Will more than half the world’s languages disappear by the end of this century? Is there a technological way to safeguard the knowledge in the endangered vocabulary codes?
I recently read A Future of Fewer Words? Five Trends Shaping the Future of Language, an essay by Lawrence Baines that was originally published in THE FUTURIST 46(2), 42 – 47, and later appeared online at the Lifeboat Foundation’s website.
The article states:
“Natural selection is as much a phenomenon in human language as it is in natural ecosystems. An ongoing “survival of the fittest” may lead to continuing expansion of image-based communications and the extinction of more than half the world’s languages by this century’s end.”
My opinion on this?
I find the information very intriguing because it deals not only with ancient languages dying out, but also the shifts in language trends through human evolution. In viewing the charts, it appears that English maintains its status as the most widely used or favored language for international business.
Will humanity a shift to more visual and image-based communication? Yes, I believe so. People have always used hand gestures and visual cues to bridge language/cultural barriers.
I would not be surprised to see Sign language become an international language. Studies, like England’s ‘Sign in Education’ (Robinson, 1997) have shown that children who learn to speak and Sign at the same time experience improved communication, literacy and math skills.
As per a Universal language, Wikipedia’s definition suggests that this is “a hypothetical or historical language spoken and understood by all or most of the world’s population. In some contexts, it refers to a means of communication said to be understood by all living things, beings, and objects alike.”
I may be ‘old school’, or at least in the manner(s) by which I grasp the burgeoning technologies (taking a ‘bottoms-up’ approach) however; when researching anything, be it simple or complex, you must reduce all to a common denominator, breaking things down to their basic components.
In reducing languages to their common denominators, I’m inclined to follow the logic of using binary code, first espoused by Gottfried Leibniz in 1666 within his “On the Art of Combination” and (refined much later) by Claude Shannon in 1948 in “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, used in the current worldwide telecommunications.
In this Technological Revolution, information is reduced to a series of ones and zeros. Given the complexities of telecommunication and its use of binary code, I am confident that “the 6,900 or so languages spoken on the planet” today, as well as the languages threatened to become extinct, can be reduced to and preserved using binary code.
Binary code could be deemed as the Universal Language where information about ourselves for future generations of our civilization - and civilizations whose existence we have yet to become aware of - is stored and commonly understood.
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