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Comment by whomstve | Hacker News Reader

And I wish for the complete opposite.

When I go to Finland, I want to hear Finnish, read Finnish, and eat Finnish. I don't want to go to a place where kids speak, write, and think exactly like the kids from the school down the road here in North America. I don't want to travel 8000km to hear and see the same things as I have for my whole life.

There's nothing more depressing to me than a world where everything is the same and where there is no friction between anything.

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When I go to Finland I want to understand and be understood. When I go to Spain I want to understand and be understood. When I go to - any of the 100+ other countries in the world (most with more than one language) - the same, I want to understand and be understood. If this was just about Finland I would learn their language (or just not go there in my lifetime), but this is about the 3000 other languages spoken in the world as well, and nobody has time to learn them all.

If I want to read I'll go to my local library and request a book. Unless you mean streets signs - but there again not enough time.

Well the future will be ‘interesting’ if it is all approximately the same culture. Then the only reason to travel would be to look at different earth formations and buildings, and experience different weather?.

Language isn't barely even a part of culture. Sure cultures have a language, but that is just to communicate, culture is how the people live their life.

That's a false dichotomy. Same language does not imply same everything else.

People can speak more than one language, though. It would be great if we had one that was truly universal to encourage communication and sharing of information, while retaining all the existing languages for colloquial use and arts.

retaining the existing languages is hard. loan words will come in wholesale from English, there's no real incentive to keep speaking when you could be practicing your English skills, the native language will be associated with being uneducated, etc.

Navajo is maybe the best example of a language that's been kept up for cultural reasons, and it tends not to assimilate loanwords, but thousands more languages are dying or extinct.

Living people aren't some kind of exhibits in a museum. If they don't want to retain their existing language as living, they shouldn't be forced to - just as they shouldn't be forced to drop it.

Same thing with language purity. Loanwords etc are a natural part of language evolution. It's up to the community speaking the language to incorporate more loanwords - or not - as they speak it.

That's too simplistic. It's very hard to keep minority languages alive, even if you really desperately want to, when you're immersed in a majority language.

The Irish language is in danger even in the Gaeltacht areas where native Irish speakers live, because English is everywhere. Tech is almost exclusively English, most jobs are English-only, most media is in English (not to mention ads on YouTube), most news and politics happens in English (the primary sources at least), all the packaging on everything you buy is in English, it's much easier to find a solicitor who speaks English-legalese than Irish-dlítheanga, your kids pick up English from TV and life.

Before you know it, you and many of your acquaintances are a bit rusty, and conversations happen in English more and more. The language declines, and it's not what you wanted.

Well, yes, it's a community endeavor. But if the majority of the community want to keep it, they will have no problem doing so - most jobs and media would be in that language. OTOH if you find that everywhere you go, you have to use English because other people do it - well, those people are part of the community, too. If most Irish want to speak English in most contexts, why should they be forced not to for the benefit of the minority that wants to preserve the language? If the minority really feels so strongly about it, they can organize as a separate insular community, so that their children don't have to interact with other languages etc.

This equation is different when the dominant language is spoken by the minority, but that minority can overpower the majority for historical reasons (e.g. historical concentration of economic or political power in their hands) - a good example of that would be Quebec. But the proper solution to that is to prevent or fix the concentration of power, not to force anyone to speak or not speak what they want.

So you want a lingua franca, which is English (ironically). A Japanese and Chinese business meeting would be more likely to be in English than in Japanese or Chinese as everyone speaks English as a second language.

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