People here venerate Paul Graham's Blub Paradox article--I wonder how many stopped to think about the possibility that we're speaking Blub, and the attempt of a unilingual world is incomprehensibly more problematic than that of computer programming languages. From the root comment of this chain:
> Do you feel stunted or unsatisfied because your ancestors didn't pass their native tongues down to you? I don't.
How would you fucking know?
Technocracy in action: we can't think of a black swan, so black swans can't exist.
English patois in some parts of the world makes no sense to British/American speakers, even though it reads and sounds more or less like standard English.
You don't even have to travel to find the split happening. Just try listening to teenagers.
Language isn't just a utility. One of its functions is to define social register and tribal identity, and humans are so attached to both they can't accept homogenisation.
Unfortunately I could only find statistics information in Japanese.
Languages tend to accommodate the way of thinking prevalent in the cultures that speak it, and vice versa the language also shapes the speakers. To learn another language as a non-native speaker, especially one that is sufficiently different from your own, you must also learn a different way of looking at the world; something that I think is a useful experience for anyone.
Before reading the article, had you ever considered that there might exist a word describing exactly why cat videos are popular?
In my opinion, no-one should be satisfied with speaking only one language, so long as they have the means to learn another.