Extended Response to: (Re)Building the Tower of Babel: English as a Universal Language

The idea of a universal language was originally the topic I wanted to write my blog post on, but given Raci’s post I thought it might be best to frame my discussion of a universal language as a response to her post. My first purpose of this post is a rebuttal of the idea that English is becoming the universal language, and also to describe why it does not make sense as the universal language. Then I will describe why it would be most advantageous for linguists to attempt to create a universal language rather than simply attempting to make a specific language the most universal language.

I will start by agreeing that English as a language has become quite ubiquitous, it is fairly widely spread and its use is increasing as time goes on, relative to other languages. But even within the post there is the idea that there are more Chinese speakers than any other language speakers in the world. So why would English even be considered the spoken language of the world? It simply feels like in-group ideas of dominance, that is, we are American feels that since we hear examples of our language in many places that it must be the world’s most used/ubiquitous language, and idea that is frankly unproven.  

This idea of English-dominance was also defended as the most logical choice for becoming a universal language primarily because of its cultural power. Specifically, English should be the universally used language purely because the global powers that be are predominantly English speaking countries. Yet, this is again a cultural idea, rather than one based in linguistic fact. For instance English semantics and implicatures are among the hardest to learn and understand. Examples include any of the ways that we can either unintentionally violate or purposefully flout Gricean Maxims. Or little examples like the phrase “interesting little book”, which is almost certainly the same idea as “little interesting book”, yet in English the second phrase is not-used and there is no particularly powerful reason why that is true, except that it “doesn’t sound right” to native speakers. Given these very minor and certainly not all-encompassing issues I see no reason why English should become the universal language.

Yet, the idea of having a universal language is a very appealing concept given its possible benefits. As an example of this benefit I will use the constructed language of Esperanto to describe the plethora of advantages from a constructed universal language. Esperanto is a constructed language that follows very regular rules and is extremely easy to learn and is understandable by many romance language speakers. There has been some research by UNESCO suggesting that Esperanto might make diverse language learning more easily possible, especially when Esperanto is a speakers native language. Based on this minor example that only relies on the use of a romance specific language it becomes easily clear how beneficial it might be to go about creating a universal language. I would propose that were this to be done, it would obviously be most advantageous to create this language using a combination of both romance language bases and indo-language bases. Given that this sort of combination would be possible it would also make the most sense to make sure that the phonetics of the language provided the largest range of sounds so that it could be used to help native speakers learn other languages more easily, and also to help people learning this universal language by having some familiar speech sounds despite what language background the speaker comes from. I think this idea provides the best chance of creating a language that is understandable and learnable by the greatest number of speakers. There does not seem to be any reasoning as to why teaching entire nations a complicated language such as English would be any more intelligent than creating a universal language that is easier to learn and teaching everyone that language.