What do ya'll think of Global Languages?

[TheBlondeSalad]

Theoretically, having everyone on an equal footing in terms of whose language is being spoken is a nice idealistic thought however implementing it is tricky. The failure of Esperanto, infact, has already proved that practically it wouldn't work - many people have no interest in learning other languages, so I'm not sure how many of them would be willing to learn a global language. Plus there's the whole problem of having to decide on a script - would you use an existing script or create a new one? would people want to have to learn a new script? what about all of the information that would need to be translated and the cost of all that?

It's better to do what we are doing now and just, at places like the UN, have the main languages as official languages. Arabic, Chinese, French, English, Russian and Spanish covers enough of the world for everyone to know what is going on.

Personally, I quite like the variety and diversity of languages we have hence I wouldn't really want to learn a global language for the sake of communicating with other nations

[alfieb]

I think they're worthless and that the people who spent thousands of hours compiling these artificial languages did nothing but waste their time.

The only useful artificial language is one made for a book or movie.

[Comte Arnau]

Esperanto, Interlingua, etc, are auxiliary languages, not global languages. The only real global language is English. French tries to still be but just can't and at most it can try to keep being the most important language in Sub-Saharan Africa for a long while.

Theoretically, having everyone on an equal footing in terms of whose language is being spoken is a nice idealistic thought however implementing it is tricky. The failure of Esperanto, infact, has already proved that practically it wouldn't work

Esperanto is, in fact, the only constructed language that has worked. One could argue whether it has succeeded or not, because in comparison with the rest of constructed ones, it definitely has, but if one considers what the final goal was, it hasn't and it won't ever do, because languages are always attached to power. In as many spheres as possible. And no matter how much we think today that English will now definitely be the global language forever, if in 500 years there's a different world power, the cool language everybody'll learn will be theirs.