian voices. They'd just find different ways to be poetic or clever or deep, while still writing about distinctive Russian issues.
Two things: 1) This is hard to believe. How does the English language dictate informality? How does Russian especially accommodate formality?
2) How would this not precipitate enormous changes? The "formality" of the State is a crucial aspect of Westphalian cultural hegemony. Its very "institutionality," its sense of realness is dependent on collective agreement that State actions are "formal", and civilian actions are "informal." To erode that boundary would, I think, have unpredictable repercussions.
Some languages have structures in place for formality. In English formality is less explicit, more implied.
Government workers and traditional office workers in Russia, for example, are expected to speak to each other on a second-person plural basis, and use patronymics to address each other: "Elena Ivanovna, did ye move the stapler?".
Obviously over months and years of familiarity, or after going through adversity together and becoming close, many people drop this and start calling each other by familiar names, but perhaps not in front of superiors or outsiders. And dropping this often involves explicitly saying out loud "let's switch from 'ye' to 'you'".
To give another example, if you worked at Samsung in the 90's and you spoke to your direct superior in 반말 (casual, informal speech) without reading the room correctly, you might not only be fired (read: made miserable until you make an excuse to quit), but basically have your professional reputation scorched if future employers heard what you did (i.e. the audacity of speaking to your boss in casual form).
While if you worked at IBM in the 90's you could reasonably start a conversation with your boss's boss with "Hey Bob, got a sec?".
Obviously that's not a rule. In some offices you could be more casual in Korea or Russia and in some offices you could be much more formal in the US. I'm sure there are plenty of bosses at big Corps in the US who wouldn't appreciate a "Hey Bob".
But you can't be said to "know" Russian or "know" Korean if you don't know formal grammar.
Whereas in English there's no such thing as "formal grammar" by comparison- it comes down to word choice, intonation, etc.
e.g.
- "I didn't have enough money, so I couldn't buy it."
- "As I lacked funds, I failed to purchase it."
> How would this not precipitate enormous changes?
It depends what we define as "enormous". Would Russian society still be prima facie Russian society even if everybody were speaking English tomorrow? Yes. It'd be a bit different than today, but it'd still be very much Russian.
You are so, so wrong about that. Let me guess: you didn't grow up in Europe, did you?
A language IS part of a culture. I'm from Italy, where dialects of various regions have distinctive characteristics that are tied to the history and the uniqueness of these regions.
An example?
A great Sicilian writer, Leonardo Sciascia, wrote "The Day of the Owl", which is a book about Mafia, written in the late 1950s, in a period where the Mafia's existence was questioned and uncertain, in popular culture [0].
He talks (in Italian, not in Sicilian) about the five stages of being a man, from best to worst:
"gli uomini, i mezz'uomini, gli ominicchi, i (con rispetto parlando) pigliainculo e i quaquaraquà"
"men, half-men, little-men, (speaking with respect) the take-it-in-the-ass, the blah-blah-blah".
The fourth type, the "take-it-in-the-ass", is a distinct Sicilian word, and can only be fully understood if you take into account Sicilian culture at that time, which had a specific view on homosexuality, in a distinct way compared to the general view you would have in other parts of South Italy.
And the Sicilian language has everything to do with it.
Now, tell me: is the Sicilian language [1] worth preserving?
I say so.
This is precisely the sort of nuance that everyone who is not Sicilian would understand if the author had written in a global language that 100% of the world's population understands natively.
I said that language is not equivalent to culture. You said that language is a part of a culture. We both agree.
I want everyone to have access to all of culture. For every nuance of 1950's Sicilian culture we lose, we gain a complete understanding of the meaning behind every word from every author for the rest of civilization.
I'm saying the trade-off is well worth it.
Global dialects have very little nuance or sophistication, English included. Though, it may be hard to realize that on a site like HN where those who use English as a second language also tend to be well-versed in American English, not to mention highly educated.
Have you ever heard young people speaking Singlish (Singapore) or Hinglish (India) in informal settings? I have and it's immediately obvious that I'm missing alot of nuance, and conversely (despite the high education and familiarity with American culture of the listener) I've learned to be careful with my Americanisms lest they be taken the wrong way. Heck, even in the U.S. there are different forms of sarcasm and irony, both across geographic regions but also, most clearly, social strata. Or compare American English across time. Written American English from 200+ years ago seems facially clear, but just because it seems clear doesn't mean we're not blind to various nuances. Likewise for just 100 or even 50 years ago--contemporaneous culture is encoded in the interstices at least as much as its encoded literally.
The reason global dialects lack nuance is precisely because you can't dissociate culture from language, and local cultures will tend to be richer as they can evolve faster and more independently. Global dialects have to take a least common denominator approach, not only in their grammar and diction but in the shared experiences they reflect.
What's so difficult to understand? It's preserving human knowledge, human history, human development, etc. Language is a form of a unwritten historical document. We can infer a lot of our past from language.
> Language is not equivalent to culture
Nobody said it is. But language is tied to culture and vice versa.
> I'll be thrilled if every language in the world disappears except for one, and we all communicate in it.
What a simplistic world view. So what do we get rid of? English literature? French literature? Chinese literature? Indian literature? Persian? Now which music do we get rid of? Do we just stick to classical?
> People who want to still do learn latin or Ancient Greek or Sanskrit. And even if they couldn't, the trade-off is still worth it times a thousand.
What? In what world does getting rid of latin, ancient greek or sanskrit provide any benefit? Let alone a 1000X benefit? Latin and ancient greek is the foundation of western civilization. One of the reasons for modern society is the preservation of latin and ancient greek. We don't have modern science without latin or ancient greek.
> But there's no reason your other languages have to be from a particular culture or can't be constructed languages.
Actually it does. Language informs on culture and vice versa.
I'd rather keep american literature, history, culture, music, movies, etc and forgo everyone speaking indonesian and writing in hangul. Not to mention keeping french, german, chinese, russian, arabic, etc literature/culture/religion/history/etc. If the price is that we all don't speak the same language, so be it. I can't believe your comment is the most upvoted one here.
It's strange that the same people screaming about diversity are the ones so desperately trying to erase it.
I'm not suggesting we burn books.
I'm suggesting we let all languages die except for whichever singular global language.
Whoever wants to study latin can. Whoever wants to study ancient 20th century American English literature in 1000 years can.
You can keep all the movies and music you currently enjoy.
The difference is that a kid born in Penang and a kid born in Pennsylvania and a kid born in Perm will all be speaking the same language and growing up to make movies and music in the same language, for everyone in the world to enjoy in the same language.
Languages do not die on their own. They're killed. Most "charitably," by environmental circumstance. Less "charitably," they are killed by Colonialism.
No I understood your point perfectly. You are not understanding mine. Throughout history, people have posited your idea. A "universal" language - latin, french, esparanto, etc. Now go back 1000 years ago and imagine you were in charge and we made everyone speak/use latin. We wouldn't have english, french, italian, etc. No shakespeare, no voltaire, no twain, no modernity.
> You can keep all the movies and music you currently enjoy.
Right I understand that. But you are ignoring the future movies/music/etc that will be lost because of the languages that never existed?
> The difference is that a kid born in Penang and a kid born in Pennsylvania and a kid born in Perm will all be speaking the same language and growing up to make movies and music in the same language
Once again, I get the simplistic logic. Right, we all get to listen to the same music and watch the same movies. The point is all the music and movies that will be lost. There was a time I thought the same thing. Now I realize how silly it was and I suppose you'll come to the same conclusion one day.
> for everyone in the world to enjoy in the same language.
I guess you never heard of subtitles or that you can enjoy music without understanding the words. And if we wiped out all languages except vietnamese, how will I enjoy all the nonexistent music that won't be produced in english, french, etc? If you took a minute to examine your own assertion, you'd realize how absurd it is. Certainly, you understand that there is a different sound to vietnamese, american, french, etc languages. These languages produce different sounds which produce different music?
You don't seem to be clued to the fact that different languages/cultures/etc produce different kinds of music/movies/etc. For example, the type of poetry in the english languages is directly informed by language. As opposed to say italian and its extraordinarily rhythmic language. There are pros and cons to languages.
Just like it would be naive to say we should all program in the same language or we should use the same OS or use the same database, it's even more naive to say that about human languages.
> People create languages to communicate on an as-needed basis.
So there's an assumption that languages exist only because they are "needed". Maybe this is true for pidgins, but where's the necessity in e.g. speakers of Proto-Polynesian moving to different islands, losing contact with each other, and having their languages diverge into Hawaiian, Samoan, Tuvaluan, etc.? For the most part, the creation of something we recognize as a distinct language is an unconscious process and is guided by incidental facts like physical location and resulting contact patterns with other language-communities.
> And languages that aren't needed anymore [...] fall away.
I think this is a strange way to put things, and that it could distort some facts about why people lose their ancestral languages. Often languages _do_ cease to be spoken because of, say, economic and bureaucratic reasons, but when this happens it'd be simplistic to look on and say that this is the natural order of things. Many American Indian languages ceased to be spoken in the 19th century because the United States tore Indian children from their parents and put them many miles away in English-only Christian boarding schools where they were physically punished if they ever spoke a word of their mother tongue[1]. It is an odd kind of necessity here that drove American Indians from their languages.
> I'll be thrilled if every language in the world disappears except for one, and we all communicate in it. I don't care which one, although ideally it'll be a simple or logical one, like Indonesian/Malay, with a writing system like Hangul.
Even if we snapped our fingers and everyone in the world suddenly spoke Malay written in a perfectly regular writing system, there's a lot of reason to think that the global language would quickly fragment into many languages again. This would be due to many forces, but two big ones among them would be plain old isolation from the rest of the world (e.g. in the highlands of Papua New Guinea) and the fact that changing the way you speak is a very powerful way of signaling your identity and ideological alignments[2].
More generally, as others have pointed out, people who believe in the value of documenting endangered languages do so most commonly because they believe in the general anthropological value of such data, the specific linguistic value of the data as another data point we can use to investigate the nature of language in general, and last but not least, the value of giving the communities who speak these languages the ability to draw on these records should they ever desire to develop their language.
[0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/416854
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schoo...
To extend a naive view, I think it would be ideal if everyone can choose the languages they want to learn and use. This would make it a bit more like programming languages. There is concentration at the top if you want efficiency of communication, but also a lot of choices to explore. Of course this wouldn't work so well with human languages, since you need something to communicate with people around you. There is a little bit more choice if you decide to learn a second language or more.
By the way, some of this is already happening with globalization. I'd expect one's first language to be whatever used where they are raised. Their second language, if they choose to pick it up, is likely to be one of the popular ones. And the third on so on would be whatever interests them.
On a tangent, there is a Freakonomics podcast "Is Learning a Foreign Language Really Worth It?" that covers some of this. The distinctive conclusion I remember from it is, it's only worth it if the foreign language is English. I guess now or soon it could be Chinese, who knows.
(Over on this continent, we've also seen the emergence of en-eu as a contact language, much to the dismay of the ethnic english.)
Edit: (clarification here due to rate-limit)
Demographically, I expect en-in to become the english "standard" (just going by history: some english are still salty that most people who learn english these days learn what they'd consider "american").
pop(M)
IN 1'300
US 300
UK 70
Edit2: retox — one reason to "save" languages which applies even if no one intends to use them in dialogue is to have a wide variety of empirical examples of language formation, which can then quantitatively inform our attempts to reverse engineer current languages and dialects.
Edit3: as to the argument by economic power, maybe it's just chutzpah, but I'll point out that many dope additions to en-us have come from AAVE, which is not normally considered a dialect representing economic power. As I expect future english usage to be driven by phone chatters, that demographic should correlate with population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_En...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
en-us native
en-eu creole
en-gb native
I guess you need a more wide and natural speaking of bad English for a creole to form when people try to over-bridge their bad English with own inventions?
That said, agreed that there's probably more progress necessary for a true creole. (What language do people normally speak on vacation? Many of tourists who come here try english if they're not entirely comfortable in a local language.)
Speaking comfort (judging by my circle) generally takes a couple of years of immersion. Now that we have large quantities of video online[2] in the popular languages, listening comprehension should be far easier to come by, but speaking is always the difficult part.
The two best ways I've found to learn to speak are (a) trying to get some real world task done, and (b) drunken pub convos. Note that in both these cases perfection is secondary to communication.
[1] Dijkstra ("EWD") had a better written english than many native speakers.
[2] In countries where I'm amazed at the local command of english, it's often because their TV ran english programs undubbed.