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The Forum > General Discussion > Should we move towards an international language?

Should we move towards an international language?

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I recently saw a U.S discussion page, which had around a 50% for and 50% against in terms of all people moving towards speaking the English language worldwide.

Those for, said the move said this would break down barriers communication and economic wise between people, whilst those against said it would impact on the cultural heritage of a country.

Is moving towards one central international language, something worth considering or should the idea simply be scrapped?
Posted by NathanJ, Thursday, 1 October 2015 5:35:41 PM
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Well one problem you'll have is deciding which language to standardise on.

I assume that you have English in mind, however a very good case can be made in favour of Spanish.

English does have considerably more speakers, when counting the total L1 and L2 speakers, than Spanish*. According to some English has about 1 billion verses 1/2 billion for Spanish, although the numbers vary wildly depending whose counting.

Although, Spanish has slightly more native speakers (L1) than English: about 400 million vs 350 million.

Both have less L1+L2 speakers than Chinese.

However, the main advantages of Spanish over Chinese are: firstly it uses the Latin alphabet (plus one adittional letter, which has a diacritical tilde on top of 'N') which is almost universally known. Secondly, the fact that it is geographically diverse while Chinese is mainly based in/around China. Lastly, and most importantly, it is also a lot easier to learn to speak and write while Chinese is vastly harder.

The great advantage of Spanish over English is that is the easier to learn to speak, read, spell and write (especially so for speakers of other Romance languages and to a lesser degree English speakers- due to common/similar words).
In fact, for some, it only takes a couple of months to learn how to spell Spanish since the spelling is more or less phonemic. Contrast this to English which takes many years to learn.

*L1 means first language, ie: native language/mother tongue, while L2 means second language, ie: not the native language but another that the person speaks that is also used in the locale of the person.
If you add in people who speak English has a foreign language, ie: a language learned but not commonly spoken in the person's region (eg: a North Korean learning English) then, according to some counts, English has close to 2 billion speakers. However, most who speak it as a foreign language do so very poorly and only a very small percentage could be considered proficient at writing it.
Posted by thinkabit, Thursday, 1 October 2015 10:29:43 PM
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Jes , ni ĉiuj parolas Esperanton.
Posted by Toni Lavis, Thursday, 1 October 2015 11:20:41 PM
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In Asia the English language is taught in Primary schools. I thought it was an agreement that English was the international speech.

Air traffic control English is the norm.
Posted by doog, Friday, 2 October 2015 8:29:21 AM
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Don't be silly Nathan, you are trying to reinvent the wheel.

The kids have already got this well in hand with text speak. At least there is some possibility they will become fluent in this new language, as they have invented it themselves.

As for me, I'm totally not interested. Hell I'm having enough trouble, at my tender age, remembering the words I once knew, when I want to use them, without trying to learn some Mediterranean or other chatter.
Posted by Hasbeen, Friday, 2 October 2015 11:45:54 AM
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Esperanto was designed to be an international language.
It has a latin base and uses the same character set as English.
It has 16 rules which are always obeyed.
You can write or say "Blue Hat" or "Hat Blue" and likewise have your
words in a mixed up order but the meaning remains the same.
This is because verbs end in "a", nouns end in "o", pluals end in "j"

"Murda en la Oriento Expresso"
err I think that is correct it has been thirty years since I learnt
a bit of esperanto.
Posted by Bazz, Friday, 2 October 2015 12:01:59 PM
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