This morning I woke up thinking about what steps would need to be taken to unite the world. The event I think most likely to successfully unite us would be a common enemy, and since I'm looking to unite the world, I think alien invasion is the best idea for that one. Lots of people would die, I know. Maybe everyone. But let's say for purpose of this exercise that the invasion is not terribly efficient and we manage to survive, and somehow manage to come up with weapons capable of fighting back against this species that's technologically advanced enough to manage interstellar travel. Our chances go way up when everyone in the world works together. On top of that, like I said: lot's of people likely die in the invasion, and that means we'd probably need more people of the world to work together just for sheer numbers.
I guess I could write a whole blog post on that one by itself, but I'd have to start putting together scenarios and doing research on feasibility before I'd be comfortable with that. What I wrote above is just an idea without support. Now, on to the idea I mean to focus on for this blog post...
I woke up thinking about how language is a dividing force in our world. I suppose I'm going to rely on logic for this one too, since I'm not sure where to look for supporting evidence online. I'll start with small scale. My grandmother from Germany is visiting right now. She only speaks German, and my native language is English. I speak a little German, but my skills are diminished from lack of use. I want to talk to my grandmother, but I don't really have to vocabulary to handle all the topics I'd normally cover. When I visit my parents and talk about my day at work, or a television show I like, or something I went and did with friends, or whatever, I can manage to convey the ideas just fine in English. In German, though, I just can't do it. So when I go over there now while my Oma (German word for "grandmother") is visiting, I end up talking about these normal conversational things in English.
I understand more German than I can speak (easier to hear a word and remember what it means than to recall a word when I'd want to use it), and so I can listen to my grandmother speak about her day and what she did, but even still, I don't understand it all. And I'll admit here that it's often about something that I don't really want to listen to. I listen anyway, but listening to her talk about the nifty knick-knack she found at the store is just not that engrossing. Sometimes the conversation gets to something interesting like politics in Germany, but that's often a bit beyond my vocabulary, and my mom has to translate.
So as an example of a dividing force on the small scale, my experience is that I could be much closer to my grandmother if I was better at speaking German. I'm sad at this, and have gotten language learning tracks to listen to while I drive, but haven't made a lot of progress. I think I'd need to go to Germany and stay immersed in the language for a while to really improve my speaking skill.
One more thing I'm going to bring up that I'll use later is humor. My grandmother has made several jokes in the time she's visited this time around, and I tend to have no idea what she's talking about. I'll understand the individual words, but I won't understand the joke, and when my mother explains to me, it turns out that the joke relies on some nuance of the language. So the point I'm trying to get across is that it's not just about knowing the words, but about knowing the idioms and shades of meaning in order to really understand what a native speaker is trying to communicate.
So even on friendly terms, a lack of common language makes communicating difficult at best.
Now I'm going to try to apply that to a larger scale. Imagine two nations without a common language that share a border. Imagine a misunderstanding at the border because of the lack of common language. Imagine hostilities ensuing over that misunderstanding. And consider the possibility that if they had spoken the same language from the beginning, the misunderstanding wouldn't have happened. I'm not trying to say that all hostilities begin from misunderstandings, but I know that they can.
Pick a conflict in the world to think about where the opposing sides don't share a native language. Most likely, each side has people that had to learn the opposing language. If not, maybe they're just ignoring a diplomatic solution as an option. But it's pretty easy to say that if a diplomatic solution is possible, it would be much easier if both sides spoke the same language. And diplomacy would only be possible with communication... which of course is easier with a common language, even if absolute fluency isn't achieved, though without fluency, you run the risk of missing the "humor", and having further misunderstandings.
I guess I'm trying to assert that common language is really important, and I think that one of the steps to bringing the world together is to homogenize language. Maybe that means picking a language that is most robust and everybody agreeing to learn it. Maybe it means everyone trying to learn at least one other language so they are doing something improve their own ability to communicate with more people. Maybe it means the long process of languages using words from other languages, eventually resulting in a language that is an amalgam of all major languages.
With that said, I was curious about what language is most spoken in the word. Thinking that English stood a good chance considering how many other countries are learning English as a second language, I was surprised to find internet data that says Mandarin Chinese is the forerunner by a wide margin: http://www.vistawide.com/languages/top_30_languages.htm
You can find all sorts of websites with lists like that, but most of the ones I found display lists from the same source. The link I provided just has the most recent year I found. Of course, the number one was Mandarin Chinese no matter the year I found. The second, third, and fourth spots were generally occupied by Hindi, Spanish, and English in some order or another.
Another interesting article (thank you wikipedia) is about the languages spoken in the United States of America: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States
The numbers in the article are a decade old, but I find them interesting anyway. It makes me think I should be trying to learn Spanish. So at this point, in order to take responsibility and make myself more able to communicate with the world, I should learn Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and for my own family: German. As an aside... I want to learn American Sign Language too.
The source (http://www.ethnologue.com/) that provides the language by population data says they track more than 7400 languages. Combined with the knowledge of the number of languages just spoken in the United States, and how much of a topic of contention language is here, I'm really beginning to believe that the idea of common language may be tremendously important to making the world a better place. Since we don't have any alien invaders to force us to come together, I think it's something we might need to pay attention to.
Okay... I think I got all the thoughts out of my head from when I woke up. Now I guess I start fixing my German skills...
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