Prepare a set of points mentioning the benefits and problems of using a single language as well as multiple language.(Debate)
Answers
Answer:
What’s a debate over how "using multiple languages is better than a single language”?
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I don’t see as much of a debate. There’s simply no way you’re going to get a single world language.
The most ambitious effort to enforce a single language over all others was probably China’s use of Mandarin as the national standard. It has succeeded to the point that most Chinese people don’t even recognise the other Chinese language as languages, but as dialects of a single Chinese language. That’s a whole different debate, the difference between language and dialect, but suffice it to say that when I lived in China, I met older people who could not speak Mandarin, and required younger people to translate when they met someone who didn’t speak their “dialect” - and that is far from an unusual situation. And there is more difference between some Chinese “dialects” than there is between Spanish and Portuguese. Label it whichever way you like, but understanding how much difference we’re talking about. However, on the whole, China was very successful at spreading Mandarin across the world’s most populous nation. Almost all younger Chinese people speak Mandarin. But, here’s the key point: even in China, most people also speak another language. The fact that they are referred to as dialects confuses public perception of the issue, but, the idea that Mandarin could replace these languages has flat out failed. They are still very much alive and in use.
Even if a government were to somehow succeed in replacing local languages completely with a national standard, they’d still have to contend with language change. Languages change remarkably fast: I don’t speak the same way as my parents, and I speak remarkably differently to my grandparents. My great-grandmother speaks more differently still, and audio recordings of people from 100 years ago reveal an even greater difference. What happens when people in one place use language in a different way to people in another place, and it changes at different speeds, in different ways? Even if they are starting from the same standard, they will diverge. This has happened countless time across the world historically, and that’s not likely to change going into the future.
You might think that technology would make it easier to standardise everything, but that claim has been made before: that societies with higher literacy rates would naturally trend towards a more standardised language. But that wasn’t the case. Even after that establishment of national standards, languages continued to evolve and change in ways that reflected regional culture and usage, no matter what the standard did. And, the advent of the internet has, not, in fact, slowed the evolution of language, but sped it up. As people can converse with others from all around the world, they adapt to new speech patterns, new vocabulary, new phrasing and so on. And this is not converging to some new global standard, but rather, there are multiple online subcultures with their own registers of speech which share little with other subcultures. Some things have made their way into public usage, and some haven’t.
I submit that no matter what reasons one may have for wanting to create a single world language, it’s a fool’s errand. Whether it is a good idea or not is irrelevant. It’s impossible: you can’t control language in that way, without also controlling people in ways that even the world’s most oppressive regimes have never thought a good idea.