As a French Canadian with Catalan friends, fuck no.
Language is part of our culture. You can’t translate anything slightly complex perfectly because vocabulary doesn’t align between language. And that’s without going into idioms.
People will always make concerted efforts to preserve their heritage, so looking languages takes a cultural genocide like in Ireland. Since we consider this to be morally bankrupt, I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
Yes. However, a reduction in languages is usually linked with major authoritian episodes. For example, the rise of Latin associated with the dominance of the Romans. Or English, French, and Spanish with colonial dominance.
Any future reduction in language diversity will likely, unfortunately, be linked with such a period. Wouldn’t want to live through it, but it’s probable it’ll occur at some point, if you give us a long enough timescale.
Not in the next couple of hundred years.
Europe is a great example of how people have multiple languages and just work together. I can’t imagine France, Germany, or Italy at the very least giving up their languages.
Right. I’m looking more towards “big picture” changes, similar to progressing through the different civilization types from the Kardashev scale.
That hypothetical universal language will have to start small scale, in a community such as the EU, and spread from there. Or am I misunderstanding what you’re saying?
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.
I don’t really think so, nor do i believe it would be desirable.
