The Evolution of a Universal Language

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

We got an email from Sean Clark, who says that he’s recently started a new job at a small manufacturing facility that employs about 250 people.

And about half the people there speak English as a first language, and the other half speak Spanish as a first language, but they all work together.

And Sean writes, what has surprised and even inspired me is the fact that instead of seeing division or resentment between these two groups, or even just a lack of effective communication, they’ve instead developed a sort of shorthand.

In some cases, even creating entirely new words and phrases to describe products or processes.

He says that seeing this kind of rapid language evolution on a small scale is making him wonder if perhaps it’s happening on a large scale as well or if it could happen on a global scale.

He writes, what is the possibility of a one world language in the future, not as a result of imperial expansion or military invasion, but instead from peaceful cultural migration and the shared human experience?

What are the chances that we could develop one language because we all become a little more like each other and willing to accommodate each other’s differences?

Yeah.

Wow, it’s a great question.

Well, we could go back to the story of the Tower of Babel,

In which case, supposedly, everyone spoke one language and then they didn’t

Because they’d done wrong and they were divided by God, right?

We could also look at invented languages like Esperanto,

Which have come from a whole cloth, and yet they also have had their divisions.

Slang has appeared in Esperanto and been stomped down.

If you speak Esperanto in Finland versus speaking it in Italy,

You’re probably more likely to use some words and avoid other words because of your native language kind of informing your understanding of Esperanto and your use of it.

No kidding. So they’re like dialects of Esperanto?

Kind of. Not really full on dialects, but some languages have split off from it.

Most of them haven’t been very successful.

But clearly there’s been a conscious effort and sometimes unconscious effort with these invented languages to do something different,

Even though this language was supposedly perfect from the start.

But I have read that if we ever got to the point where we all spoke one language, it would last for about a minute until a new slang word was created that only a few people knew.

Or somebody moved away and kept the old words that everyone else abandoned or needed new words for new plant life or new ideas.

And there’s just almost no chance that we’ll ever all speak alike.

Yeah, that makes sense to me.

And there’s a couple things happening in his letter, which I love.

And one of them is I wonder if that workplace isn’t so accommodating to these differences because they feel like they have a shared experience.

And we’ve talked about this on the show, for example, in the military or in many different kinds of workplaces.

When people have a shared mission and vision, they tend to create their own in-house language, their own jargon or slang, and use that because it helps unify them and make them feel like one people.

But I’ve seen construction sites that work this way where you have English-speaking and Spanish-speaking workers,

And sometimes they’ll just adopt the Spanish word for a tool or a practice just because everyone likes it more.

Or it’s the custom.

Or the guy who’s best at that particular job is the one who is teaching everyone else how to do it.

So his language prevails for that task.

Yeah.

Well, I would love to hear stories about that.

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