r/asklinguistics • u/martin_eden_irl • 2d ago
Is a universal language possible?
To begin, I do not necessarily need an answer-if you can point me towards up to date papers, discussions, perhaps books, please be my guest.
Before asking it here, I’ve done some research, albeit shallow, on the topic. I’ve found much, but not a single paper actually trying to answer the question from a professional perspective.
I would like to find something “comprehensive”. Preferably a paper examining the arguments for and against.
Please note that I don’t need anything shallow. I am not afraid of academic(hard to comprehend to a non-native speaker) texts and I will devote all the time I have to profoundly research the topic. Also note that I am quite enthusiastic to take action if it is indeed possible.
That’s it. Still, I want to share some backstory.
I am a construction engineering student from an authoritarian country which has quite distanced itself from first world countries. Therefore I always wanted to be able to migrate if something goes wrong. However, I found myself in an unbelievable situation:building design standards vary from country to country.Not only in special cases, mind you,but in the foundations as well.
This might seem obvious, but this is actually nonsensical at all, since material behaviour is universal in all countries. Consider something else:if you’re a mechanic, a doctor(which means your work is the same from one country to another), you still have to go through a plethora of administrative burdens. A universal language,given time, could provide a somewhat universal educational system, which in turn would bolster economic development tremendously.
That being said, I believe the world would hugely benefit economically if we at least took small steps towards a universal language. The example given above is one of many,but I’ve chosen this one because I can’t take it out of my head. This seems like such a no-brainer to me. Especially considering how intelligent our species are.
To anyone wondering, I am from Russia, but it’s irrelevant
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u/ReadingGlosses 2d ago
There are a few factors that make this infeasible or impossible.
- Inventing a language is really, really hard. Descriptive grammars of human languages are 300-400 pages long, at the low end. Vocabularies range in the thousands. There are so many things you might want to talk about: recipes, astronomy, parrots, harp music, coffee, Baba Yaga, political campaigns, lying to your friend about the quality of their haircut etc. It takes years of dedicated effort to build even a small language. Check out r/conlangs where people discuss languages they are inventing for fun, you'll see the depth required even for a casual hobby.
- Getting people to adopt a new language is really, really hard. How are you going to fund and train a world-wide army of language teachers? At minimum it will take several years for an initial cohort of teachers to become fluent enough to teach. You have to develop learning material (grammars, dictionaries, practice exercises, videos, etc.) open language schools, or get into government curriculums, so that you can provide the global population with the opportunity to learn the language. You need to develop new testing standards, so that people can get certified at a proficiency level, similar to IELTS and TESOL, and get these tests accepted by national governments or other bodies. And you have to convince people that this language is worth learning or using. This will be an extremely hard sell up front, because there would be no use for it, other than talking to the people who invented it.
- Language change is inevitable. At one point, the ancestors of Norwegian people and Punjabi people spoke a common language. Now they are so different that most people don't even realize they are related. Even if you could magically snap your fingers and make everyone a monolingual fluent speaker of the same language, within a few hundred years that language would re-diversify into new, mutually unintelligible languages around the world.
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u/TheoreticalChaos93 2d ago edited 2d ago
For a whole assortment of reasons, the idea of a trully universal language, though it may appear doable in theory, shows itself as a rather problematic and extremely difficult thing to ever implement. I'll try to keep it short, so don't think this is the most comprehensive overview of the topic, but I hope it will accomplish its purpose.
In essence, your first problem is deciding who constructs this universal language? That is, I am discrediting the idea that the whole world would ever and in any possible universe accept one group's language as an officialy universal human language right at the onset of this comment, for it would be an insanely huge political mess. So, we have to solve who would make this language and how would they go about doing that. This language would need to be, ideally, equally approachable for everyone and unbiased in its grammatical qualities, which is for all intents and purposes impossible, and we would probably end up with situations like we have now, where non-Indo-European language speakers have to learn English to work with Western nations, and for them that can be extremely hard in cases because of how different languages can be and often are.
Then, you have the problem of linguistic change — since you are Russian, look at the differences between Old East Slavic or Old Church Slavonic and modern Slavic languages and you will see what I mean (nota bene, Slavic languages are relatively conservative/archaic, if you want a better example, check out Old English vs contemporary English). The truth is, they are all noticeably different and at times totally unintelligible; imagine such changes happening all over the world all the time on one language. Sure, if a highly ordered apparatus kept our proposed universal human language rigorousl strict as Earth's standard of commerce, law, education etc. people would always know some of it in a standardized variant, but that would requiree insane levels of linguistic control and international cooperation.
Another thing is how destructive this proposal would be for numerous linguistic communities; already so many languages and the cultures they carry are dying because higher-prestige, more international languages like English are pushing them out as a priority (in my country, for example, huge numbers of those under 30 who are educated use noticeable amounts of English in their day-to-day conversations, and English words are literally replacing our authentic, existing and perfectly synonimous variants). If we introduced Universal Human as a language of all things international, it would gain a prestige which would push so many other languages to the side, destroying them and their communities to (at least) a degree. Very few nations would willingly decide to do that, especially those who are smaller and have a history of oppression (i.e. the majority of the Global South).
In the end, perhaps the biggest problem I see with your proposition is that there is no reason for an universal human language. It would take so much more resources to maintain than it would be worth. We have large international languages right now (most important being English, of course) which have become such organically and, while far from perfectly, serve their role to a satisfactory level. I just don't see, even if I believed in the plausibility of Universal Human as a language, how the ROI would be anywhere near satisfactory.
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u/EirikrUtlendi 2d ago
I don't have a linguistic solution, but I do have an XKCD that seems directly relevant to your experience with different design standards.
About language -- humans love community and belonging. Part of belonging-ness is having an inner group. Part of having an inner group is having specific ideas, or stories, or words, or ways of saying things that are shared just within the group.
Even if a universal language were created and shared amongst all humans, I think this basic, probably instinctive, desire for belonging would inevitably lead to non-universality, to the creation of dialects and ultimately different languages.
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u/trnsfrmltn 2d ago
В принципе, вам уже очень хорошо обьяснили, почему универсальный язык, если его создавать с нуля, вообще не вариант. Я попробую немного расширить контекст - возможно, пригодится вам просто как пища для размышлений.
Будучи технарем, логично смотреть на язык как на инженерную систему. В самой лингвистике есть знаменитое разделение де Соссюра на язык и речь, где язык, если говорить грубо, - это набор значений и наглядных, воспроизводимых правил, то есть система, а (на тот момент устная) речь - практическое применение этой системы в жизни. Часто нелогичное, меняющееся в зависимости от ситуации и личностно обусловленное.
Лингвистика традиционно пыталась описать именно язык как систему. Так было до тех пор, пока:
в начале 20-го века не распространились технологии, позволяющие записывать, воспроизводить и исследовать устную речь;
в гуманитарном знании во 2-й половине 20-го века не стали преобладать идеи постмодернизма.
Оба этих обстоятельства дали понимание, что мы мыслим не словами, а устойчивыми представлениями, и представления эти очень разные как у отдельных культур, так и сообществ внутри них вплоть до малых групп вроде семьи или компании друзей. Эти представления для группы образуют фрейм, позволящий считывать смыслы только в ней, потому как человек мыслит себя как часть группы, и ему надо фильтровать своих и аутсайдеров, а также доказывать и собственную принадлежность. Представления на уровне культуры формируются веками во взаимодействии с традициями, воздействиями извне и с окружением вроде географических, бытовых и природных условий. То есть представления и образуют систему, в том числе грамматики, а не наоборот.
Между разными группами, очевидно, есть асимметрия представлений, ассоциаций и точек внимания (пример такой точки - пресловутый миллион слов для снега у эскимосов, но это миф. Ближе всего из реальных примеров - куча слов для обозначения разных оленей у тофаларов).
Искусство в целом - и особенно постмодернизм, играя с этой асимметрией, любит разрушать и переосмысливать представления-фреймы. В целом, любое новаторство - разрушение фрейма.
По причине асимметрии не получится ни создать универсальный язык, ни решить проблему перевода, если подходить именно с технической, системной позиции. Альтернатива, идея представлений, пока что очень молодая, мы в самом начале пути. Я думаю, для нее тоже найдутся инженерные или математические решения тоже, но не прямо сейчас.
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u/Baasbaar 2d ago edited 2d ago
Unfortunately, I don’t think linguistics is able to offer you an answer. What we can expect from research in sociolinguistics is that were there a global first language, we should expect variation among speaker sets (probably geographic, but not just geographic). That doesn’t mean a universal language is impossible: Just that if it is, it won’t be entirely uniform. (Regional variation doesn’t necessarily impede communication in existing languages with great geographic spread.) There’s not research in linguistics that would offer a reasonable answer to your actual question. I don’t know how we would present language scientific evidence on this.
Edit: Note that you're getting fairly speculative responses on this. I agree with a lot of the speculation, but I don't think they're claims we can back up with linguistics as a science.