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Comment by pablisco | Hacker News Reader

Why do people that speak some flavour of English feel frightened by other languages?

I suspect the underlying cause is a combination of arrogance/entitlement and fear that English is on its way to become the next Latin.

Arrogance and entitlement perhaps, however I'd argue that both are deserved. It's the international standard, it's not as if we are arrogantly feeling entitled to everybody speaking farsi or something.

However fear that english is on it's way to becoming the next latin? Whaaaat? I can't recall a thought like that ever coming to my mind nor ever reading somebody saying that and now that I've taken it in, I can't think of a single reason why somebody would fear that. If anything, the rest of the World should start fearing all of their languages are going the way of latin...

English probably is on its way to becoming the next Latin. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin remained the primary language across much of Medieval Europe. Over the long term, two things happened: its local use in various European districts drifted into separate languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.), while the formal language ossified and died out.

That was a much different World where people only communicated with those who lived in their town. International travel and the internet have both made English much, much stronger and more important.

Did you mean the next esperanto? I don't think anybody thinks that English is going to be the next Latin, thanks to the internet, which is good though. A common language is useful for international relations. I usually call English a flapjack language because it was made from many others mashed up (quite badly sometimes). But the next Latin?

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