“The value of a network grows exponentially to its size.”—Reed’s Law I became American last month.Thank you. As a proper new American, I immediately started wondering: “Should everybody just start speaking English already?” In the Book of Genesis (am I a proper American or what?!), when humans spoke the same language, they decided to build the Tower of Babel and reach the heavens. God didn’t want that, and His response was to divide people by having them speak different languages. Unable to communicate, they couldn’t build the tower, and scattered. As He had wanted. That’s the first reference I know about strength in numbers, when the whole is stronger than its parts.
I usually love your articles, but this one is lacking a leg, so to speak. Yes, English dominates in the technological and commercial spheres globally but languages are more than that. They are intrinsically related to culture, food, music, a way of thinking, a logic, so to speak. These are things that might not have a high economic value (and that is debatable), but have a high emotional value. When companies seek people to work abroad, they are not only looking for people who speak English, but for people who understand and can relate to the cultures they will be working with and that, my friend, usually comes with learning or knowing the local language. I am in the middle of moving from the US to South Africa for work reasons, and I cannot write as extensively as I would like to. I was born and raised in Mexico and became a US citizen around 20 years ago. Congratulations on your American citizenship. I speak four languages and have passive knowledge of a fifth one, and I suspect you do too. I am a translator, and I still have to see the day when apps like Google translate will be able to translate a patent application. What I have seen in the over 20 years that I have been living in the US (intermittently because we frequently relocate abroad for work reasons) is a push to make the world monolingual, in English of course, and that will most probably never happen. I have a 14 year old daughter who was bilingual English-Spanish when she came to the US for the first time when she was 9 years old. She is now starting 9th grade, and the ability to speak and write Spanish has reduced substantially (she can still understand and read because we speak Spanish at home). You will probably face this situation yourself as your kids grow older in the US (unless you are rich enough to keep them in private, truly bilingual schools and out of the public system average schools). Making people monolingual, in English or any other language, at this point in time, works to their disadvantage, both socially and economically. Deep friendship bonds develop by sharing, among other things, a common language and culture. I have experienced this repeatedly over and over during my time abroad. Yes, learn English, but as a second, third, fourth or fight language. Advocating for English as the main language is not realistic, and leaves one half out of the equation: The cultural aspects and benefits different languages brings to those who speak them. I wish I could write in more detail, but I just do not have the time now.
Interesting article, interesting comments... I can fully relate to Daniel Sisson post earlier about how knowing different (active) languages opens your horizons and perspectives. Knowing five fluently, to the point of starting a sentence in one and ending it in another without noticing, I confirm I feel at times I am a different person according to the language commonly spoken around me.
Not to mention the vast question of dreaming in different languages....
But the question of the former linguas francas brought me back to a (in my opinion) fascinating interpretation of the evolution of languages and its purposes over time.
I'd like to share it here without further comments, just to fuel the debate and allow some to extrapolate possible steps before we all speak Klingon.
It is from Sri Aurobindo in "The Secrets of the Veda" :
"My researches first convinced me that words, like plants, like animals, are in no sense artificial products, but growths, — living growths of sound with certain seed-sounds as their basis. Out of these seed-sounds develop a small number of primitive rootwords with an immense progeny which have their successive generations and arrange themselves in tribes, clans, families, selective groups each having a common stock and a common psychological history. For the factor which presided over the development of language was the association, by the nervous mind of primitive man, of certain general significances or rather of certain general utilities and sense-values with articulate sounds. The process of this association was also in no sense artificial but natural, governed by simple and definite psychological laws. In their beginnings language-sounds were not used to express what we should call ideas; they were rather the vocal equivalents of certain general sensations and emotion-values. It was the nerves and not the intellect which created speech. To use Vedic symbols, Agni and Vayu, not Indra, were the original artificers of human language. Mind has emerged out of vital and sensational activities; intellect in man has built itself upon a basis of sense-associations and sense-reactions. By a similar process the intellectual use of language has developed by a natural law out of the sensational and emotional. Words, which were originally vital ejections full of a vague sense-potentiality, have evolved into fixed symbols of precise intellectual significances. In consequence, the word originally was not fixed to any precise idea. It had a general character or quality (guna), which was capable of a great number of applications and therefore of a great number of possible significances. And this guna and its results it shared with many kindred sounds. At first, therefore, word-clans, word-families started life on the communal system with a common stock of possible and realised significances and a common right to all of them; their individuality lay rather in shades of expression of the same ideas than in any exclusive right to the expression of a single idea. The early history of language was a development from this communal life of words to a system of individual property in one or more intellectual significances. The principle of partition was at first fluid, then increased in rigidity, until word-families and finally single words were able to start life on their own account. The last stage of the entirely natural growth of language comes when the life of the word is entirely subjected to the life of the idea which it represents. For in the first state of language the word is as living or even a more living force than its idea; sound determines sense. In its last state the positions have been reversed; the idea becomes all-important, the sound secondary. Another feature of the early history of language is that it expresses at first a remarkably small stock of ideas and these are the most general notions possible and generally the most concrete, such as light, motion, touch, substance, extension, force, speed, etc. Afterwards there is a gradual increase in variety of idea and precision of idea. The progression is from the general to the particular, from the vague to the precise, from the physical to the mental, from the concrete to the abstract, from the expression of an abundant variety of sensations about similar things to the expression of precise difference between similar things, feelings and actions. This progression is worked out by processes of association in ideas which are always the same, always recurrent and, although no doubt due to the environments and actual experiences of the men who spoke the language, wear the appearance of fixed natural laws of development. And after all what is a law but a process which has been worked out by the nature of things in response to the necessities of their environment and has become the fixed habit of their action".
This is a fascinating insight into the value of networks -- a value that is nowhere more obvious than the extraordinary difference between human and other animals, a difference that is entirely due to the fact that language lets us link up our minds. I explore the power of language and how it made us human here: https://simon-57319.medium.com/so-why-cant-your-dog-talk-anyway-ac17a7d3df78
What are we loosing if we go down this path? I am the descendant of immigrants .My family has lost the ability to speak two of our ancestral languages . I speak English and French. From this I know that languages are poor at saying certain things. In our community we go back and forth using English when it is good and using French when it is good. When using social media I communicate with people in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic.
I'd like to supplement this information: IF you're an English speaker and only speak English, start learning another language now. Like, today. Portuguese or Spanish are extremely good options.
And, if English are your second language, start learning a new one, like, today. Portuguese and Spanish and maybe Hindi are good options.
Why? Because culture. Because literature and music and richness of thought. Knowing more languages and being able to speak to more people in them carries infinite rewards.
Can't stress enough how well the "put English shows on TV" works. See the "Percentage of population able to hold a conversation in English" map above and find Slovenia, a tiny country between Italy, Austria and Hungary. With 59%, we are at the top in EU. Why? Because our country is too small to dub TV shows, so we watch almost everything with subtitles. Years and years of hearing English on TV while reading subtitles does wonders.
Great article. Made some similar points in the report at www.supermind.design (language and “e pluribus unum” chapters. Literally language is the encoding that rides on top of communication infrastructure, and the two generate a flywheel of collective intelligence. The only delta I have is that speaking English for someone who’s not very proficient still uses up a lot of brain resources which (a) reduces the ability fit he speaker to focus on the content and (b) will get the speaker to make mistakes which will degrade their perceived credibility and persuasiveness. Literally native speakers can gain the upper hand in discussions just because of their command of the language (there’s some research on this in management science). And native speakers won’t be able to counter their partially involuntary bias against “half assed sentences” anytime soon - except in technical language like coding or engineering. That’s why for some time interpreters will stick around for the older generations.
As with all things human, language also has the function of displaying social status. I live in England and discrimination on the basis of regional English accents is part of the culture. It is changing slowly, but being able to speak BBC English with a posh accent is a huge bonus.
I used to live in Edinburgh. The fee-paying schools there can justify a large part of their cost by teaching their students to speak with a London accent not a Scottish one.
Congratulations on your American citizenship! Having moved to France ten years ago and starting to learn French, I found the various translation and learning apps to be a great help, enabling me to navigate the lengthy process of gaining French citizenship. Initially I used Google and ITranslate but came to rely on (and subscribe to) DeepL which I highly recommend. I find it to be faster and better at capturing the tone of what I want to say. I also like that it does not store my texts. I now have American, British and French citizenship!
I sold my home in 2007 to travel around the world. I did so up until the start of the pandemic and have been to 130 countries.
English already is the world language.
- I once visited an orphanage in Cambodia. The main thing that the children were taught was English. Why? If they knew English, they were guaranteed to have a job later in life.
- All international airports work in English. They all have signs in English and almost everyone who works at the airport has to know English.
- There are more people in China who are in some stage of learning English, than there are people in the United States.
- When the Prime Minister of India addresses the country, he will usually do so in English. That is because English ISN'T native to any particular group in India, so no one is offended. Only 10% of Indians speak English, but it is the most educated 10%, and that percentage is growing rapidly. The use of English in India is similar to its use in Singapore. It serves as a neutral, yet international language, which doesn't favor any part of the country.
- Your article doesn't really address WHO is speaking English in most of these countries. It tends to be the educated and the elite. The people who don't speak it tend to be poorer and more rural. If you want to be in the elite, English is the ticket.
- The working language of the EU and the Euro Bank is English. That is despite having any English-speaking members other than Ireland.
- The only argument ever given for Chinese is the fact that there are a lot of people in China. However, India will soon surpass China and the fastest growing country in the world in Nigeria. Chinese has no traction outside of China. The only other country where Mandarin is an official language is Singapore....which speaks English. A tonal, character-based language is never going to be adopted by a world in which hardly anyone, regardless of language, speaks a tonal-based language and uses an alphabet.
English has already achieved escape velocity from the US and UK. Even if native English speakers aren't involved, English will be used in most every international interaction.
One other value to learning another language is that it rewires your brain and offers massive neural benefits. In addition to the neural benefits, it helps you access and appreciate the culture of the second language on a new level. I often find that I think differently, feel differently, act differently in a different language.
Even with instant, in-ear translators, similar to Star Trek, it would be ideal to know English at extreme proficiency and at least 2 distinct other languages at some reasonable, conversational level - say Spanish and Japanese, or French and Chinese -- both for the neural/cognitive benefits and the cultural / diversity of thought benefits
Thanks for these far-sighted perspectives and awesome visuals.
Here's one more (controversial) policy implication: instead of spending 10s of billions in English classes, countries interested in helping their population globalise should spend that money to train translation AI. Working with Google?
This way they would also preserve their language since their people could then consult/publish on the internet in their own language.
Would be interesting to see Unesco on that train.
Translation to/from very different languages like Japanese still is far behind though. You can do the round-trip translation and have a good laugh.
Two personal observations - no scientific evidence, I know! 1. In companies where most of the staff are speaking English as a non-native tongue, the desire to reduce linguistic complexity by the use of "slang", of habitual labels, is strong, and it has effects on the outcome of conversations. This is an intensifier of an effect I also observe in any corporate culture. It has to do with the desire to end a conversation, not to have to explain everything. E.g. people talk about "setting up" a project. Is this a rough draft of a plan? Does it include budget and staffing decisions? Does it include estimates of outcomes? People only find out they don't have a common understanding of this after they leave the meeting. 2. In an international group of people speaking English, often the Brithis are the least understood. They speak Scottish, or Irish, or Estuary, or a Yorkshire accent - and they are not aware that people outside the U.K. have much trouble understanding.
One big reason that English has become the lingua franca of the world is due to its relatively flat intonation. Even badly spoken or mispronounced English is relatively easy to understand by other English speakers in contrast to most other language that place a higher value on intonation. Witness the myriad of English dialects that are spoken around the world all of which are comprehensible to other English speakers
Very erudite and incisive article. Chapeau to your ability to discuss this in your second language.
Oh how I wish our post war Dutch father hadn’t discouraged us from talking in his language as well as our mother’s tongue (English). It has been shown that if you let infants be exposed to two languages at that stage they rapidly develop a switch that seems to translate their languages. Learning future languages seems to become almost intuitive.
He was fluent in Dutch, Flemish, English, French and Spanish. I have always struggled with languages since my school days. I’m concentrating on French now.
I usually love your articles, but this one is lacking a leg, so to speak. Yes, English dominates in the technological and commercial spheres globally but languages are more than that. They are intrinsically related to culture, food, music, a way of thinking, a logic, so to speak. These are things that might not have a high economic value (and that is debatable), but have a high emotional value. When companies seek people to work abroad, they are not only looking for people who speak English, but for people who understand and can relate to the cultures they will be working with and that, my friend, usually comes with learning or knowing the local language. I am in the middle of moving from the US to South Africa for work reasons, and I cannot write as extensively as I would like to. I was born and raised in Mexico and became a US citizen around 20 years ago. Congratulations on your American citizenship. I speak four languages and have passive knowledge of a fifth one, and I suspect you do too. I am a translator, and I still have to see the day when apps like Google translate will be able to translate a patent application. What I have seen in the over 20 years that I have been living in the US (intermittently because we frequently relocate abroad for work reasons) is a push to make the world monolingual, in English of course, and that will most probably never happen. I have a 14 year old daughter who was bilingual English-Spanish when she came to the US for the first time when she was 9 years old. She is now starting 9th grade, and the ability to speak and write Spanish has reduced substantially (she can still understand and read because we speak Spanish at home). You will probably face this situation yourself as your kids grow older in the US (unless you are rich enough to keep them in private, truly bilingual schools and out of the public system average schools). Making people monolingual, in English or any other language, at this point in time, works to their disadvantage, both socially and economically. Deep friendship bonds develop by sharing, among other things, a common language and culture. I have experienced this repeatedly over and over during my time abroad. Yes, learn English, but as a second, third, fourth or fight language. Advocating for English as the main language is not realistic, and leaves one half out of the equation: The cultural aspects and benefits different languages brings to those who speak them. I wish I could write in more detail, but I just do not have the time now.
Interesting article, interesting comments... I can fully relate to Daniel Sisson post earlier about how knowing different (active) languages opens your horizons and perspectives. Knowing five fluently, to the point of starting a sentence in one and ending it in another without noticing, I confirm I feel at times I am a different person according to the language commonly spoken around me.
Not to mention the vast question of dreaming in different languages....
But the question of the former linguas francas brought me back to a (in my opinion) fascinating interpretation of the evolution of languages and its purposes over time.
I'd like to share it here without further comments, just to fuel the debate and allow some to extrapolate possible steps before we all speak Klingon.
It is from Sri Aurobindo in "The Secrets of the Veda" :
"My researches first convinced me that words, like plants, like animals, are in no sense artificial products, but growths, — living growths of sound with certain seed-sounds as their basis. Out of these seed-sounds develop a small number of primitive rootwords with an immense progeny which have their successive generations and arrange themselves in tribes, clans, families, selective groups each having a common stock and a common psychological history. For the factor which presided over the development of language was the association, by the nervous mind of primitive man, of certain general significances or rather of certain general utilities and sense-values with articulate sounds. The process of this association was also in no sense artificial but natural, governed by simple and definite psychological laws. In their beginnings language-sounds were not used to express what we should call ideas; they were rather the vocal equivalents of certain general sensations and emotion-values. It was the nerves and not the intellect which created speech. To use Vedic symbols, Agni and Vayu, not Indra, were the original artificers of human language. Mind has emerged out of vital and sensational activities; intellect in man has built itself upon a basis of sense-associations and sense-reactions. By a similar process the intellectual use of language has developed by a natural law out of the sensational and emotional. Words, which were originally vital ejections full of a vague sense-potentiality, have evolved into fixed symbols of precise intellectual significances. In consequence, the word originally was not fixed to any precise idea. It had a general character or quality (guna), which was capable of a great number of applications and therefore of a great number of possible significances. And this guna and its results it shared with many kindred sounds. At first, therefore, word-clans, word-families started life on the communal system with a common stock of possible and realised significances and a common right to all of them; their individuality lay rather in shades of expression of the same ideas than in any exclusive right to the expression of a single idea. The early history of language was a development from this communal life of words to a system of individual property in one or more intellectual significances. The principle of partition was at first fluid, then increased in rigidity, until word-families and finally single words were able to start life on their own account. The last stage of the entirely natural growth of language comes when the life of the word is entirely subjected to the life of the idea which it represents. For in the first state of language the word is as living or even a more living force than its idea; sound determines sense. In its last state the positions have been reversed; the idea becomes all-important, the sound secondary. Another feature of the early history of language is that it expresses at first a remarkably small stock of ideas and these are the most general notions possible and generally the most concrete, such as light, motion, touch, substance, extension, force, speed, etc. Afterwards there is a gradual increase in variety of idea and precision of idea. The progression is from the general to the particular, from the vague to the precise, from the physical to the mental, from the concrete to the abstract, from the expression of an abundant variety of sensations about similar things to the expression of precise difference between similar things, feelings and actions. This progression is worked out by processes of association in ideas which are always the same, always recurrent and, although no doubt due to the environments and actual experiences of the men who spoke the language, wear the appearance of fixed natural laws of development. And after all what is a law but a process which has been worked out by the nature of things in response to the necessities of their environment and has become the fixed habit of their action".
This is a fascinating insight into the value of networks -- a value that is nowhere more obvious than the extraordinary difference between human and other animals, a difference that is entirely due to the fact that language lets us link up our minds. I explore the power of language and how it made us human here: https://simon-57319.medium.com/so-why-cant-your-dog-talk-anyway-ac17a7d3df78
What are we loosing if we go down this path? I am the descendant of immigrants .My family has lost the ability to speak two of our ancestral languages . I speak English and French. From this I know that languages are poor at saying certain things. In our community we go back and forth using English when it is good and using French when it is good. When using social media I communicate with people in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic.
I'd like to supplement this information: IF you're an English speaker and only speak English, start learning another language now. Like, today. Portuguese or Spanish are extremely good options.
And, if English are your second language, start learning a new one, like, today. Portuguese and Spanish and maybe Hindi are good options.
Why? Because culture. Because literature and music and richness of thought. Knowing more languages and being able to speak to more people in them carries infinite rewards.
Can't stress enough how well the "put English shows on TV" works. See the "Percentage of population able to hold a conversation in English" map above and find Slovenia, a tiny country between Italy, Austria and Hungary. With 59%, we are at the top in EU. Why? Because our country is too small to dub TV shows, so we watch almost everything with subtitles. Years and years of hearing English on TV while reading subtitles does wonders.
Great article. Made some similar points in the report at www.supermind.design (language and “e pluribus unum” chapters. Literally language is the encoding that rides on top of communication infrastructure, and the two generate a flywheel of collective intelligence. The only delta I have is that speaking English for someone who’s not very proficient still uses up a lot of brain resources which (a) reduces the ability fit he speaker to focus on the content and (b) will get the speaker to make mistakes which will degrade their perceived credibility and persuasiveness. Literally native speakers can gain the upper hand in discussions just because of their command of the language (there’s some research on this in management science). And native speakers won’t be able to counter their partially involuntary bias against “half assed sentences” anytime soon - except in technical language like coding or engineering. That’s why for some time interpreters will stick around for the older generations.
As with all things human, language also has the function of displaying social status. I live in England and discrimination on the basis of regional English accents is part of the culture. It is changing slowly, but being able to speak BBC English with a posh accent is a huge bonus.
I used to live in Edinburgh. The fee-paying schools there can justify a large part of their cost by teaching their students to speak with a London accent not a Scottish one.
Congratulations on your American citizenship! Having moved to France ten years ago and starting to learn French, I found the various translation and learning apps to be a great help, enabling me to navigate the lengthy process of gaining French citizenship. Initially I used Google and ITranslate but came to rely on (and subscribe to) DeepL which I highly recommend. I find it to be faster and better at capturing the tone of what I want to say. I also like that it does not store my texts. I now have American, British and French citizenship!
I sold my home in 2007 to travel around the world. I did so up until the start of the pandemic and have been to 130 countries.
English already is the world language.
- I once visited an orphanage in Cambodia. The main thing that the children were taught was English. Why? If they knew English, they were guaranteed to have a job later in life.
- All international airports work in English. They all have signs in English and almost everyone who works at the airport has to know English.
- There are more people in China who are in some stage of learning English, than there are people in the United States.
- When the Prime Minister of India addresses the country, he will usually do so in English. That is because English ISN'T native to any particular group in India, so no one is offended. Only 10% of Indians speak English, but it is the most educated 10%, and that percentage is growing rapidly. The use of English in India is similar to its use in Singapore. It serves as a neutral, yet international language, which doesn't favor any part of the country.
- Your article doesn't really address WHO is speaking English in most of these countries. It tends to be the educated and the elite. The people who don't speak it tend to be poorer and more rural. If you want to be in the elite, English is the ticket.
- The working language of the EU and the Euro Bank is English. That is despite having any English-speaking members other than Ireland.
- The only argument ever given for Chinese is the fact that there are a lot of people in China. However, India will soon surpass China and the fastest growing country in the world in Nigeria. Chinese has no traction outside of China. The only other country where Mandarin is an official language is Singapore....which speaks English. A tonal, character-based language is never going to be adopted by a world in which hardly anyone, regardless of language, speaks a tonal-based language and uses an alphabet.
English has already achieved escape velocity from the US and UK. Even if native English speakers aren't involved, English will be used in most every international interaction.
This is a great post!
One other value to learning another language is that it rewires your brain and offers massive neural benefits. In addition to the neural benefits, it helps you access and appreciate the culture of the second language on a new level. I often find that I think differently, feel differently, act differently in a different language.
Even with instant, in-ear translators, similar to Star Trek, it would be ideal to know English at extreme proficiency and at least 2 distinct other languages at some reasonable, conversational level - say Spanish and Japanese, or French and Chinese -- both for the neural/cognitive benefits and the cultural / diversity of thought benefits
Thanks for these far-sighted perspectives and awesome visuals.
Here's one more (controversial) policy implication: instead of spending 10s of billions in English classes, countries interested in helping their population globalise should spend that money to train translation AI. Working with Google?
This way they would also preserve their language since their people could then consult/publish on the internet in their own language.
Would be interesting to see Unesco on that train.
Translation to/from very different languages like Japanese still is far behind though. You can do the round-trip translation and have a good laugh.
Two personal observations - no scientific evidence, I know! 1. In companies where most of the staff are speaking English as a non-native tongue, the desire to reduce linguistic complexity by the use of "slang", of habitual labels, is strong, and it has effects on the outcome of conversations. This is an intensifier of an effect I also observe in any corporate culture. It has to do with the desire to end a conversation, not to have to explain everything. E.g. people talk about "setting up" a project. Is this a rough draft of a plan? Does it include budget and staffing decisions? Does it include estimates of outcomes? People only find out they don't have a common understanding of this after they leave the meeting. 2. In an international group of people speaking English, often the Brithis are the least understood. They speak Scottish, or Irish, or Estuary, or a Yorkshire accent - and they are not aware that people outside the U.K. have much trouble understanding.
Chrome offers me "Translate to English"
!!! ???
One big reason that English has become the lingua franca of the world is due to its relatively flat intonation. Even badly spoken or mispronounced English is relatively easy to understand by other English speakers in contrast to most other language that place a higher value on intonation. Witness the myriad of English dialects that are spoken around the world all of which are comprehensible to other English speakers
Very erudite and incisive article. Chapeau to your ability to discuss this in your second language.
Oh how I wish our post war Dutch father hadn’t discouraged us from talking in his language as well as our mother’s tongue (English). It has been shown that if you let infants be exposed to two languages at that stage they rapidly develop a switch that seems to translate their languages. Learning future languages seems to become almost intuitive.
He was fluent in Dutch, Flemish, English, French and Spanish. I have always struggled with languages since my school days. I’m concentrating on French now.