Why Can't We All Speak English, Redux

It's always fun to study the Google search terms that drive people to your site and wonder why someone searching for "shaming alarm" was directed to your site and if they found what they were looking for.

A large percentage of the Google 'keywords' that drive people to TomNoir.com are similar to the following:

why don't we all just speak english
why don't people just speak 1 language
what effect would it have if it was required to speak just english
differences if you cant speak english
all european languages equally complex

Most of these inquiries will get directed to a post I wrote provocatively titled Why can't we all just speak English anyway? That title is actually a bit misleading, since it is really a post about John McWhorter's book The Power of Babel. One might find the answers to many of these questions in that book, it's true, but I don't explicitly answer the question in the post.

So I thought I would take a crack at answering some of these questions here.

Disclaimer: I'm no linguist. I don't even play one on TV. I've read a couple books and lived in a couple foreign countries, that's all. That said, I think I could give pretty reasonable answers based on what I've learned. And I can provide some references for those who wish to dig deeper.

I'll start with the most general questions and work towards the more specific:

Why don't humans all just speak one language?

There's no question that this is a complex and extremely fascinating question that has occupied linguists, biologists, geneticists, and neurologists for years. I don't think that there is as yet a definitive answer. But Stephen Pinker takes a very good crack at one in his bestselling intro to linguistics, The Language Instinct. Pinker argues that the instinct for language, and even a specific 'universal grammar' that underlies all human languages, is genetically hard-wired into the human brain.

Well, you might ask, if we have a universal grammar encoded right into us, then why not take the next logical step and have a universal language plugged right into our brains from birth? Here's the problem with that, in two words: genetic drift. Over generations genes mutate in small, random ways. If our genes specified an explicit language, we would be in trouble when this happened. Independent people groups might suddenly find themselves permanently unable to speak to each other, because their languages had 'evolved' in different directions.

It's also the case that a language is a lot of information to specify genetically. Most languages consist of tens of thousands of words, to say nothing of variations on those words and the grammar that underlies it. Maybe specific rules about 'who' and 'whom' just don't belong in a strand of DNA.

From both a flexibility and information density standpoint, it's much simpler to accept that virtually all members of the human race are given the tools to acquire language, without a specific language being embedded in us.

But why don't we all learn the same language? Where did the thousands of different languages come from?

Blame it on the kids; each generation must transfer its language to the next, and that process is imperfect. What you recognize as slang your children may accept as the standard way the language is spoken. Over time small differences creep in. Eventually these add up to large differences: mutually unintelligible tongues.

Also, blame foreigners; no language survives contact with another unchanged. When people learn a language as a second language they change their own language, as well as very often the language they are learning. Depending on the type and extent of the contact between two separate languages, the impact may be substantial. For a much more in depth examination of this process, see the first two chapters in The Power of Babel.

What about English? It's well on it's way to being a universal language. Is it easy for foreigners to learn?

No language is simple or easy to learn, at least not if you're an adult. Every language ever discovered is vastly, even excessively complicated, filled with nuance, subtleties and exceptions. Every language in the world is capable of expressing the full range of human thought and emotion. When you think about it, this is really impressive. But it means that acquiring a new tongue will always be a time-consuming and difficult process.

Fine, but is English simple by comparison to other languages? Well, let's look at it's individual components:

Sounds
McWhorter claims that English contains no sounds that you have to be born to pronounce, although the Japanese might disagree with this as they famously struggle to differentiate between 'r' and 'l'. I've read that English is slightly above average for the world's language in terms of the number of sounds it contains. So in general simple pronunciation shouldn't be too difficult. It's not a tonal language, which all by itself should be worth fifty 'easy points'.

Verb Conjugation
Nothing will make people throw up their hands faster than finding out that there are 600 ways to conjugate verbs in your language. English conjugations are dead simple, boiling down to adding an -s suffix in most situations. Another 50 easy points for English.

Irregular Verbs
This site lists 370 irregular English verbs that are in common use. Any irregular verb must be memorized by rote, since the usual rules do not apply to it. 370 verbs and their irregular forms is a lot of memorization. We're docking English fifty points.

Tense
Some languages don't differentiate tense at all. If you want to say that you will play baseball in the future in such a language you just say "I play baseball tomorrow." Alas, despite having simple verb conjugations English does have several verb tenses. You can use these tenses to differentiate, for instance, between actions that may potentially happen in the future and actions that started in the recent past and are ongoing. A non-native speaker is going to boggle quite a bit at a perfectly allowable English construction like "I will have known him for many years." Subtract twenty-five points.

Syntax
English word order is simple, right? Subject, verb, other stuff. Not so fast, Chomsky. English syntax is only simple if you already speak it. Everyone else is wondering why we start questions with a meaningless 'do' ("Do you want some butter?" instead of the more straightforward "Want you butter?" in other Germanic languages). And where do sentences like "Tomorrow I have to take a test in one of these subjects," fit in your simple sentence diagram? Still, at least English has a pretty consistent left-to-right word order when other languages may not, so we'll call it even. No points.

Words
The biggest part of learning a language is memorizing long lists of words. Alas, the 1989 edition of the OED contained over 615,000 entries. This is not counting the nearly limitless permutations of words that English allows. 'Logic' is one word, but from it you could form 'logical', 'logically', 'illogical', 'logicalness', 'logicality' and many more, depending on how creative you're willing to get. There are potentially millions of words in the English language. Learners have quite a hill to climb. Negative fifty points.

These considerations are just the tip of the iceberg. Some languages have hundreds of noun cases and English has very few, so that's good. But most languages are closely related to other languages and can be quickly acquired by neighboring speakers, but English is an island, so that's not so good. English doesn't bother with gender like some languages which is a plus, but it requires you to specify with articles whether or not you're referring to a specific noun. For more of what makes English special, check out another McWhorter book entitled Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.

So where does that leave the score?

Linguists find that rather counter-intuitively, the languages of large urban societies are generally more streamlined and less baroque than those of smaller and more insular societies. So is English easier to learn than Bushman? Yes. Is it easier to learn than French? That will depend greatly on whether you already speak Spanish, German or Chinese.

Will English one day become the universal language of the world?

The answer to this is purely speculative. But I would say probably not. While thousands of languages are on their way to extinction, hundreds are still going strong or even gaining in strength. English is hardly the only global language these days. Spanish speakers number in the billions, and so do Chinese. Even 'obscure' languages such as Malay-Indonesian and Bengali count their speakers in the hundreds of millions.

In the last century we've seen the massive growth of urbanized languages even as small and obscure languages lose ground. For the foreseeable future Bengali, for instance, will acquire more speakers, not less, and it's not clear that it will ever come down to a showdown with English.

Even if globalization does eventually push us toward a scenario where there is a single global language, it would be unlikely to be English as we know it. Languages tend to steal from each other and use those 'foreign' pieces as raw material for their own evolution. The Universal English that has absorbed Arabic, Russian and French is likely to be very different from the form we speak today.

To sum up:

We don't all speak the same language probably because it is biologically simpler and more advantageous to simply give us the tools for language acquisition. And languages change over generations. All languages are complex and difficult to learn, but widely-spoken languages like English tend to be a bit more streamlined on average. Some things about English are simple, but it also has a fair amount of the ornate complexity native to all human language. There is no reason to think that English will one day be the one universal language, but if it is we can bet that it will be substantially different from what it sounds like now.

Hopefully that answers some of the questions that bring people to this blog. If you have more, drop me a comment and I'll see if I can put our team of unpaid research interns to work on the problem.