this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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chapotraphouse
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I think everyone should learn esperanto or some made up languange as a second language so that you can communicate with anyone in the world no matter what country they come from.
Idk ... in my opinion, naturally-developed languages are the basis to go, but alr then...
Maybe 100 years from now we'll have the global coordination needed to make stuff like that a reality.
Until then, I think it's a lot more useful to have "regional languages". Between Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Mandarin, Hindi, and Malay, over 3/4 of Asia speaks one of these, and roughly half of Asia speaks one of them natively. Add Japanese, Vietnamese, and Thai, and you reach perhaps 90% L1 or L2. Interestingly enough, only 2 of these 9 languages share a language family.
4 languages make up >95% of the L1s in the Western Hemisphere, and these carry over to Africa to make up probably at least 60% of people at L2.
Perhaps a controversial position would be that groups of endangered or smaller languages could maintain a better guaranteed existence by coalescing around one of them as a lingua franca, and possibly having better prospects of outsiders learning that language too.