The thing about Esperanto is that it was never intended to REPLACE natural languages, but to SUPPLEMENT them. If I remember correctly, the original idea was for people to learn it as an intermediary language, to make trade and diplomacy as efficient as possible.
My problem with esperanto is that i find it ugly and weird sometimes. Esperantido or just IDO is an Esperanto derived that is a better alternative but nobody speaks it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@gorilaogorila835 Ido has a treacherous "Benedict Arnold" type past. The guys who promoted it to a European commission were supposed to promote Esperanto to that same commission, and were entrusted to do so, but egotistically did a bait-and-switch and presented their own blackboard language project.
Say that to Germany. Once we had a great, for normal Germans not understandable Dialect called Swabian. But the German Government is exterminating our great dialect. only 20-40% of the dialect are left. I would rather speak English at any other part of Germany than speaking only the "normal" German.
Modern English is the way it is because it's already been more simplified than any other contender. Chinese is tonal. Nobody's ever going to learn a tonal language as an adult. Spanish has gender... which is as big a roadblock as tonality when being learned as a second language. Modern English is not tonal, and has lost all it's tricky gender BS specifically because it was already simplified centuries ago when an influx of scandanavians settled in England who had to learn Old English as adults, and simply dispensed with all the silly bells and whistles. Modern linguists fairly agree that if English is not already the global language, it's the only real contender to become one.
+Aidan Bowie Not just cause it's someone's native language do they prefer it. I for example speak more English than Spanish even though Spanish is my first language. I will always prefer English over Spanish cause English is such an easy language to learn and a great one overall.
+Patrick Melody English is not simple at all. Every single spelling and pronunciation rule is broken in at least one way, and there are WAY too many irregular verbs.
Geoffrey Brunell Bruh compare it to many other languages like French, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, German, Irish, Russian, Arabic, etc. English is a really easy language.
FuriousGaming I'm learning Spanish right now, and I have to say that it is a lot easier than English. It's sound-audible, which means that words are pronounced exactly how they are spelled, unlike in English when you have words like "dough", "through", and "tough" which. There are also less irregular verbs and less grammar rules than English.
The problem is that some languages use TOTALLY different writing styles than others. For example, English, German, and French look a hell of a lot different than Arabic, Mandarin, or even Russian. If every language used a Latin alphabet, things would probably be a whole lot simpler. English isn't that hard to learn if you already speak a Germanic or Romantic language. Yeah there's a lot of complicated rules, but the thing with English is you can absolutely *butcher* a sentence and native speakers will still understand you. In some languages a slight mispronunciation could mean the difference between telling someone you like their outfit and telling someone you want to sodomize them. English doesn't have this problem for the most part. Not only that but the only real way to learn a language is by communicating with a native speaker, and English has *a lot* of native speakers, and many, many sources of media. My Dutch friend learned fluent English in two years just by watching a ton of movies, reading some books, and browsing the web. That's all she needed. So English has that going for it too.
This is primarily why I love english so much. Even someone who is not very good at it can still communicate. The butchering of sentences is easier to translate compared to other languages.
+Unbearable Pain The Cyrillic alphabet is not that different, if you think more. English is way easier than Mandarin, because in English, there are more accents, and some might pronounce some words different, but still you can understand them. In Chinese, you could call your mother a cow, if you don't know how to pronounce it. :)
In the far future, I can see English as the only language spoken by humans beyond Earth. For example, if we ever go to Mars, the first colonists will all have to speak the same language, which will probably be English.
1:52 that’s not actually true. Spanish and Mandarin have more native speakers than English, but English has the most total speakers (which imo is more important)
Well, the point of an international language is not to replace the local language in favour of a lingua franca. In the Netherlands, children are taught English, but they only ever use it to communicate with others who don't speak Dutch. In the Netherlands, Dutch is still spoken by the large majority of the people. Lingua franca are instead meant as a second language for everyone. You're not asking the Spanish to sacrifice the Spanish language, but instead, you're asking them to learn a second language so they can communicate with non-Spanish speakers. Also, Esperanto is perfect for this role; after a few months, you can speak Esperanto just as fluently as English after a few years of learning. I can already speak B1~B2 after just 4 months. With English, it took me 2 years to get to B1+. Note: English has both Germanic as Romance aspects, as the French brought their language with them in 1066 and made English into a hybrid. Thanks to this, speaking English makes Esperanto quite a bit easier.
+Kriso de la Erikejo it's simple to dutch to learn english because english and dutch are similar languages but for a person like me that speak a latin language it's more difficult, the main problem for me is that english pronouciation is different from what you write, the enourmus number of verbal constructions and the phrasal verbs that are far too many
+Jason Mey ik vermoed dat hij aan Engels dacht. Wel grappig dat ik zonder al te veel moeite je reactie verstond. Welke taal is dat? (te lui om het in een vertaalmachine te stoppen)
Josh Edwards Going down the road we are heading everyone will have google translate built in their brain. So it will not matter what language you speak!
Also, if for any point there was a single language, I believe local slang would evolve into dialect and then separate languages as Latin did into Spanish, French, Italian, etc. so a global language would be temporary at best.
I'm still speaking a German dialect, but 80% of the words that a normal German would not understand are gone. Some of my friends use only 1% of the left 20%. Dialects will not work in the future.
With the world getting smaller and smaller the only thing that might allow dialects to become languages is the sun destroying electricity on earth. People in Germany used to have really different dialects but now that pop culture only uses a single dialect, kids staring to speak roughly the same kind of German and I'd imagine that it would be the same for other countries as well.
miniwars123 Unless it was secondary. A secondary global language could work. Just get everyone to know English as a secondary language (unless they know it as a primary), and you're done! We don't need to speak to every human on earth in their native language. We just need to speak to every human in a language they understand.
Norwegian, a shitty language which no one speaks, as a portuguese native speaker, I can say, no one would ever want to learn such a different language, Latin languages and english are okay...
I reckon that Esperanto should be taught everywhere as a secondary language; IT IS increadably easy to learn due to its fixed grammatical rules which contain no exceptions. What is more, it wouldnt be forcing a foreign culture upon other people
1985: UNESCO encourages UN member states to add Esperanto to their school curricula. Well, looks like only China and Hungary listen to them. Source: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Esperanto
@@augustfranfrankrike9548 If anything, that would encourage people to pick up a 3d language. The simplicity of Esperanto makes it easier. So you have your native language, esperanto because it’s easy and practical, and, say, Japanese because you like anime, or French because you like the way it sounds.
Make it an international responsibility to raise children as bilingual in both their native tongue, and Esperanto. It wouldn't be an immediate shift, but over the course of just a decade, we could have one diffinitive widely known lingua franca. Even if not all people knew it, it still would be the biggest step to finally uniting the world under something.
+ethan finley "International Responsibility" doesn't mean enforced education. It would benefit people to know 2 languages anyways. It is easier for bilingual people to learn another language. Esperanto is a combination of some Slavic and Romantic Languages meaning it would also help with other forms of language education.
+ethan finley a responsibility is not enforced. It would be up to the parents to take the recommended actions to teaching their children a lingua franca.
Since I watch youtube a lot and play video games a lot I pretty much hear more english than my own language in a day... In my country you now have english in school from 2nd grade of primary school on... My language uses more and more english words in slang and some of them have made it into our dictionary... I don't think that my language will survive another 100 years...
***** Within more or less than a generation people in Turkey couldn't understand Ottoman Turkish from the beginning of the 20th century after the Republic of Turkey was formed once the Ottoman Empire fell after WWI, the Turkish language was romanized (meaning it stopped using the Arabic script it had used for centuries in favor of the Latin alphabet) and turk-ized (the linguistic authority of Turkey cleansed the language of many of its Perso-Arabic influences it had gained over the centuries in favor of Turkic originating root words). So, the idea is not so far fetched is just this kind of change had to be highly motivated from within and outside of the government and its people!
***** Maybe I overexaturated it maybe it wont happen in 100 years, but, yes obviously everybody still speaks slovenian right now, but the thing is that in the last generations pretty much everybody knows how to speak english, because you learn it in school... As I said english words are slowly comming in, specially with the younger generations... If nothing else our language will sound more like english in 100 years than it does now, I would never replace my language in everyday life with english or any other, even though I use it a lot... If english starts to take over the world as offiial language one day, Slovenia will probably be one of the first countries to take it...
Teach English as the secondary language in all schools across the European Union and it would grow in power through one generation hard enough for other nations to have to follow suit. Nobody says you have to forget your native language, humans are easily capable of speaking multiples of them.
Interestingly, some believe that Orwell based Newspeak on Basic English. I don't like Basic English at all, but I still think it's a little harsh to equate the idea of making a language easier to controlling though.
@@joshuaswart8211 Orwell had a relative who spoke Esperanto, but Newspeak clearly is based on politician's English. Newspeak does not distinguish truth from propaganda, just like English doesn't distinguish know from know, justice from justice, only from only, right from right, you from you, free from free...and a word like "sanction" can mean the opposite of itself. Esperanto is easy because - like German - it relies on consistently combining wordstems with prefixes and suffixes rather than having separate words to memorise.
The idea is not to abandon your native language, but to learn a second universal language. Esperanto is probably the best choose in this case. It's very easily to learn and already has a globe acceptance. It already is a global language without any one country's language having dominance over any other countries'.
+Firefox is red, Explorer is blue. Google+ sucks and Chrome does too. How is English easy? Pretty much every single spelling and pronunciation rule is broken, which means you can almost never know how a new word is pronounced just by reading it. English also has a crap ton of irregular verbs.
A language in which ghoti can be read as fish (gh like enough, o like women, and ti like emotion) is NOT easy. Run is pronounced /ran/ and rune is /ru:ne/.
+Geoffrey Brunell Because most of other languanges have shit which beats your spelling and irregular verbs. We for example have 13 ways of conjugating verbs, 4 ways of conjugating adjectives, 15 ways of declinating nouns - with quite a few exceptions...
Geoffrey Brunell You're absolutely right. But it's not like English has a ton of different vowels to choose from. There's plenty of subtle difference such as in "read" and "bean", but that's mostly due to English well rounded pronunciations. I agree with you, but I think it's not that big a deal because of the simplicity of English grammar.
Felipe Vasconcelos Haha, true. But when does "gh" ever appear at the start of a word in English? I'm not sure but isn't "gh" a mutated "ch" from German/Dutch? Ex: [EN] Laughing [NL] Lachen [GE] Lachen - or [EN] Sought [NL] Gezocht [GE] Gesucht. It's definitely inconsistent and ridiculous nowadays, but it probably made sense in the past... blame the French.
Or we just wait until a global language has evolved? I myself am a native dutch speaker. I learned french and english and understand some basic german and afrikaans ('cause dutch...). If everyone just knows 1 language (spanish, english, french, russian or chinese) other then their native tong, the world would be for more easier to communicate with.
Yes, and most people go full english because of that... I speak portuguese and english, I live in Brazil. Literally the most influential language here is english by far, even with most of our continent speaking Spanish, we most of the time really don´t learn it because we can communicate with our Spanish counter parts easily if we talk slow... That is why english is already the international language, whether the french and the Spanish like it or not
It won't be a single language. It if were to happen, it would most likely become Esperanto. Esperanto is simple and easy to learn. It is easy for everyone to learn. Cultures will keep their languages, but everyone would just be fluent in another language. Again, highly probable that it will be Esperanto.
I'd place my bets on either Esperanto or English as a secondary language, with Native English speakers knowing Esperanto. This would be the most efficient way to create a global language.
Rose Knight Yea. A secondary language may very well be entirely possible. But to say the whole world will be monolingual in English is a long stretch. Even if it were to be English, It would only be English until the American economy collapses. The world is just a game.
Dillon Flatt I suppose. I guess the most likely would look something like this: Primarily English Speaking Countries English Esperanto Primarily Non-English Speaking Countries Your Primary Language Esperanto/English This way, everyone should be able to communicate with everyone.
Rose Knight Yea. I think having English along with Esperanto to be the most widely used 2nd languages would be the most realistic. As long as we can still cherish eachother's cultures and languages respectively, I would say the world is fine.
***** Languages like Esperanto are only going to get stronger the more we share it. The more we make people aware that Esperanto is the future of Foreign Relations and Global Communication. There could be a future, but it's the doubters that are holding us back.
daDuke42 good luck teaching it to the people from our country THAT DONT EVEN SPEAK ENGLISH...... *cough* Hawaiians *cough* also, how is your language any better? I could agree that your version is better if you were from Canada or Australia, but you're clearly a Britt.
Damn it's pretty impressive how Americans could create the internet and the app you're using right now without language. God damn we must be smart as fuck.
English is easy for a native english speaker, as Mandarin is easy to native mandarin speakers. English, however is not easy for native mandarin speakers just as mandarin is not easy for a native english speaker.
+Sam Kužel I've never understood people who think English isn't logical. Maybe it's because it's the only language I'm fluid in. But it's always seemed to be quite beautiful in the way it all works and fits together.
English is my second language and it's pretty easy, especially it's grammar, When compared with other languages it's really simple. It's writing is kinda weird but the grammar really makes up for it.
why not just have schools teach 2 languages to everyone as they grow up? you would have your common tongue and then a universal tongue. (like english or esperonto)
Here in Greece we are taught THREE different languages at schools : Greek, English, and either German or French ( Four if you count ancient Greek that is very much similar to modern Greek ) AND THEY ARE ALL OBLIGATORY.....
The Yellow Zombie Rules here in pak you are though all those,our national language,our native language and more....you get off luck,oh and continuing the asian trend if you don't get an A+ you'll get disowned
In my opinion the best world language would be a constructed one like Esperanto. I do learn Esperanto in school and it's really not hard at all as long as you put a bit of effort into it. The problem with English or any other non-constructed language is that a native speaker will always be better in telling his ideas than someone who speaks English as his second language. It is also complicated to import all traditional and cultural things into a language that is not the typical language of these tradition. With a constructed language everyone would have the same chance to tell his ideas and support his opinion. But on the other hand I have to agree that I'm writing this in English because it is the most used language at this time and spreading a language that nobody speaks natively would be hard.... By the way my mother tongue is German :)
There's actually different sign languages across the world. Mind you, they share some same signs so they're more like dialects, but the thing with sign language is that across the globe different deaf schools and people created they're own sign language independantly of each other until it got standardized fairly recently in the 20th century. With globalization, of course they got closer, but they are still different.
Why would anyone need to give up their language? Everyone speaks at least 2 languages after all. Just let them have their mother language, and teach them the global language too. No problems at all.
I get where you're coming from, but we don't. here in the states at least most people know only English, and only want to know English. I myself have always wanted to learn a language, so im taking Russian, but im the exception.. nowhere near the norm.
"Therefore, the question of an auxiliary international tongue has the utmost importance. Through this means international education and training become possible; the evidence and history of the past can be acquired. The spread of the known facts of the human world depends upon language." - Abdul-Baha, Baha'i Faith
Bailey Holmes There are so many "rules" for English that only apply some of the time. Like "I before E except after C," for example. There are still words like Neighbor that don't follow this at all. I mean, some _native_ speakers have a hard time with it, imagine what it's like being an _adult_ trying to sort it all out.
hardest rule about English: no rules, yet you still can brake them :) Learn every word's prononciation and spelling by heart (or let auto correct do the work for you) the usual irregular verbes are always a little pain and foreigners can fuck up the use of tenses quite easily.
Hexx i 100% agree. ENGLISH IS DUMB. but thats besides the point. actually no it isnt ENGLISH IS DUMB i never get tired of saying that. but yeah, i after e is 10% usage and even in words where they apear after c, e gos first. ENGLISH IS DUMB italian and other latin based languages may have masculaine and feminine suffixes? i guess you could call it? but their phonetic, follow all thier rules, and only use words from other languages IF THIER BUSY and even then, they have rules they follow for them as well...
+Vanpyro Gaming yeah, because most words in Portuguese or in French pretty much sound like English words with twists, for example: Violência in Portuguese is Violence in English.
Thanks for mentioning Esperanto. The easiest way to learn a second and/or third language is to learn the simplified/planned language Esperanto as a second language. Numerous trials have shown that those studying Spanish only for 2 years will not benefit more than learning Esperanto and Spanish for a year each. The Esperanto community is welcoming in dozens of countries, makes tourism very cheap and realistic for all.
Spanglish is the best for unifying English and Spanish speakers. Plus it is more wide spread than Chinese, which is only spoken in (most of) East Asia.
Spanish is also only widespread in the Americas. In Europe, only Spain speaks Spanish so it's not widespread there. Only few speak Spanish in Africa and almost no one speaks Spanish in Asia.
While I agree that no country will willingly abandon their tongue, that's not the point of a global language. The idea is a language that everyone has and can learn, but not necessarily have grown up on. If we used a manufactured language, we Americans can still teach our young to speak English, the tongue of our people, and still teach them an artificial language in school that all people speak. The issue isn't really getting the countries to ditch their languages, more to get them all to agree on a language and have it be taught to the public so we communicate with everyone
Holy cow, an actual unbiased description of Esperanto from a non-Esperantist! Usually non-Esperantists who speak about Esperanto give descriptions which are not accurate at all…
Awesome video, I was wondering this question too. So glad that I can speak Mandrain, which is my mother tongue, English, a.k.a. the international language, and Malay, which is my country's official language and soon to pick up Spanish. BTW, I know some Chinese dialects like Hokkein and Cantonese
You're completely missing the point. An auxiliary language such as Esperanto is not a replacement for the natural languages spoken by natives around the world, it's used as a bridge for people that would not otherwise have any way to communicate. Getting rid of all languages but one would be a terrible cultural loss and would limit the entire world to one frame of mind: the one of the language. And on top of that you're missing a huge point in this video; the difficulties involved in learning a second language. English is not an easy language to learn. People will spend years studying English and still stutter and mess up word order and forget about connotations. At that point you may well be able to communicate to some degree but the message will come across incorrectly. Studies show that if you study Esperanto for 150 hours you speak it better than someone who's studied English for 2000 hours. A language such as Esperanto however does not suffer from this issue. In Esperanto you can use the word order of your native language and people will still perfectly understand you due to how logically the language is structured. You can create entirely new words to describe extremely complicated concepts that would be mostly impossible to phrase in a sensible manner in almost all languages in the world knowing just one small root word and a few affixes. English may sure be the language with the most root words but that only serves to further complicate the language. In Esperanto you don't need to know the word, you just make it, and everyone will understand you. So to conclude, English is an awful candidate for an international language, not only because it's biased towards the 5% minority of native speakers but also because of how ridiculously difficult it is to learn as a second language. Thank you for reading if you made it this far.
The US and British ones are the funniest to me. They really capture the countries personalities. Ones a powerful, soulless superman. The other is a stuck-up, intelectual has-been.
1:32 Is the reason why I believe we should have a common language you can still keep your native language but when confronted by a foreigner who doesn't know your native language you both will know the common language.
So if many countries talk english makes the language big, why didint you touch on german? German is Spoken in: Germany Austria Switzerland Luxemburg Lichtenstein Parts of Belgium Parts of Hungary Parts of the Chzech Repuplic parts of Poland so yeha
A Swedish friend of mine said that sometime in the late 90's-early 00's that the Swedish government made the conscious decision to start teaching English in all of their schools (idk if it was required every school year but that's what he made it sound like). Their reason for their government to make this linguistic push is that they believed it would give their country an advantage on the world stage. Also because English is considered the primary language of the internet and entertainment globally speaking (the internet was after all invented by English speakers). The global language trend seems to be English, Japanese, Spainish, Arabic, and to a lesser extent, French and German. Sanskrit and Mandrian while prevalent seem like they will be localized at least in the near future.
A story by Abdul-Baha in the Baha'i Faith: A Turk came here to the Holy Land and a man told him, ‘You are the light of my eye.’ The Arabs use this expression to convey love. But In Turkish it [‘ayn] means a bear. So this man threw him on the ground. One who knew the language said, ‘What are you doing?’ he replied, ‘This man calls me a bear.’ The other avowed, ‘By God, I said the light of my eye.’
i think a more plausible thing that would happen is that each language root will slowly combine Romance languages will slowly converge Germaninc languages will slowly converge and so on
Not everyone speaks it, it's not the most spoken language in the world, and in Africa the language they use to speak between them local languages. (except countries where British is the official language)
I generated an engineered language called Terwen using a spin off of Esperanto called Ido. Swapped out all the vocab to contain all the current languages on earth by percentage of who uses them. Posted it in several language groups and pretty much everyone picked it apart and treated it as absolutely stupid. I thought it was a good idea, and everyone could have a part of their language represented so people could focus on their their native tongue and an international language but if it ever came down to it competing internet fake language rooms are not the place to show it. Don't know why I would be expecting anything different. Will probably be using it in futurist books I plan to write someday but until then its just a fun thought experiment.
Most languages came about from evolving from other languages. Most languages don't appear the same as they did 500 years ago. This is contrasted against just creating a whole new language from scratch with no background or history.
Yes, to some extent all languages are artificial. They are not genetic. National languages usually come into existence by promoting one particular dialect (italian) or by creating a compromise from several existing dialects (like Romansch, or the Dutch used in the statenbijbel)
Italians have the solution to this: hand speaking. Instantly understandable, atonal, agender: perfect. And now we are already creating and implementing bionic hands, so it is easy to speak even for people without hands!
You forgot to mention something like the “Olympics”, in which the recognized languages spoken at the worldwide event is always French and English. Also, the idea of a convergence between all languages making a common tongue spoken by a global society to come into being. I mean, English is in reality a conglomeration of lots of languages, especially modern day American English, take into consideration a fully educated person utilizing scientific names, mathematics, and complex ideologies, they are going to be speaking a language that encompasses influences from the entire world...
Kompreneble estas internacia lingvo, kaj tiu estas Esperanto. Estas plej facilega ol la anglan, la ĉinan, aŭ la araban. Ĉia stultulo povas lerni ĝin, inkluzive mi kaj vi!
xkcd have obviously done a comic about this issue but with standards instead: The issue with Esperanto and any other new constructed language is that instead of having "X" different languages and trying to converge into a single language is that you now have "X+1" languages to converge down to one and you have only made the task harder.
You seem to miss the point. You can learn my language or I can learn yours for several years, or we can both learn Esperanto for one or two years. It does not make things harder.
English is actually a pretty terrible language, at least to learn as an adult. Although languages such as Spanish and Latin have more complex rules to learn and it can be somewhat annoying to master them all, the key difference is that they usually follow their rules, with the exception of a few irregular words. Meanwhile the English language has basically no consistency and breaks its own rules constantly, making it particularly annoying to take as a second language. For this reason, making the English language the official "global language" would not only be a pain but horribly impractical compared to, say, Italian.
English is like the modern equivalent of Latin (although it's a Germanic language, which makes it superior!): It's so complicated, and so widely spoken, that it'll fracture into many regional dialects (called 'accents' for some reason) that will eventually become entirely different languages. I hope the Internet won't prevent this.
English would be so much better if rules didn't have irregularities and the pronunciation was direct (ie. say it how you see it, I mean even Finnish does that). The grammar is easy to learn but unfortunately you also need to learn all the anomalies which is a big let down for the language.
Smeetheens How is it superior because it's Germanic? Aren't Germanic languages infamous for having nonsensical rules and pronunciations? Esperanto is a much better candidate
Not to sound whiny but the proposal of English as a universal language is very eurocentric. Languages are tied to cultures and to many, erasure of one means removing another. Even if it's just as a second language, you're forcing the idea unto the whole world. It's like colonialism again. If we're going to go with a common language, why does it have to be English, why does the rest of the world has to spend their time learning a second language while English-speaking population can stick to just one language. Please remember many English or European-language speaking population today from Asia, Africa and Americas were forced to learn the language, in fact some of them even had to remove their culture. -I was born in former English colony, all of us are required to learn ESL.
Farisss92 That's a good thing. If your culture is dependant only on language then your culture SUCKS. I don't know any other language but I can garuntee that if you threw a newly invented language at america and had all children learn it nothing would change besides the fact that everyone would hate us for causing yet another detrimental devide THAT SERVES NO PURPOSE and HAS NO REASON TO EXIST IN MODERN SOCIETY FOR ANY REASON EVER.
+Harbard come on, it is not the language of that corrupt pedophile church (not originally). It was the language of the mighty Roman Republic/Empire and it is awesome. Too complicated to be a global language, though. Fucking cases...
what we need is not one language for everyone to speak,but a ear/eye piece that can automatically translate anything said/written (it would be called the babel fish)
The best way to solve this problem is by making universal translating units, kinda like a super google translate, that is easily accessible, especially to governments.
rather than create a global language a person could just learn multiple languages. it is fairly easy to learn multiple languages if you are exposed to them enough. such as most eurapeans speak 2 to 3 languages with some speaking over 5 most first world countries require students to learn a second language
+ThePogoBro No. I'm dead serious. Foreign Language is the one skill from High School that I have never used. It's worthless. Especially if we can just have translators.
The most common constructed language by far is Standard Mandarin (普通话), which is primarily based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, along with elements from what linguists refer to as the "Wu (吴)" language. It was designed by the Chinese government for the purpose of facilitating communication all over the country. Second place is held by Malay, particularly the Indonesian dialect, known as "Bahasa Indonesia." Of course, neither of those languages were created by a single person, but rather by committee.
OK… Let's make Portuguese the world's official language! For example, let's start by translating this sentence from English to Portuguese. Look: Português para língua mundial já, caralho!! Easy XD
*Ian Kinley* Portuguese is older than spanish, so actually Spanish is funny Portuguese. BTW, Brazilian Portuguese >>> European Portuguese >>>> Spanish.
You never mentioned the number of Esperanto speakers or the people who speak it, nor the reasons for learning a universal language. Your uploads are interesting but I think they could be excellent if you were more thorough.
As there is no census, nobody knows how many Esperanto-speakers there are. A few years ago, facebook claimed that 350,000 (?) of its users listed Esperanto as one of their languages. Some people learn it for fun, some out of idealism, some to get better at languages in general
I think the best solution would be a form of modified, improved English used as a primary language. Right now, English is a very "broken" language, not with how many words it has, but rather the inconsistency with it's grammar rules. Almost every rule has an exception, and this makes English somewhat "disappointing" for a global language. A modified English could probably use the same vast word base, while mainly focusing on improving grammar rule consistency.
It'll be like Firefly the few terms that are difficult are Asiatic so we'll just assimilate them. It's one of our strengths we love to expand our knowledge and tinker.
The appeal of Esperanto, outside of it's lack of native country, is how easy it is to learn. Of course it will be tougher for certain regions than others, but overall the language is extremely easy to learn and doesn't suffer from lack of vocabulary as much as many other constructed languages. It does have a bit of a robotic feel to it though.
I think first a secondary language would be needed (the world one) and maybe just VERY slowly make it a first language (to whom don’t speak in it that is...)
The advantage of using an already existing language like English is that you basically have a billion people who already speak it fluently, and millions who are good enough to teach it. If there ever will be an international language, it will be English, assuming a catastrophic event doesn't happen to the major English speaking nations.
Here's a thought: translating from, say, English to Japanese on google translate doesn't really make very much sense. So how about we come up with languages similar to our current ones, only that use the EXACT same grammar rules? That way, I can still speak something similar to English and easy to learn, but maybe someone in china can speak something *similar* to Chinese. If we want to talk, it's an easy translation because of the grammar.
Besides my native language (dutch), I had to learn french, german and english during middle and high school. I think it's perfectly possible for every kid around the world to learn just one language besides their native language. If that language is the same for everyone, there would be no need to replace native languages for a global language and language barriers would be a thing of the past. Imagine if you could communicate with everyone around the world! I think that would be absolutly amazing! This would be way more convenient then using technology to overcome language barriers.
The purpose of Esperanto is to be a second language for everyone. It's not supposed to be a first language. It's the easiest and most logical language. There are no silent letters, no gender, and words can mean sentences
I don't know much about other languages but could a modified version of Latin work? That may be a stupid question but a thought a lot of languages take something from it making everyone's transition smoother
It certainly has been tried! Interlingua has a few thousand speakers. I'm not sure about latine sine flexione or Lingua Franca Nova. Of course, if you criticise Esperanto for being "too european", any such language is out of the question
As i see it, until spoken mass media/non local publications the dialects were diverging, but since spoken mass media/non local publications the dialects is converging, sure it was due to nation states but that mechanism seems to work on a global stage now. How ever the time if will take to actually make a global language, well i think we got babelfish before.
The thing that defines the popularity of a language is how many places you can use it to communicate. The 3 biggest languages are Chinese, Spanish and English. Chinese is the biggest, but you can only use it in, well, China. This is because of the enormous Chinese population, so it's effectively out of the running. Spanish and English are mass spoken as a legacy of the respective empires that once ruled the lands, and the Spanish and British empires were the 2 largest European empires. So this goes back to places it can be used to communicate. Spanish is good in Spain, the Caribbean, Central America, South America and the South-West USA. English is good in the UK, all the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and just generally all over the world, especially in Commonwealth countries (The Commonwealth includes India and South Africa among others, FYI). So, in conclusion, I declare English the best globally, because it has the most popular speaking places.
If anything countries should make it mandatory for people to learn and fluently speak two or more languages and have people take tests yearly. To be sure that individuals are proficient in said language. I think this way there would be higher amounts of people speaking a universal language that is easy for many people to speak. Though I would personally veto English since it is a very hard and confusing language to learn, from a perspective of a foreigner. That least that's my thought on this topic :)
The thing about Esperanto is that it was never intended to REPLACE natural languages, but to SUPPLEMENT them. If I remember correctly, the original idea was for people to learn it as an intermediary language, to make trade and diplomacy as efficient as possible.
My problem with esperanto is that i find it ugly and weird sometimes. Esperantido or just IDO is an Esperanto derived that is a better alternative but nobody speaks it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@gorilaogorila835donkey
@@gorilaogorila835 Ido has a treacherous "Benedict Arnold" type past. The guys who promoted it to a European commission were supposed to promote Esperanto to that same commission, and were entrusted to do so, but egotistically did a bait-and-switch and presented their own blackboard language project.
@@hamburger4127 arguments ?
@@Dracopol good to know that. Actually Interlingua may be a better alternative.
*Esperanto speakers slowly emerging from the shadows*
Vivu Esperanto!
I'm basing a language primarily off of Japanese, Esperanto, and Korean.
Petu ke Esperanto povas gian golon.
I tried to learn Esperanto, it’s kinda hard
Saluton amiko :^)))))
It's more likely that technology will close the language gap. Imagine a device that can translate speech and text in real time.
Like the tardis
No, the Universal Translator from Star Trek.
Babel Fish
MayuriKurotsuchi I think the same
I'm pretty sure it already exists
I think that everybody should know a global language, but remain with they native language in their homeland
Sao Paulo Mapper yeah thats what i was thinking
Say that to Germany. Once we had a great, for normal Germans not understandable Dialect called Swabian. But the German Government is exterminating our great dialect. only 20-40% of the dialect are left. I would rather speak English at any other part of Germany than speaking only the "normal" German.
Vinicius Azalim really? When I went to Munich all they spoke was normal german and Bavarian at home.
So basically the goal of many Esperantists.
Homeland, sorry I'm not a nazi.
Modern English is the way it is because it's already been more simplified than any other contender. Chinese is tonal. Nobody's ever going to learn a tonal language as an adult. Spanish has gender... which is as big a roadblock as tonality when being learned as a second language.
Modern English is not tonal, and has lost all it's tricky gender BS specifically because it was already simplified centuries ago when an influx of scandanavians settled in England who had to learn Old English as adults, and simply dispensed with all the silly bells and whistles.
Modern linguists fairly agree that if English is not already the global language, it's the only real contender to become one.
+Patrick Melody I can see english is your first language.
+Aidan Bowie Not just cause it's someone's native language do they prefer it. I for example speak more English than Spanish even though Spanish is my first language. I will always prefer English over Spanish cause English is such an easy language to learn and a great one overall.
+Patrick Melody English is not simple at all. Every single spelling and pronunciation rule is broken in at least one way, and there are WAY too many irregular verbs.
Geoffrey Brunell Bruh compare it to many other languages like French, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, German, Irish, Russian, Arabic, etc. English is a really easy language.
FuriousGaming I'm learning Spanish right now, and I have to say that it is a lot easier than English. It's sound-audible, which means that words are pronounced exactly how they are spelled, unlike in English when you have words like "dough", "through", and "tough" which. There are also less irregular verbs and less grammar rules than English.
The problem is that some languages use TOTALLY different writing styles than others. For example, English, German, and French look a hell of a lot different than Arabic, Mandarin, or even Russian. If every language used a Latin alphabet, things would probably be a whole lot simpler.
English isn't that hard to learn if you already speak a Germanic or Romantic language. Yeah there's a lot of complicated rules, but the thing with English is you can absolutely *butcher* a sentence and native speakers will still understand you. In some languages a slight mispronunciation could mean the difference between telling someone you like their outfit and telling someone you want to sodomize them. English doesn't have this problem for the most part. Not only that but the only real way to learn a language is by communicating with a native speaker, and English has *a lot* of native speakers, and many, many sources of media. My Dutch friend learned fluent English in two years just by watching a ton of movies, reading some books, and browsing the web. That's all she needed. So English has that going for it too.
This is primarily why I love english so much. Even someone who is not very good at it can still communicate.
The butchering of sentences is easier to translate compared to other languages.
I learned Esperanto in two months on my own without much effort. And I could have learned it a lot quicker if I tried harder.
Your friend learned English so easy bc dutch is close to English and German
Gotta love it when people butcher the language.
+Unbearable Pain
The Cyrillic alphabet is not that different, if you think more.
English is way easier than Mandarin, because in English, there are more accents, and some might pronounce some words different, but still you can understand them.
In Chinese, you could call your mother a cow, if you don't know how to pronounce it. :)
In the far future, I can see English as the only language spoken by humans beyond Earth. For example, if we ever go to Mars, the first colonists will all have to speak the same language, which will probably be English.
+Eugene Porter i agree.
nah peoples on their original countries will speak their language
*Chinese
+Guilherme Hiroshi Correa Kuroishi yeah, they will continue to pass down their native language. Oi tudo bem oje?
Ryan The Roman hue hue
1:52 that’s not actually true. Spanish and Mandarin have more native speakers than English, but English has the most total speakers (which imo is more important)
Well, the point of an international language is not to replace the local language in favour of a lingua franca. In the Netherlands, children are taught English, but they only ever use it to communicate with others who don't speak Dutch. In the Netherlands, Dutch is still spoken by the large majority of the people. Lingua franca are instead meant as a second language for everyone. You're not asking the Spanish to sacrifice the Spanish language, but instead, you're asking them to learn a second language so they can communicate with non-Spanish speakers.
Also, Esperanto is perfect for this role; after a few months, you can speak Esperanto just as fluently as English after a few years of learning. I can already speak B1~B2 after just 4 months. With English, it took me 2 years to get to B1+.
Note: English has both Germanic as Romance aspects, as the French brought their language with them in 1066 and made English into a hybrid. Thanks to this, speaking English makes Esperanto quite a bit easier.
+Kriso de la Erikejo Agreed
+Kriso de la Erikejo it's simple to dutch to learn english because english and dutch are similar languages but for a person like me that speak a latin language it's more difficult, the main problem for me is that english pronouciation is different from what you write, the enourmus number of verbal constructions and the phrasal verbs that are far too many
I have the solution to people not wanting people to give up their native language. basically an international second language for everyone.
random kerbonuat Kiun lingvon vi rekomendas?
+Jason Mey
ik vermoed dat hij aan Engels dacht. Wel grappig dat ik zonder al te veel moeite je reactie verstond.
Welke taal is dat? (te lui om het in een vertaalmachine te stoppen)
alexander reusens Varför inte svenska?
wie kent er nu Zweeds?
:)
alexander reusens Tiu ĉi lingvo estas Esperanto. (Google Translate: Deze taal is Esperanto.)
You want the world most unified language? That is easy. 01010111
+tindus123 exactly!
+Witcherworks 101010101110010101011101000ⁿ11010101100011ⁿ01010010101110
Translate: This is system language. the ⁿ is "...
+Witcherworks that's not really a language, it's a writing system
+Witcherworks What does binary turn into? The letters are turned back into the language you want it to. So English binary etc
Josh Edwards Going down the road we are heading everyone will have google translate built in their brain. So it will not matter what language you speak!
Also, if for any point there was a single language, I believe local slang would evolve into dialect and then separate languages as Latin did into Spanish, French, Italian, etc. so a global language would be temporary at best.
miniwars123 that is a very good thought, it wouldn't take long for slang to catch on with teenagers and whatnot.
I'm still speaking a German dialect, but 80% of the words that a normal German would not understand are gone. Some of my friends use only 1% of the left 20%. Dialects will not work in the future.
With the world getting smaller and smaller the only thing that might allow dialects to become languages is the sun destroying electricity on earth. People in Germany used to have really different dialects but now that pop culture only uses a single dialect, kids staring to speak roughly the same kind of German and I'd imagine that it would be the same for other countries as well.
miniwars123 if everyone had two languages their native language and then english it would work.
miniwars123
Unless it was secondary.
A secondary global language could work. Just get everyone to know English as a secondary language (unless they know it as a primary), and you're done!
We don't need to speak to every human on earth in their native language. We just need to speak to every human in a language they understand.
Lets make Norweigan the offical language of the world, everyone would be happy and sound super excited when they speak.
Yes, just yes. You have my vote.
+Anton Richter (Drhonda)
Norweigan language is very hard!!
Let's make Icelandic the global language.
+scorpioninpink should be Ilocano. It has more tropical fruit words.
Norwegian, a shitty language which no one speaks, as a portuguese native speaker, I can say, no one would ever want to learn such a different language, Latin languages and english are okay...
I reckon that Esperanto should be taught everywhere as a secondary language; IT IS increadably easy to learn due to its fixed grammatical rules which contain no exceptions. What is more, it wouldnt be forcing a foreign culture upon other people
1985: UNESCO encourages UN member states to add Esperanto to their school curricula.
Well, looks like only China and Hungary listen to them.
Source: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Esperanto
But Esperanto is really ugly 🤮
@@augustfranfrankrike9548 don’t judge a language by its look
@@augustfranfrankrike9548 If anything, that would encourage people to pick up a 3d language. The simplicity of Esperanto makes it easier. So you have your native language, esperanto because it’s easy and practical, and, say, Japanese because you like anime, or French because you like the way it sounds.
@@augustfranfrankrike9548yes it's but very practical
Make it an international responsibility to raise children as bilingual in both their native tongue, and Esperanto. It wouldn't be an immediate shift, but over the course of just a decade, we could have one diffinitive widely known lingua franca. Even if not all people knew it, it still would be the biggest step to finally uniting the world under something.
A single language would not unite people. People would just find different ways of separating themselves from others.
+Dark Gomamon still better than not trying at all :/
+ethan finley "International Responsibility" doesn't mean enforced education. It would benefit people to know 2 languages anyways. It is easier for bilingual people to learn another language. Esperanto is a combination of some Slavic and Romantic Languages meaning it would also help with other forms of language education.
+ethan finley a responsibility is not enforced. It would be up to the parents to take the recommended actions to teaching their children a lingua franca.
+ethan finley That's understandable.
Since I watch youtube a lot and play video games a lot I pretty much hear more english than my own language in a day... In my country you now have english in school from 2nd grade of primary school on... My language uses more and more english words in slang and some of them have made it into our dictionary... I don't think that my language will survive another 100 years...
+martinjez1 What language is yours?
VIDCAs17 Slovenian...
Same with my language finnish.
*****
Within more or less than a generation people in Turkey couldn't understand Ottoman Turkish from the beginning of the 20th century after the Republic of Turkey was formed once the Ottoman Empire fell after WWI, the Turkish language was romanized (meaning it stopped using the Arabic script it had used for centuries in favor of the Latin alphabet) and turk-ized (the linguistic authority of Turkey cleansed the language of many of its Perso-Arabic influences it had gained over the centuries in favor of Turkic originating root words). So, the idea is not so far fetched is just this kind of change had to be highly motivated from within and outside of the government and its people!
***** Maybe I overexaturated it maybe it wont happen in 100 years, but, yes obviously everybody still speaks slovenian right now, but the thing is that in the last generations pretty much everybody knows how to speak english, because you learn it in school... As I said english words are slowly comming in, specially with the younger generations... If nothing else our language will sound more like english in 100 years than it does now, I would never replace my language in everyday life with english or any other, even though I use it a lot... If english starts to take over the world as offiial language one day, Slovenia will probably be one of the first countries to take it...
English uk (traditional)
English us (simplified)
لتفيد عقلك hoh
Yes
[Several People are Typing]
True though.
No
+DragonOnZap23 you already are.
+Primarch Alpharius He might be speaking Spanish
+adiosnoob or italian
+The Anti-Putin, Yulia Tymoshenko or French
+DragonOnZap23 Nein
Teach English as the secondary language in all schools across the European Union and it would grow in power through one generation hard enough for other nations to have to follow suit. Nobody says you have to forget your native language, humans are easily capable of speaking multiples of them.
Basic English? Anyone else gettin Orweillan vibes over here?
doubleplusungood thoughtcrime over here.
Interestingly, some believe that Orwell based Newspeak on Basic English.
I don't like Basic English at all, but I still think it's a little harsh to equate the idea of making a language easier to controlling though.
@@joshuaswart8211 Orwell had a relative who spoke Esperanto, but Newspeak clearly is based on politician's English. Newspeak does not distinguish truth from propaganda, just like English doesn't distinguish know from know, justice from justice, only from only, right from right, you from you, free from free...and a word like "sanction" can mean the opposite of itself.
Esperanto is easy because - like German - it relies on consistently combining wordstems with prefixes and suffixes rather than having separate words to memorise.
Why should people need to abandon their language? It would be enough if they learned the global language as a secondary language.
Tasse05 EXACTLY
The idea is not to abandon your native language, but to learn a second universal language. Esperanto is probably the best choose in this case. It's very easily to learn and already has a globe acceptance. It already is a global language without any one country's language having dominance over any other countries'.
I agree
@@MrHPT3 no, we have english for that
Secondary? Sounds like English
English's just really, really, really easy and has a huge vocabulary. Two birds, one stone.
+Firefox is red, Explorer is blue. Google+ sucks and Chrome does too. How is English easy? Pretty much every single spelling and pronunciation rule is broken, which means you can almost never know how a new word is pronounced just by reading it. English also has a crap ton of irregular verbs.
A language in which ghoti can be read as fish (gh like enough, o like women, and ti like emotion) is NOT easy. Run is pronounced /ran/ and rune is /ru:ne/.
+Geoffrey Brunell Because most of other languanges have shit which beats your spelling and irregular verbs. We for example have 13 ways of conjugating verbs, 4 ways of conjugating adjectives, 15 ways of declinating nouns - with quite a few exceptions...
Geoffrey Brunell You're absolutely right. But it's not like English has a ton of different vowels to choose from. There's plenty of subtle difference such as in "read" and "bean", but that's mostly due to English well rounded pronunciations.
I agree with you, but I think it's not that big a deal because of the simplicity of English grammar.
Felipe Vasconcelos
Haha, true. But when does "gh" ever appear at the start of a word in English? I'm not sure but isn't "gh" a mutated "ch" from German/Dutch?
Ex: [EN] Laughing [NL] Lachen [GE] Lachen - or [EN] Sought [NL] Gezocht [GE] Gesucht.
It's definitely inconsistent and ridiculous nowadays, but it probably made sense in the past... blame the French.
Or we just wait until a global language has evolved?
I myself am a native dutch speaker. I learned french and english and understand some basic german and afrikaans ('cause dutch...).
If everyone just knows 1 language (spanish, english, french, russian or chinese) other then their native tong, the world would be for more easier to communicate with.
Yes, and most people go full english because of that... I speak portuguese and english, I live in Brazil. Literally the most influential language here is english by far, even with most of our continent speaking Spanish, we most of the time really don´t learn it because we can communicate with our Spanish counter parts easily if we talk slow...
That is why english is already the international language, whether the french and the Spanish like it or not
no such language is evolving, so you can wait all you want
It won't be a single language. It if were to happen, it would most likely become Esperanto. Esperanto is simple and easy to learn. It is easy for everyone to learn. Cultures will keep their languages, but everyone would just be fluent in another language. Again, highly probable that it will be Esperanto.
I'd place my bets on either Esperanto or English as a secondary language, with Native English speakers knowing Esperanto. This would be the most efficient way to create a global language.
Rose Knight Yea. A secondary language may very well be entirely possible. But to say the whole world will be monolingual in English is a long stretch. Even if it were to be English, It would only be English until the American economy collapses. The world is just a game.
Dillon Flatt I suppose.
I guess the most likely would look something like this:
Primarily English Speaking Countries
English
Esperanto
Primarily Non-English Speaking Countries
Your Primary Language
Esperanto/English
This way, everyone should be able to communicate with everyone.
Rose Knight Yea. I think having English along with Esperanto to be the most widely used 2nd languages would be the most realistic. As long as we can still cherish eachother's cultures and languages respectively, I would say the world is fine.
***** Languages like Esperanto are only going to get stronger the more we share it. The more we make people aware that Esperanto is the future of Foreign Relations and Global Communication. There could be a future, but it's the doubters that are holding us back.
nobody:
the Spanish guy: no.
si
The brasilian guy: HUE.
@@MrRobot-0 lmao
MAKE SPANISH GLOBAL LANGUAGE
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
@@abandonedchannel72929 No. Russian should be a global language.
So what would be better as a global language, Klingon or Elvish?
+Necrikus Screw that, Lantean all the way! ;)
+Necrikus Nah. Dragon Language all the way
tlhIngan Hol. It gets rid of all the formalities, and skips directly to the point.
Sindarin YAAAAS!
i vote norse
The problem with English is that you would have to find a way to teach it to those Americans.
daDuke42 You are acting like the Americans are the only ones with their own form of English
daDuke42 good luck teaching it to the people from our country THAT DONT EVEN SPEAK ENGLISH...... *cough* Hawaiians *cough* also, how is your language any better? I could agree that your version is better if you were from Canada or Australia, but you're clearly a Britt.
xStrQight MCPE I don't think you understand what sarcasm is
Damn it's pretty impressive how Americans could create the internet and the app you're using right now without language. God damn we must be smart as fuck.
Shorpy I don't think you understand what a joke is,
English is easy, so let's go with it.
English is a particularly illogical language and it's generally difficult for L2 learners to pick up.
English is easy for a native english speaker, as Mandarin is easy to native mandarin speakers. English, however is not easy for native mandarin speakers just as mandarin is not easy for a native english speaker.
+Sam Kužel I've never understood people who think English isn't logical. Maybe it's because it's the only language I'm fluid in. But it's always seemed to be quite beautiful in the way it all works and fits together.
English is my second language and it's pretty easy, especially it's grammar, When compared with other languages it's really simple. It's writing is kinda weird but the grammar really makes up for it.
Rev. SockTrooper120 WAR GENERAL It's so much worse than just the writing system.
why not just have schools teach 2 languages to everyone as they grow up?
you would have your common tongue and then a universal tongue. (like english or esperonto)
i think your missing my point.
lol english would never become a international language seeing as how it still had bias.Espernto would be more likely
Here in Greece we are taught THREE different languages at schools : Greek, English, and either German or French ( Four if you count ancient Greek that is very much similar to modern Greek ) AND THEY ARE ALL OBLIGATORY.....
The Yellow Zombie Rules here in pak you are though all those,our national language,our native language and more....you get off luck,oh and continuing the asian trend if you don't get an A+ you'll get disowned
Tezla Alchemia well that doesn't really work. We have that and most pepole only adapt one of two (English , German).
english with a set of strict rules for pronunciation (for every letter a unique sound), that could be it
In my opinion the best world language would be a constructed one like Esperanto. I do learn Esperanto in school and it's really not hard at all as long as you put a bit of effort into it. The problem with English or any other non-constructed language is that a native speaker will always be better in telling his ideas than someone who speaks English as his second language. It is also complicated to import all traditional and cultural things into a language that is not the typical language of these tradition. With a constructed language everyone would have the same chance to tell his ideas and support his opinion. But on the other hand I have to agree that I'm writing this in English because it is the most used language at this time and spreading a language that nobody speaks natively would be hard....
By the way my mother tongue is German :)
There's actually different sign languages across the world. Mind you, they share some same signs so they're more like dialects, but the thing with sign language is that across the globe different deaf schools and people created they're own sign language independantly of each other until it got standardized fairly recently in the 20th century. With globalization, of course they got closer, but they are still different.
Why would anyone need to give up their language? Everyone speaks at least 2 languages after all. Just let them have their mother language, and teach them the global language too. No problems at all.
I get where you're coming from, but we don't. here in the states at least most people know only English, and only want to know English. I myself have always wanted to learn a language, so im taking Russian, but im the exception.. nowhere near the norm.
"Therefore, the question of an auxiliary international tongue has the utmost importance. Through this means international education and training become possible; the evidence and history of the past can be acquired. The spread of the known facts of the human world depends upon language." - Abdul-Baha, Baha'i Faith
The one problem with using English is its a pain in the ass to Learn
Bailey Holmes Depends what your native language, its much easier than most.
Bailey Holmes There are so many "rules" for English that only apply some of the time. Like "I before E except after C," for example. There are still words like Neighbor that don't follow this at all. I mean, some _native_ speakers have a hard time with it, imagine what it's like being an _adult_ trying to sort it all out.
hardest rule about English:
no rules, yet you still can brake them :)
Learn every word's prononciation and spelling by heart (or let auto correct do the work for you)
the usual irregular verbes are always a little pain and foreigners can fuck up the use of tenses quite easily.
Hexx i 100% agree. ENGLISH IS DUMB. but thats besides the point. actually no it isnt ENGLISH IS DUMB i never get tired of saying that. but yeah, i after e is 10% usage and even in words where they apear after c, e gos first. ENGLISH IS DUMB italian and other latin based languages may have masculaine and feminine suffixes? i guess you could call it? but their phonetic, follow all thier rules, and only use words from other languages IF THIER BUSY and even then, they have rules they follow for them as well...
Silver Archer Your English is terrible.
"prefix '-un'"
like if you get why that is wrong.
+Athenic Cuber un-
That is double plus un good
+General noob not gonna lie I wasn't expecting to see newspeak on youtube
randomizednamme I didn't know it was actually a real language.
General noob
Well, not "real". It was made for the novel 1984 by George Orwell. It's basically English with a bunch of words removed.
For anyone wondering, the outro song is Cadre Crimson - Nineteen-Seventeen (1917)
Portuguese native here, I feel like English should be the global language because it is highly used around the world.
+Miloas Milo neo latin would be best or a new modified latin
That's actually true, because most of West Europe is Latin: Portuguese, French, Spanish, Italian and Romanian.
+Miloas Milo English is a wiird mix of Latin and Germanic.
+Vanpyro Gaming yeah, because most words in Portuguese or in French pretty much sound like English words with twists, for example: Violência in Portuguese is Violence in English.
Sorry, many words in English sound like Roman languages*
Thanks for mentioning Esperanto. The easiest way to learn a second and/or third language is to learn the simplified/planned language Esperanto as a second language. Numerous trials have shown that those studying Spanish only for 2 years will not benefit more than learning Esperanto and Spanish for a year each. The Esperanto community is welcoming in dozens of countries, makes tourism very cheap and realistic for all.
this is even better channel the alternatehistoryhub. you are awsome
Spanglish is the best for unifying English and Spanish speakers. Plus it is more wide spread than Chinese, which is only spoken in (most of) East Asia.
Spanish is also only widespread in the Americas. In Europe, only Spain speaks Spanish so it's not widespread there. Only few speak Spanish in Africa and almost no one speaks Spanish in Asia.
While I agree that no country will willingly abandon their tongue, that's not the point of a global language. The idea is a language that everyone has and can learn, but not necessarily have grown up on. If we used a manufactured language, we Americans can still teach our young to speak English, the tongue of our people, and still teach them an artificial language in school that all people speak. The issue isn't really getting the countries to ditch their languages, more to get them all to agree on a language and have it be taught to the public so we communicate with everyone
Ending Music: The song that played when I was being born.
+Andrew Cawley Haha
Cadre Crimson Or was it the Dying Light the video game's intro? Or MW2 the video game's ending?
Huh?
Holy cow, an actual unbiased description of Esperanto from a non-Esperantist! Usually non-Esperantists who speak about Esperanto give descriptions which are not accurate at all…
Awesome video, I was wondering this question too. So glad that I can speak Mandrain, which is my mother tongue, English, a.k.a. the international language, and Malay, which is my country's official language and soon to pick up Spanish. BTW, I know some Chinese dialects like Hokkein and Cantonese
You're completely missing the point. An auxiliary language such as Esperanto is not a replacement for the natural languages spoken by natives around the world, it's used as a bridge for people that would not otherwise have any way to communicate. Getting rid of all languages but one would be a terrible cultural loss and would limit the entire world to one frame of mind: the one of the language.
And on top of that you're missing a huge point in this video; the difficulties involved in learning a second language. English is not an easy language to learn. People will spend years studying English and still stutter and mess up word order and forget about connotations. At that point you may well be able to communicate to some degree but the message will come across incorrectly. Studies show that if you study Esperanto for 150 hours you speak it better than someone who's studied English for 2000 hours. A language such as Esperanto however does not suffer from this issue. In Esperanto you can use the word order of your native language and people will still perfectly understand you due to how logically the language is structured. You can create entirely new words to describe extremely complicated concepts that would be mostly impossible to phrase in a sensible manner in almost all languages in the world knowing just one small root word and a few affixes. English may sure be the language with the most root words but that only serves to further complicate the language. In Esperanto you don't need to know the word, you just make it, and everyone will understand you.
So to conclude, English is an awful candidate for an international language, not only because it's biased towards the 5% minority of native speakers but also because of how ridiculously difficult it is to learn as a second language.
Thank you for reading if you made it this far.
Also English got to the moon first so
What the fuck does that have to do with anything?
+DEADPOOLVP26 Russian stuff landed first.
The Americans
+Primarch Alpharius
Fine, we'll let the robots speak to each other in Russian then.
Also Russians got to outer space first.
Music is a universal language. Maths too
I think we will invent a practical universal translator before adopt a global language
lol the Chinese person actually cracked me up
Rudy Yuan RACIST
is what a nirmal person would say
IM ROFLING SO HARD RIGHT NOW IM SO RACIST
is what i would say.
im so racist
Reacist
The US and British ones are the funniest to me. They really capture the countries personalities. Ones a powerful, soulless superman. The other is a stuck-up, intelectual has-been.
Ik
1:32 Is the reason why I believe we should have a common language you can still keep your native language but when confronted by a foreigner who doesn't know your native language you both will know the common language.
ESPERANTO!!! Mi parolas Esperanton, kaj vi?
Mi ankaŭ parolas Esperanton. Mi pensas, ke ĝi estas bonega! (Kvankam mi ŝatas Pandunion pli kiel lingvo).
これはバカです。
Mi lernas ĝin :)
そおですね
Esperanto is gay
I really want him and Nighthawkinlight to make a collab video and make us guess who's saying what
So if many countries talk english makes the language big, why didint you touch on german?
German is Spoken in:
Germany
Austria
Switzerland
Luxemburg
Lichtenstein
Parts of Belgium
Parts of Hungary
Parts of the Chzech Repuplic
parts of Poland
so yeha
+MaiNai "parts of" is not a country
And joke countries like Lux and Liech don't count
they do in my opinion
MaiNai keep being delusional
+Luis Alfonso Rodrigáñez joke countries lol
+MaiNai Notice how all of those countries are in Europe (pretty much the same parts even)
A Swedish friend of mine said that sometime in the late 90's-early 00's that the Swedish government made the conscious decision to start teaching English in all of their schools (idk if it was required every school year but that's what he made it sound like). Their reason for their government to make this linguistic push is that they believed it would give their country an advantage on the world stage.
Also because English is considered the primary language of the internet and entertainment globally speaking (the internet was after all invented by English speakers). The global language trend seems to be English, Japanese, Spainish, Arabic, and to a lesser extent, French and German. Sanskrit and Mandrian while prevalent seem like they will be localized at least in the near future.
Let's all learn Huttese :D
A story by Abdul-Baha in the Baha'i Faith: A Turk came here to the Holy Land and a man told him, ‘You are the light of my eye.’ The Arabs use this expression to convey love. But In Turkish it [‘ayn] means a bear. So this man threw him on the ground. One who knew the language said, ‘What are you doing?’ he replied, ‘This man calls me a bear.’ The other avowed, ‘By God, I said the light of my eye.’
Everyone get Duolingo and learn Esperanto!
Basic English is the closest thing to Newspeak from 1984 that I have ever hear of
Doubleplusungood
i think a more plausible thing that would happen is that each language root will slowly combine
Romance languages will slowly converge
Germaninc languages will slowly converge and so on
There already is a global language. It's called English.
candiduscorvus yes but not everyone speaks it
Phillip P not at all
Dolan Duk lol yes, it is.
Not everyone speaks it, it's not the most spoken language in the world, and in Africa the language they use to speak between them local languages. (except countries where British is the official language)
..."British"? I think you mean English.
I generated an engineered language called Terwen using a spin off of Esperanto called Ido. Swapped out all the vocab to contain all the current languages on earth by percentage of who uses them. Posted it in several language groups and pretty much everyone picked it apart and treated it as absolutely stupid. I thought it was a good idea, and everyone could have a part of their language represented so people could focus on their their native tongue and an international language but if it ever came down to it competing internet fake language rooms are not the place to show it. Don't know why I would be expecting anything different. Will probably be using it in futurist books I plan to write someday but until then its just a fun thought experiment.
aren't all languages artificial?
Most languages came about from evolving from other languages. Most languages don't appear the same as they did 500 years ago. This is contrasted against just creating a whole new language from scratch with no background or history.
Yes, to some extent all languages are artificial. They are not genetic. National languages usually come into existence by promoting one particular dialect (italian) or by creating a compromise from several existing dialects (like Romansch, or the Dutch used in the statenbijbel)
Italians have the solution to this: hand speaking.
Instantly understandable, atonal, agender: perfect.
And now we are already creating and implementing bionic hands, so it is easy to speak even for people without hands!
We should just all learn low gothic
Wes Scherle Eller svenska!
Wes Scherle fuck that, let's speak Klingon.
Don't forget High Gothic :)
0:26 Is Britain lookin' down US' pants?
na, Britain ended up dropping it's hat and monocle
Esperanto :D?
You forgot to mention something like the “Olympics”, in which the recognized languages spoken at the worldwide event is always French and English.
Also, the idea of a convergence between all languages making a common tongue spoken by a global society to come into being.
I mean, English is in reality a conglomeration of lots of languages, especially modern day American English, take into consideration a fully educated person utilizing scientific names, mathematics, and complex ideologies, they are going to be speaking a language that encompasses influences from the entire world...
Kompreneble estas internacia lingvo, kaj tiu estas Esperanto. Estas plej facilega ol la anglan, la ĉinan, aŭ la araban. Ĉia stultulo povas lerni ĝin, inkluzive mi kaj vi!
Mi tute konsentas! :)
Esperanto estas la lingvo de la mondo :D
This is how English wurds shood b speld
inglish*
+Eddie Gerber Nah you had it right the first time man.
+TheMattzila no because it looks like it would be pronounced eng, not ing
+Eddie Gerber If it was, that'd get past the biggest hurdles in our language.
the nice thing about English is that you can freaking destroy and butcher a word, spelt or verbally, and we will still understand.
xkcd have obviously done a comic about this issue but with standards instead: The issue with Esperanto and any other new constructed language is that instead of having "X" different languages and trying to converge into a single language is that you now have "X+1" languages to converge down to one and you have only made the task harder.
You seem to miss the point. You can learn my language or I can learn yours for several years, or we can both learn Esperanto for one or two years. It does not make things harder.
English is actually a pretty terrible language, at least to learn as an adult. Although languages such as Spanish and Latin have more complex rules to learn and it can be somewhat annoying to master them all, the key difference is that they usually follow their rules, with the exception of a few irregular words. Meanwhile the English language has basically no consistency and breaks its own rules constantly, making it particularly annoying to take as a second language.
For this reason, making the English language the official "global language" would not only be a pain but horribly impractical compared to, say, Italian.
and it would break into other languages
English is like the modern equivalent of Latin (although it's a Germanic language, which makes it superior!): It's so complicated, and so widely spoken, that it'll fracture into many regional dialects (called 'accents' for some reason) that will eventually become entirely different languages.
I hope the Internet won't prevent this.
English would be so much better if rules didn't have irregularities and the pronunciation was direct (ie. say it how you see it, I mean even Finnish does that). The grammar is easy to learn but unfortunately you also need to learn all the anomalies which is a big let down for the language.
Even as someone who speaks English as a first language, I still prefer Esperanto due to it's consistency.
Smeetheens
How is it superior because it's Germanic? Aren't Germanic languages infamous for having nonsensical rules and pronunciations? Esperanto is a much better candidate
Not to sound whiny but the proposal of English as a universal language is very eurocentric. Languages are tied to cultures and to many, erasure of one means removing another. Even if it's just as a second language, you're forcing the idea unto the whole world. It's like colonialism again. If we're going to go with a common language, why does it have to be English, why does the rest of the world has to spend their time learning a second language while English-speaking population can stick to just one language. Please remember many English or European-language speaking population today from Asia, Africa and Americas were forced to learn the language, in fact some of them even had to remove their culture. -I was born in former English colony, all of us are required to learn ESL.
Farisss92 That's a good thing. If your culture is dependant only on language then your culture SUCKS. I don't know any other language but I can garuntee that if you threw a newly invented language at america and had all children learn it nothing would change besides the fact that everyone would hate us for causing yet another detrimental devide THAT SERVES NO PURPOSE and HAS NO REASON TO EXIST IN MODERN SOCIETY FOR ANY REASON EVER.
The new international language should be Latin. ROMA INVICTA HERI, HODIE, ET IN AETERNUM.
+Harbard because many languages have roots in Latin and non-romance languages have many words from Latin. oh and btw go fuck yourself mate ;)
"Many" by many you mean like 4-5? lol... No thanks I'll keep speaking Swedish and Finnish. No Christian pedophilia language here thank you.
+Harbard (As a Catholic, you mean Catholic.) Not all Christian denominations use Latin.
+Harbard come on, it is not the language of that corrupt pedophile church (not originally). It was the language of the mighty Roman Republic/Empire and it is awesome.
Too complicated to be a global language, though. Fucking cases...
Gabriel Miranda Then why don't we all speak the language of the Third Rome, Russian?
I believe that the internet will speed things up about which language becomes dominant
what we need is not one language for everyone to speak,but a ear/eye piece that can automatically translate anything said/written (it would be called the babel fish)
The best way to solve this problem is by making universal translating units, kinda like a super google translate, that is easily accessible, especially to governments.
rather than create a global language a person could just learn multiple languages. it is fairly easy to learn multiple languages if you are exposed to them enough. such as most eurapeans speak 2 to 3 languages with some speaking over 5 most first world countries require students to learn a second language
But I speak English - so no. Power means you must learn my language and I don't have to learn yours....
I just think we need better translators. We need to ban teaching a second language.
+PeterWatchesTheWatchmen is this a joke?
_is this a joke?_
Absolutely not. It's an *excellent* definition of soft power.
+ThePogoBro No. I'm dead serious. Foreign Language is the one skill from High School that I have never used. It's worthless. Especially if we can just have translators.
The most common constructed language by far is Standard Mandarin (普通话), which is primarily based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, along with elements from what linguists refer to as the "Wu (吴)" language. It was designed by the Chinese government for the purpose of facilitating communication all over the country. Second place is held by Malay, particularly the Indonesian dialect, known as "Bahasa Indonesia." Of course, neither of those languages were created by a single person, but rather by committee.
force English... Do it
In Brazil most of schools already teach english along with portuguese
French is very popular too
Sound argumentation. Love it. :D
Renovartio most countries do force English as a second language.
Palpatine: Dew it !
OK… Let's make Portuguese the world's official language! For example, let's start by translating this sentence from English to Portuguese. Look: Português para língua mundial já, caralho!! Easy XD
Carlos The Great Portuguese is hard for non-native Portuguese speakers, however it's pretty easy to write
What the fuck
Portuguese is like drunk russian guy speaking spanish XD
*Ian Kinley* Portuguese is older than spanish, so actually Spanish is funny Portuguese.
BTW, Brazilian Portuguese >>> European Portuguese >>>> Spanish.
Acho melhor não
You never mentioned the number of Esperanto speakers or the people who speak it, nor the reasons for learning a universal language. Your uploads are interesting but I think they could be excellent if you were more thorough.
As there is no census, nobody knows how many Esperanto-speakers there are. A few years ago, facebook claimed that 350,000 (?) of its users listed Esperanto as one of their languages.
Some people learn it for fun, some out of idealism, some to get better at languages in general
Yes. It's called ENGLISH
how about using a reconstructed proto - world?
I think the best solution would be a form of modified, improved English used as a primary language. Right now, English is a very "broken" language, not with how many words it has, but rather the inconsistency with it's grammar rules. Almost every rule has an exception, and this makes English somewhat "disappointing" for a global language. A modified English could probably use the same vast word base, while mainly focusing on improving grammar rule consistency.
It'll be like Firefly the few terms that are difficult are Asiatic so we'll just assimilate them. It's one of our strengths we love to expand our knowledge and tinker.
I think the way a language would become global is through hundreds of years of gradual acceptance of the language
The appeal of Esperanto, outside of it's lack of native country, is how easy it is to learn. Of course it will be tougher for certain regions than others, but overall the language is extremely easy to learn and doesn't suffer from lack of vocabulary as much as many other constructed languages.
It does have a bit of a robotic feel to it though.
I think first a secondary language would be needed (the world one) and maybe just VERY slowly make it a first language (to whom don’t speak in it that is...)
The advantage of using an already existing language like English is that you basically have a billion people who already speak it fluently, and millions who are good enough to teach it. If there ever will be an international language, it will be English, assuming a catastrophic event doesn't happen to the major English speaking nations.
That opening picture
I almost died
Here's a thought: translating from, say, English to Japanese on google translate doesn't really make very much sense. So how about we come up with languages similar to our current ones, only that use the EXACT same grammar rules? That way, I can still speak something similar to English and easy to learn, but maybe someone in china can speak something *similar* to Chinese. If we want to talk, it's an easy translation because of the grammar.
On a similar note what do you think about a global currency?
Besides my native language (dutch), I had to learn french, german and english during middle and high school. I think it's perfectly possible for every kid around the world to learn just one language besides their native language. If that language is the same for everyone, there would be no need to replace native languages for a global language and language barriers would be a thing of the past. Imagine if you could communicate with everyone around the world! I think that would be absolutly amazing! This would be way more convenient then using technology to overcome language barriers.
In Wikipedia 1 also stumbles upon Interlingua and Interlingue. What about those two (and what is the difference)?
Those are other languages created to become world languages. Interlingua even has a few thousand users, but it's very romanic (latin-centered)
Basically, Interlingue is Interlingua except being more regular
The purpose of Esperanto is to be a second language for everyone. It's not supposed to be a first language. It's the easiest and most logical language. There are no silent letters, no gender, and words can mean sentences
I don't know much about other languages but could a modified version of Latin work? That may be a stupid question but a thought a lot of languages take something from it making everyone's transition smoother
It certainly has been tried! Interlingua has a few thousand speakers. I'm not sure about latine sine flexione or Lingua Franca Nova.
Of course, if you criticise Esperanto for being "too european", any such language is out of the question
As i see it, until spoken mass media/non local publications the dialects were diverging, but since spoken mass media/non local publications the dialects is converging, sure it was due to nation states but that mechanism seems to work on a global stage now. How ever the time if will take to actually make a global language, well i think we got babelfish before.
The thing that defines the popularity of a language is how many places you can use it to communicate. The 3 biggest languages are Chinese, Spanish and English. Chinese is the biggest, but you can only use it in, well, China. This is because of the enormous Chinese population, so it's effectively out of the running. Spanish and English are mass spoken as a legacy of the respective empires that once ruled the lands, and the Spanish and British empires were the 2 largest European empires. So this goes back to places it can be used to communicate. Spanish is good in Spain, the Caribbean, Central America, South America and the South-West USA. English is good in the UK, all the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and just generally all over the world, especially in Commonwealth countries (The Commonwealth includes India and South Africa among others, FYI). So, in conclusion, I declare English the best globally, because it has the most popular speaking places.
Everyone in the comments: Esperanto is the best choice because it is very easy!
Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans: has left the chat
Those languages have very complicated grammar
Bruh those are not easy
If anything countries should make it mandatory for people to learn and fluently speak two or more languages and have people take tests yearly. To be sure that individuals are proficient in said language. I think this way there would be higher amounts of people speaking a universal language that is easy for many people to speak. Though I would personally veto English since it is a very hard and confusing language to learn, from a perspective of a foreigner. That least that's my thought on this topic :)