The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English

Today, languages are becoming extinct faster than species. One estimate predicts 90% of the 6,000 languages will cease to be spoken in the next century. Though lamenting such a loss, linguist and Columbia University Professor John McWhorter challenges the notion that language death equates to cultural loss. Languages show the diverse ways humans conceptualize the world. But, McWhorter notes, the ability to draw representative thought patterns or cultural trademarks from language has failed. Ultimately, increased globalization has elevated English as the international lingua franca. Though bound to its historical use as an imperial language, English nevertheless has risen thanks to the growing demand for communication across borders, all the while aided by its relative simplicity in verb conjugation and noun classes. “Ironically,” McWhorter concludes, language death is “a symptom of people coming together.” As geographical distances shrink, through both technology and urban migration, the concentration of a few dominant languages is inevitable and not inherently threatening to entrenched culture. – YaleGlobal