If the Internet pushes English enough to get every digital citizen to learn it, that would be one of the most compelling reasons for its social good.

I always hate all the talk about multilingualism as a good thing, when the consequence of language diversity is, one, people are wasting time in their youths learning languages for other peoples benefit, ie, those that want to "preserve" it, when the marginal utility of having excess languages is at best questionable. And two, if you do not know the primary language used for, you know, communicating with other human beings, especially English, your potential economic mobility is catastrophically crippled on a global scale.

While I agree that language policing like you see in France or the drive for culture preservation via language in various parts of the world is tragically misguided if not actively harmful, the one thing that gives pause is that we do not have a 'perfect' language in english by any means. Learning other languages and lingustic evolution gives hope that we can trend towards better options in the future. So lets not declare english as the winner just yet.

Absolutely, but at the same time it depends on what you value in a language. That is kind of what this whole conversation is about, after all. English is garbage from any compative measure of language quality, its grammar is irrational, it has thousands of edge cases, it does not even use the entire range of human auditory sounds. But that constitutes a linguists evaluation of it - for probably 99.9999% of human beings, language is there to facilitate communication, in which case all the grammar breaks and eccentricities go out the window for the singular overriding and essential value of - do you and the other person speak the same language?

That is why English is so important now, since about half the world knows it, and the difference between knowing it or not could be the difference between perpetual poverty and improving standards of living.

In the same way, the cultural aspect cannot be considered relevant as much as the grammar cannot be, because the importance of having a language to communicate is overwhelming. There will always be people that like languages and learn them, language diversity will never die, but I also would wonder how you could ever hope to replace English with something better. It is the kind of thing that logically should seem obvious - a university department of smart people, or a global consortium, could come together and try to architect a language optimized for everyone, that has firm grammar rules and uses all the auditory notes of the human voice range, and prioritizes making common words short and such. But once you make that language, how do you teach it to the world? And in between, are you proposing people learn English and Earthish at the same time?

Well english has replaced itself many times, just compare old english, middle english, Shakespeare vs now. It is evolution and english is good at adapting, but even so, in Roman times no one would have predicted English to dominate society. These things can change quite rapidly and history is not at an end by any means. And with the internet, I think the changes/evolution could be quite dramatic.

What other language do you suggest we use instead? English as already de facto won. It is the modern latin.

What I would like to see is a language that is much more succinct, less bound in grammar rules/syntax but also less irregularities and ambiguities. English could evolve into this. Latin could have too but currently it is dead. Change happens.

But again, what language? We are not talking about computer languages. This is not a theoretical exercise in an ideal software world where you can start all over again. It's going to be one of the mainstream languages. Which one? Russian? Chinese?

Yes, currently Chinese is the main alternative with the most population and has some of the features I mentioned. It is also great for business with many people learning it to attract some of the chinese money floating around and lots of foreigners there to make their fortunes. But just a couple of decades ago it was russian. A major war between the US and China and it might be Hindi next. Never safe to predict the future.

Chinese has a really awful written form, as far as being something that people can learn to read and write in a short amount of time.

And before that Japanese.

I can safely predict that Chinese will not be used as the common language for Europe...

Tu as tout à fait raison. Pourquoi perdrais-je mon temps à apprendre ta langue pour ton bénéfice, c'est une perte de temps total. Merci de m'avoir ouvert les yeux.

J'aime bien aussi ta deuxième phrase qui sous-entend qu'on ne peut communiquer avec les autres qu'en anglais. Je me demande comment je faisais pour discuter avec mes parents quand j'étais petit. C'est sans doute de là que vient la tragique incommunicabilité qui a marqué mon enfance.

Exactement. Quand j'étais plus jeune, je voulais de comprendre et communiquer avec des Francophones.

Je ne saisis pas que le majorité des jeunes en France apprennent et utilisent Anglais tout les temps. Donc à le début, c'était très difficile d'avoir un conversation sans les changent à anglais.

Maintenant je peux parler juste un peu le Français, mais l'expression quand un francophones réalise que je peux le comprendre est absolument fantastique :)

Bravo pour apprendre Anglais. Je souhaite que plus gens ont apprécié la lutte que les locuteurs non natifs ont quand ils apprennent un nouveau langue.

One benefit of keeping languages around is that they help us understand what the brain is capable of. I'm with you on having a universal communication language, but keeping other languages alive does have some benefits.

One example is literature - literature often does not translate well at all. Another is psychology and brain functionality, as I say above. For example, there are languages out there that don't have 'left' and 'right' as concepts. Instead people use 'east' and 'west' or 'north' and 'south'. Speakers of these languages tend to have a very good grasp of their geospatial bearing as a result. Without these unusual languages, we would be very unlikely to think of experimenting with such a concept, much less be able to test it.

I did hear of one language about to go extinct (in central america, I think). There are apparently only two speakers of it, both elderly, that live a couple of streets apart... and they don't speak to each other because of some feud :)