Common Tongue

I’m sure this is a hugely unpopular sentiment, but honestly, I would prefer if the entire world spoke a common language (Esperanto anyone?). Of course, I think these auxiliary languages generally face a chicken and egg problem when it comes to gaining traction amongst the general population. Why bother learning it if nobody else speaks it?

See, for me, a language is solely for communication. Sure there might be some subtle nuances you can’t describe in another language or there might be a nice rhythmic flow or sound to the language. But really, I don’t care. I think just about any language can handle 99.9% of your modern daily needs just fine.

While in Barcelona I tried explaining this to my teacher and he responded to this by saying that he could understand my attitude since I live in a colony. I don’t know what it is like to live in a place where a language was born. Fair enough, I never really thought about it like this but I suppose he’s right. I don’t feel any special affinity towards English. He went on to say that he hates it when people use English words when there is an equivalent in Spanish. He sees it as a contamination of the language. I’m going to extrapolate from this and assume that he doesn’t really care for the Spanish in use in Latin America (where a computer is called a computadora instead of an ordenador and a car is a carro instead of a coche, for example).

I find this somewhat ironic since as far as I understand this “contamination” is exactly how Spanish was born in the first place. Way back in the day, there were a select few well educated aristocrats that could speak and write the Latin language correctly and then there was the incorrect Latin that the unwashed masses spoke. These differences in these dialects slowly became larger and larger and eventually turned into the Romance Languages that we know today. And Latin? Well, that is una lengua muerta now.

So what I’m trying to say is, language is not a static thing. Don’t be snooty about it. Embrace change. And wouldn’t it be cool if this all this increased globalization somehow resulted in a universal creole language that everybody can speak?