It doesn’t need to be a completely new language. It just needs to be a language that most people overall speak rather than, say, most people in a particular region.
Yeah and that still has to start small scale. People in the EU are perfectly fine switching to English where needed but they still speak their own languages otherwise. There’s no need for an EU-wide language so a universal language is unlikely to start here at least.
After humans have started colonising other places in space, that’s where I could see them lose their traditional languages.
Chinese, English and Spanish are the top 3 languages spoken globally. and only ten languages make up the bulk of the world population’s first language. Both Chinese and English are already widely spoken as a second or third language. I could easily see either becoming a defacto 1st/2nd language globally.
