LosT贼 Posted July 18, 2020 Posted July 18, 2020 The question of why can’t the world speak a single language is echoed more often, either by people interested in languages or by people whose interest in languages does not go beyond using them to communicate. That’s why we have to seriously consider this question. So why can’t just everybody wake up someday and decide to speak a single language? Easy-peasy! Why do we have all this linguistic mush of so many different languages? To answer this question, we need to consider why we have multiple languages in the first place. Let’s start with the (presumed) original picture. To answer this question, we need to consider why we have multiple languages in the first place. Let’s start with the (presumed) original picture. The original picture It is presumed that at some point, about 100,000-200,000 years ago, Homo Sapien ancestors started using language in the way we mean language now, with all its complex grammar and vocabulary. At the time, they were spread out over a relatively confined space on the globe and it is practically impossible that language spontaneously arose in more than a handful of places. So, at one point, there was some limited number of languages among groups of people that had some amount of geographic proximity. It could have been relatively easy for one language to emerge then, or that everyone all spoke the same mother tongue anyway and for things to have stayed that way till now. But that didn’t happen. In fact, the opposite happened. As humans spread across the globe and po[CENSORED]tion growth exploded exponentially, so too did the number of languages. In fact, it’s estimated that there were approximately 10,000 languages spoken only a couple of hundred years ago.
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