Hey everyone,
One of the ideas that most strikes me about the future is that it appears that the emergence of a new language will be impossible, or extremely unlikely at least.
- There are far too many people on the world.
- A very large amount of these people (in particular, the ones that live in a developed society) know and use the languages of the most developed nations (i.e. English is extremely well known, so is the Mandarin, etc.)
- Incredible amounts of information are stored in writing and audio files.
The three propositions above, when taken together, seem to imply to me that, if society will keep flourishing, then one language will be the norm in the limit, and in the closer future (say, within the next 1000 years), a small set of languages that we use today will be of common us.
So my main claim here is that it will be impossible (or extremely unlikely) for a new language to develop. Do you guys think the same? If you do, how do you feel about that? If you don't, what do you think will happen?
I guess the reason this concerns me is that, if we will live for tens of thousands (or even more) of years as advanced societies, does this mean that one of the main characteristics of the civilization that would exist in the future has already been set? (Namely, the language)
