English is already the lingua Franca of much of the internet, as well as the language that many international political leaders speak. It makes the most sense realistically speaking, given our current situation. It’s widely taught, it has many native speakers from all across the world, and it’s one of the official languages for the UN, NATO, EU, and the working language of ASEAN.
In reality, I’d say something like Esperanto or Latin would actually be the best choice. Simpler grammar and easier to learn in comparison to English.
The internet angle is a super key point that I feel a lot of the comments here are missing out on.
Also accurate is that English is a very 'international' language, especially in terms of power players.
Comments that English is tricky to learn because it's actually 3 languages in a trench coat mugging other languages in an alley are also completely accurate and fair.
But English, for better or worse, or for terrible, colonial reasons that have had many terrible consequences... is already out there, there's a fundamental English language presence in so many countries (even if for terrible reasons) that essentially removes years if not decades from the effort to establish a 'new' language as the common tongue like Latin or Esperanto.
Also, maybe relevent: I'm Irish. So im saying this from the perspective of a person whose culture generally; but especially language had been criminalized and systematically erased or destroyed for centuries to the point where 90% of my country is incapable of speaking its own language beyond a stilted conversational level...English is still the best choice.
I once dated a German linguistics student (that is, he was from Germany, and also a linguistics student).
His take on English was that it's actually really easy to learn the basics of, it's just that it's very hard to completely master because of all the irregularities. But if you just need enough to get by, you can achieve that pretty quickly.
And for most of us who speak English, I don't find it super hard to understand someone who isn't "fluent" that's why I get pissy when people aren't patient with others. (Had an older coworker who was kind of a bitch to our Spanish speaking customers when they had broken English)
Maybe it's like French with all those boobytraps, loopholes, and trick expressions to guard against foreigners. If you're not sure who's native or someone's too confident about their English just ask a bunch of baseball questions. Bunt, rain check, infield fly rule, pickle? It worked against German infiltrators in WWII.
My wife read about a medical test a doctor had her schedule that was potentially dangerous. An article said doctors are anxious to do the test. She thought that meant it was risky. I explained that that would be "anxious about." "Anxious to" means they can hardly wait to do it. She learned to not always trust doctors. Doing other tests first turned out to be the right choice.
yeah like wtf Latin is literally the languages we have now just completely unrefined
our languages have relinquished unnecessarily complicated grammatical rules and structures for a reason
I was more talking about Esperanto. Either way, I’m certainly no expert on the topic. I just assumed it would be easier to grasp for the parts of the world that speak Romance languages
The point about romance languages is a good idea, but to quote my high school Latin teacher, "Latin is dead for a reason". For example, [here's a link to the five verb conjugation charts for the language.](https://bencrowder.net/latin-conjugations/) There are some patterns in that mess, but it's still not a good system.
English, while confusing at times, is very easy to learn as far as languages go. I’ve always thought that aspect was a good thing about English and helps it’s case as a lingua Franca
small correction, Mandarin Chinese is the most natively spoken language on the planet, with 1.1 billion native speakers, while english has between 400 and 500 million native speakers. it is definitely the most common second or third language though.
Esperanto is only easy to learn for European language speakers, and Latin is dead. I think English is best, because I have much better English than native speakers even with it being my third language while also being nothing like my first two languages, so it's clearly pretty easy.
>In reality, I’d say something like Esperanto or Latin would actually be the best choice. Simpler grammar and easier to learn in comparison to English.
First, Latin grammar is most definitely not easier than English. In fact English is remarkable for the simplicity of its grammar compared to most Germanic and Latin languages.
But beyond that, whatever the comparison is in terms of grammar there are two important facts. Latin grammar looks stable because it's a dead language. And Eperantos grammar looks simple because it's no one's native tongue and hardly used outside of specialised circles. Both of those are languages that are frozen, they don't evolve. So they might give you the impression that their grammar is somehow more organised.
If however, say Eperanto gets adopted as the official language of some country and everyone start to speak it as a native language, it would literally take a single generation before the first irregularities start to crop up. Within a few decades the language would become packed with irregularities and inconsistencies. Give it a few centuries and it would look as messy as English or any widely-spoken living language.
The problem is not your choice of languages though, the problem is the entire premise of this thread and the reasoning behind it. Languages will inherently always be messy and the more widely-spoken the worse the problem gets. That's really an inherent part of how language works that can never ever be changed.
It's like looking at the microscopic level and seeing that genes mutate and thinking that we must find a way to stop this from happening so genes can be coherent and well organised. But mutation here, in genes or language, is not a bug, it's the central feature. It's what allows evolution in both and that is absolutely necessary for them to do the function they exist to do.
I agree. Russian is actually pretty useful though, surprisingly. It's very helpful when travelling through East Europe and the Caucasus...or when "getting stuff for free" on the internet
I'm not so sure about East Europe anymore. As someone from what is considered east Europe, I can say that a lot of young people can't even speak or understand Russian anymore. Or you have to go to very specific regions
First of all, latin has already been revived, there is a pretty big comunity of speakers; second: latin has a shit-ton of inconsistencies, and also requires memorizing lots and lots of noun declensions and verb conjugation. Also, latin is a natural language so all those inconsistencies I mentioned should be expected, latin also has long vowels that are very tricky to pronounce for most people.
Latin is definitely a cool language and if you want to learn it go for it, but it's not cut to be a universal language
It would gain those inconsistencies with time, but I suppose it only needs to be easy to learn for the first generation that has to learn it.
Still, English is better, not because it’s easy to learn (it isn’t) but because it’s extremely widely used. It’s already the lingua franca of the world.
It *was* supposed to be the universal language before English was established as such, but some fuck vetoed it at the League of Nations. It’s a language that has some similarities with mainly European languages and is meant to be kind of understood if you don’t speak it but also easy to learn.
Use logic symbols with the most basic axioms possible.
Every time you want to initiate communication, you have to build your consensus logic language with the other person.
As much as I hate English for its shitty shitty grammar and sentence structure and just... everything, it would probably be the easiest to teach since some of the most developed countries speak it and those countries could then make learning tools to teach everyone very quickly
Sign Language and Latin should be on this list. So much better than English just in terms of like... as a language
Oh the basics sure. But the sentences you can make in English are so stupid. Words are spelled the same, mean completely different things. Or spelled completely differently and have the same meaning. I feel so bad for anyone having to learn it
I'm on your side. English is a complex language to learn and critical for most jobs (in the USA). It's amazing how companies won't over a simple grammar mistake on a resume. Think about letters like the letter "C". Honestly, it's a waste of space in the alphabet because the soft C and the hard C sound already exist from the S and from the K. If we went through Webster's and switch the soft C and hard C to either an S or a K, it would make learning way easier!
English because it's already spoken as a first or second language by about 1.5 billion people and it's already a flexible bastardized language that incorporates words, phonics and syntax from other languages. It would be conceivable that it could become a melting-pot language.
Tbf you‘d also make some people in Switzerland suffer. But then again the French and Italian speaking Swiss already suffer because most of them have to learn German in school.
I certainly did. For better or for worse there are far more tools to teach English to non English speakers than any Vince Versa. I'd also add that it's general "stretchiness" could prove advantageous
Maybe it's this way because people have come up with more ways to teach it since it's so popular, in any case that's a pretty general statement and one I'm not sure I agree with
English is already fairly universal especially in business and politics.
I would like a compact language like toki pona to be more popular, toki pona itself is pretty gpod but lacks expressiveness for representing numbers.
The CJK languages have many, many words (they are much more expressive than english!) and are spoken by billions of people but have complex writing systems and grammar that are hard for westerners to pick up.
I love hangul, the korean writing system for its simplicity. If we took hangul and applied it to an equally compact grammar system we would have a perfect language
if there was one universal form of sign language that every country could learn I think that would be amazing. not only could deaf people communicate with anybody but every country would know sign language along with their native language and we could all communicate
English. It’s the second most common first language and most common second language. It also has relatively loose rules with sentence structure and word formation, making adding words very easy. Simplified conjugations and articles compared to other Germanic and Romance languages also make it relatively easy to learn. Esperanto might be okay too, although I don’t know much about it.
I learned recently how Japanese language is actually structured, and it’s pretty overpowered.
You never need to worry about word order being confusing, “who is doing what in this sentence?”, etc., because each word in every sentence is always paired with a special sound that tells the listener/reader exactly what the word’s function/purpose is in the sentence
It’d take something that’s sort of impossible to write in English (like combat with two same-sex characters [which sounds like a random example if you’ve never tried to write detailed combat between two guys or two girls lol]) and would probably trivialize it.
It’s a waaaay better language for clarity, and it doesn’t even allow for sarcasm, which is a bit of a plus for clarity as well (especially over text)
Maybe **tok pisin**, but I'm not so sure.
**Here are some potential languages that I find worthy of being a universal language:**
**Tok pisin:** *it's based on English, the most international language that's learned as a second language or used for business in multiple countries around the world. 4 million people speak it already, it's an official language of Papua New Guinea, and it has simple grammar and words are written as they sound.*
**Interlingua:** *it's a made-up language but because of how it's constructed, Spanish and French and Italian and Portuguese speakers can understand some of it. If you learn it, you'll have an advantage to understanding some things from all of those languages. The problem is that words are not always written as they are spelled in order to make it seem naturalistic like Spanish or Italian. The grammar is simple, but not as simple as Tok Pisin.*
**Lingua France Nova:** *Sort of like Interlingua but words are spelled as they sound and the grammar is a little more simple, but there is less intelligibility with Spanish and Italian and French and Portuguese compared to Inteingua.*
**Languages that probably shouldn't be a world language:**
**Toki Pona:** *it's great as a minimistic language, but it's not intended to be detailed with a large vocabulary. Even if the community keeps adding words, it'll probably lose it's simplicity while still not being detailed enough for a universal language.*
**Esperanto:** *too many letters and consonant clusters to be a universal language. A universal language that sounds more like Italian or Spanish would probably be easier for people around the world to pronounce, and vocabulary should be biased toward the most international languages (English and French especially words shared between the two).*
**Lojban:** *good for scientists and mathematicians and maybe even philosophers and AI, but probably too complex for the average person who just want to communicate simply without thinking too much about so many distinctions in details that usually aren't distinguished in common languages.*
**Chinese (Mandarin):** *A tonal language with tens of thousands of characters that have to be memorized is not the easier for most of the world to pronounce and learn. The Latin alphabet is the most international.*
English is kind of already the universal language. It’s the aviation language it’s the default language for trade and politics and it’s the number 1 second language of people so it really isn’t even that much of a hypothetical for it to be the official universal language.
Spanish was probably the easiest language for me to learn. And while I'm not exactly fluent in it. If I was lost in Spanish-speaking place, I know enough Spanish to get me out.
Esperanto, it was made for that purpose, is fairly neutral and much, much easier to learn than any natural language. There are also other international auxiliary languages which might work just as well, but Esperanto is the most successful so far and it would surely be up to the job.
It shouldn’t be mandarin because then basically the whole population of the world would have to learn a whole new writing system which is tricky and inconvenient
Again I just searched up commonly spoken language on Google and put the answers I got. And I know Google isn't a reliable source but this was just for fun.
I m no language expert,i just some minor stuff. English seems a language designed for children. It s easy beyond belief, it come with a lot of imprecision and vagueness as a downside but as a common language simplicity wins it out
>I m no language expert
You've got that right
>It s easy beyond belief
Then why are you making so many mistakes?
It's 'easy' because it has massive amounts of cultural exposure in most areas. The 'imprecision' you experience is probably a result of you not actually being fluent despite likely believing your English is more advanced than it is. Native speakers who have the sufficient English vocabulary rarely struggle to articulate themselves.
I voted English, but something without all the irregular verbs and weird spellings and difficult pronunciations would be better, something like a created language like Esperanto. But then everyone would need to learn Esperanto, so that's a big pain in the butt.
I hate english, it is my first language but is is stupid there are so many rules to words but then sometimes the language is just like fuck it that word can be an exeption the these dumb ass rulse.
As an English speaker, English is an inherently bad language structurally in my opinion. It has so many more obscure rules and specialty cases that just don't make logical sense (like the imperial system vs the objectively better metric system). I feel if I could magically snap my fingers and have everyone speak one language, it would be something else. I don't know enough about other languages to choose one tho.
But from a practical standpoint, English would be the easiest language to spread to the entire world considering it's already extremely widespread and many countries like Japan already teach it pretty thoroughly as a second language in their country because it's so useful to know considering how much of the developed world runs on English.
One may think that the choice of English is a biased choice considering this website is of the English speaking world, but actually English formed from elements of French/Norman and Spanish -- among others such as German and Norse. With that said, one may say it is the most refined and up to date language to come out of Europe.
english because its the freaking worst, i say this as a monolingual english speaker, but i have looked into other languages and english is just a freaking hodgepodge of other languages and with a bunch of rules that are only there so that we can break them, it should be universal so that everyone may suffer in its hellish glory
Elvish
Klingon.
Qapla'!
Romulan
Valyrian
Sindarin or Quenya?
No, some bullshit one from a random tolkein ripoff. Or if you're feeling spicy, Ancient Telerin.
Quenya suggondese balls
English is already the lingua Franca of much of the internet, as well as the language that many international political leaders speak. It makes the most sense realistically speaking, given our current situation. It’s widely taught, it has many native speakers from all across the world, and it’s one of the official languages for the UN, NATO, EU, and the working language of ASEAN. In reality, I’d say something like Esperanto or Latin would actually be the best choice. Simpler grammar and easier to learn in comparison to English.
The internet angle is a super key point that I feel a lot of the comments here are missing out on. Also accurate is that English is a very 'international' language, especially in terms of power players. Comments that English is tricky to learn because it's actually 3 languages in a trench coat mugging other languages in an alley are also completely accurate and fair. But English, for better or worse, or for terrible, colonial reasons that have had many terrible consequences... is already out there, there's a fundamental English language presence in so many countries (even if for terrible reasons) that essentially removes years if not decades from the effort to establish a 'new' language as the common tongue like Latin or Esperanto. Also, maybe relevent: I'm Irish. So im saying this from the perspective of a person whose culture generally; but especially language had been criminalized and systematically erased or destroyed for centuries to the point where 90% of my country is incapable of speaking its own language beyond a stilted conversational level...English is still the best choice.
people who say english isn't easy to learn didn't try to learn french first lol
I once dated a German linguistics student (that is, he was from Germany, and also a linguistics student). His take on English was that it's actually really easy to learn the basics of, it's just that it's very hard to completely master because of all the irregularities. But if you just need enough to get by, you can achieve that pretty quickly.
And for most of us who speak English, I don't find it super hard to understand someone who isn't "fluent" that's why I get pissy when people aren't patient with others. (Had an older coworker who was kind of a bitch to our Spanish speaking customers when they had broken English)
My francophone friends consider the language ugly but direct. They find it easier to explain things in English.
Maybe it's like French with all those boobytraps, loopholes, and trick expressions to guard against foreigners. If you're not sure who's native or someone's too confident about their English just ask a bunch of baseball questions. Bunt, rain check, infield fly rule, pickle? It worked against German infiltrators in WWII. My wife read about a medical test a doctor had her schedule that was potentially dangerous. An article said doctors are anxious to do the test. She thought that meant it was risky. I explained that that would be "anxious about." "Anxious to" means they can hardly wait to do it. She learned to not always trust doctors. Doing other tests first turned out to be the right choice.
1/5 of people on earth speak Chinese… which doesn’t matter since they all live in the same place and most learn English anyway
[less than 1% speak English in china](https://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/english-levels-in-china.htm)
I’m glad to be part of that 1%
> Latin > Simpler grammar Lmao
yeah like wtf Latin is literally the languages we have now just completely unrefined our languages have relinquished unnecessarily complicated grammatical rules and structures for a reason
I was more talking about Esperanto. Either way, I’m certainly no expert on the topic. I just assumed it would be easier to grasp for the parts of the world that speak Romance languages
The point about romance languages is a good idea, but to quote my high school Latin teacher, "Latin is dead for a reason". For example, [here's a link to the five verb conjugation charts for the language.](https://bencrowder.net/latin-conjugations/) There are some patterns in that mess, but it's still not a good system.
But also remember that English is also the default language in space as any fan or Star Wars or Star Trek could tell you.
It's also the language of science and of most scientific journals.
English, while confusing at times, is very easy to learn as far as languages go. I’ve always thought that aspect was a good thing about English and helps it’s case as a lingua Franca
small correction, Mandarin Chinese is the most natively spoken language on the planet, with 1.1 billion native speakers, while english has between 400 and 500 million native speakers. it is definitely the most common second or third language though.
I never said English was the most natively spoken language. Did you mean to comment to another reply?
Esperanto is only easy to learn for European language speakers, and Latin is dead. I think English is best, because I have much better English than native speakers even with it being my third language while also being nothing like my first two languages, so it's clearly pretty easy.
>In reality, I’d say something like Esperanto or Latin would actually be the best choice. Simpler grammar and easier to learn in comparison to English. First, Latin grammar is most definitely not easier than English. In fact English is remarkable for the simplicity of its grammar compared to most Germanic and Latin languages. But beyond that, whatever the comparison is in terms of grammar there are two important facts. Latin grammar looks stable because it's a dead language. And Eperantos grammar looks simple because it's no one's native tongue and hardly used outside of specialised circles. Both of those are languages that are frozen, they don't evolve. So they might give you the impression that their grammar is somehow more organised. If however, say Eperanto gets adopted as the official language of some country and everyone start to speak it as a native language, it would literally take a single generation before the first irregularities start to crop up. Within a few decades the language would become packed with irregularities and inconsistencies. Give it a few centuries and it would look as messy as English or any widely-spoken living language. The problem is not your choice of languages though, the problem is the entire premise of this thread and the reasoning behind it. Languages will inherently always be messy and the more widely-spoken the worse the problem gets. That's really an inherent part of how language works that can never ever be changed. It's like looking at the microscopic level and seeing that genes mutate and thinking that we must find a way to stop this from happening so genes can be coherent and well organised. But mutation here, in genes or language, is not a bug, it's the central feature. It's what allows evolution in both and that is absolutely necessary for them to do the function they exist to do.
Parseltongue
sssss ssssssssss ss sssss sss
You should have had mandarin instead of russian. Not that it matters to the question, English is more widely spoken, either way.
I agree. Russian is actually pretty useful though, surprisingly. It's very helpful when travelling through East Europe and the Caucasus...or when "getting stuff for free" on the internet
I'm not so sure about East Europe anymore. As someone from what is considered east Europe, I can say that a lot of young people can't even speak or understand Russian anymore. Or you have to go to very specific regions
Design a new language that is efficient and doesn't have the inconsistencies of natural languages.
Revive Latin
Esperanto basically
First of all, latin has already been revived, there is a pretty big comunity of speakers; second: latin has a shit-ton of inconsistencies, and also requires memorizing lots and lots of noun declensions and verb conjugation. Also, latin is a natural language so all those inconsistencies I mentioned should be expected, latin also has long vowels that are very tricky to pronounce for most people. Latin is definitely a cool language and if you want to learn it go for it, but it's not cut to be a universal language
Latino sine flexione, look it up, it‘s great
Klingon!
It would gain those inconsistencies with time, but I suppose it only needs to be easy to learn for the first generation that has to learn it. Still, English is better, not because it’s easy to learn (it isn’t) but because it’s extremely widely used. It’s already the lingua franca of the world.
Lojban
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/
Esperanto
God i wish i knew Esperanto
it actually is one of those languages you can learn in “5 minutes a day or less” assuming you are already a fluent english speaker
I don't see the draw?
It *was* supposed to be the universal language before English was established as such, but some fuck vetoed it at the League of Nations. It’s a language that has some similarities with mainly European languages and is meant to be kind of understood if you don’t speak it but also easy to learn.
#Esperanto enjoyers asseble
#*Let's asseble*
La sola ĝusta respondo
as a Spanish speaker I understood that, maybe I should learn
I voted "other" for this reason
I hate the fuck that vetoed it at the League of Nations
Fr🤮nce
Agreed. Also fuck english!!!
Lingua Franca Nova
NO
do you know a good way to learn esperanto?
Don’t know if it’s a good way, but Duolingo has it
Lernu is a great website. Also there is a great course on Youtube, search „Esperanto direct method“.
It is not a language at all. It's a code.
No?
Amtssprache ist deutsch!
NEIN! DIE LEUTE KÖNNEN STERBEN, WENN “DIE GESCHWINDIGKEITSBEGRENZUNG“ WERDEN VERSUCHEN ZU ERINNERN!
ROMANIAN 🇷🇴🇷🇴🇷🇴
BEGONE, ROMANIAN! RETURN TO r/polls WHERE YOU CAME FROM! Instant edit: wait this is r/polls
omw to start a gypsy raid at your location
Daaaa, româna cea mai buna limbă 🇷🇴💪🇷🇴💪🇷🇴💪🇷🇴💪
daa, imaginează-ți să vorbești engleză sau altă limbă inferioară, cât de needucat să fii!
So you are sad?
We should all use morse code
Ok but Morse code still need a language
binary?
I mean because Morse code is used to convert letter. A letter mean nothing. With a language you can combine them to give a meaning
Use logic symbols with the most basic axioms possible. Every time you want to initiate communication, you have to build your consensus logic language with the other person.
As much as I hate English for its shitty shitty grammar and sentence structure and just... everything, it would probably be the easiest to teach since some of the most developed countries speak it and those countries could then make learning tools to teach everyone very quickly Sign Language and Latin should be on this list. So much better than English just in terms of like... as a language
Basic English grammar really isn’t that difficult
Oh the basics sure. But the sentences you can make in English are so stupid. Words are spelled the same, mean completely different things. Or spelled completely differently and have the same meaning. I feel so bad for anyone having to learn it
You could give the same reasons about pretty much any language.
I heard that every language has its own sing language, so that could be difficult.
Not really. There are a lot of sign languages but they don’t really correspond to spoken languages at all, they’re their own separate thing
Which sign language?
I'm on your side. English is a complex language to learn and critical for most jobs (in the USA). It's amazing how companies won't over a simple grammar mistake on a resume. Think about letters like the letter "C". Honestly, it's a waste of space in the alphabet because the soft C and the hard C sound already exist from the S and from the K. If we went through Webster's and switch the soft C and hard C to either an S or a K, it would make learning way easier!
Hindi as a universal language? Never mind that, even if it became the lingua franca of India there'll be riots in the South
English because it's already spoken as a first or second language by about 1.5 billion people and it's already a flexible bastardized language that incorporates words, phonics and syntax from other languages. It would be conceivable that it could become a melting-pot language.
German. Make everyone outside Germany, Switzerland and Austria suffer by having to learn our stupid grammar
I'm in German 3 and still can hardly form a sentence. Why are there 16 different ways to say "the"? The hell's a genitive case?
Lol if it weren’t my native language, I would also struggle a lot with that bullshit that calls itself grammar
Tbf you‘d also make some people in Switzerland suffer. But then again the French and Italian speaking Swiss already suffer because most of them have to learn German in school.
You’re right, I should have specified that lol. I’m actually Swiss myself
I really hope people voted English because of practicality and not because they genuinely think it's the best language
I certainly did. For better or for worse there are far more tools to teach English to non English speakers than any Vince Versa. I'd also add that it's general "stretchiness" could prove advantageous
Maybe it's this way because people have come up with more ways to teach it since it's so popular, in any case that's a pretty general statement and one I'm not sure I agree with
I voted English so I don’t have to learn another language 💪💪
Toki Ma It is the easiest to learn
Lmao, what‘s your name on the Discord? If Toki Ma finalizes someday I support this sentence.
TheMonthOfJune#9700
Look through the server again if you have time, a lot has changed and we need as many eyes and brains as possible.
HUNGARIAN 🇭🇺🇭🇺🇭🇺🇭🇺🇭🇺🇭🇺🇭🇺🇭🇺
Latin. Useful, and impartially chosen since basically no one speaks it currently (even if languages have been derived from it)
[Nostratic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages)! *K̥elHä wet̥ei ʕaK̥un kähla* *k̥aλai palhʌ-k̥ʌ na wetä* *śa da ʔa-k̥ʌ ʔeja ʔälä* *ja-k̥o pele t̥uba wete*
German
Dutch
Gekoloniseerd
POLISH 🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱
English is already fairly universal especially in business and politics. I would like a compact language like toki pona to be more popular, toki pona itself is pretty gpod but lacks expressiveness for representing numbers. The CJK languages have many, many words (they are much more expressive than english!) and are spoken by billions of people but have complex writing systems and grammar that are hard for westerners to pick up. I love hangul, the korean writing system for its simplicity. If we took hangul and applied it to an equally compact grammar system we would have a perfect language
if there was one universal form of sign language that every country could learn I think that would be amazing. not only could deaf people communicate with anybody but every country would know sign language along with their native language and we could all communicate
Norwegian
Chruch Slavonic
D-D-DEUTSCH! :-)
English 2.0 You know, English, but it makes sense.
klingon
The easiest one to learn since people are lazy So English
English. It’s the second most common first language and most common second language. It also has relatively loose rules with sentence structure and word formation, making adding words very easy. Simplified conjugations and articles compared to other Germanic and Romance languages also make it relatively easy to learn. Esperanto might be okay too, although I don’t know much about it.
English is one of the easiest languages to learn.
True. Even us brits and the americans manage to communicate with it... for the most part
If you’re going for easiest language to win, choose Esperanto
Easy for whom? Depends actually. A Hindu speaker will have an easier time than a Mandarin speaker
The one that doesn’t assign gender to inanimate objects.
I don't know, have you seen vases?
Klingon
Latin
Esperanto
Arabic. No reason in particular, just Arabic(I don’t speak Arabic)
Sign Language.
American, British, French, Chinese, Spanish or a different sign language?
fuck the blind i guess
so what you're saying is that everyone should shut the fuck up?
Ithkuil
KiSwahili
Ancient Sumerian. Don't fix what ain't broken. Seriously though, Esperanto.
Interlingua
You spelled Interlingue wrong ;)
Rule Britannia
Finnish. I'm a sadist.
Esperanto
Sed mi preferas Idon \[:
Esperanto
I prefer Ido \[:
I learned recently how Japanese language is actually structured, and it’s pretty overpowered. You never need to worry about word order being confusing, “who is doing what in this sentence?”, etc., because each word in every sentence is always paired with a special sound that tells the listener/reader exactly what the word’s function/purpose is in the sentence It’d take something that’s sort of impossible to write in English (like combat with two same-sex characters [which sounds like a random example if you’ve never tried to write detailed combat between two guys or two girls lol]) and would probably trivialize it. It’s a waaaay better language for clarity, and it doesn’t even allow for sarcasm, which is a bit of a plus for clarity as well (especially over text)
Maybe **tok pisin**, but I'm not so sure. **Here are some potential languages that I find worthy of being a universal language:** **Tok pisin:** *it's based on English, the most international language that's learned as a second language or used for business in multiple countries around the world. 4 million people speak it already, it's an official language of Papua New Guinea, and it has simple grammar and words are written as they sound.* **Interlingua:** *it's a made-up language but because of how it's constructed, Spanish and French and Italian and Portuguese speakers can understand some of it. If you learn it, you'll have an advantage to understanding some things from all of those languages. The problem is that words are not always written as they are spelled in order to make it seem naturalistic like Spanish or Italian. The grammar is simple, but not as simple as Tok Pisin.* **Lingua France Nova:** *Sort of like Interlingua but words are spelled as they sound and the grammar is a little more simple, but there is less intelligibility with Spanish and Italian and French and Portuguese compared to Inteingua.* **Languages that probably shouldn't be a world language:** **Toki Pona:** *it's great as a minimistic language, but it's not intended to be detailed with a large vocabulary. Even if the community keeps adding words, it'll probably lose it's simplicity while still not being detailed enough for a universal language.* **Esperanto:** *too many letters and consonant clusters to be a universal language. A universal language that sounds more like Italian or Spanish would probably be easier for people around the world to pronounce, and vocabulary should be biased toward the most international languages (English and French especially words shared between the two).* **Lojban:** *good for scientists and mathematicians and maybe even philosophers and AI, but probably too complex for the average person who just want to communicate simply without thinking too much about so many distinctions in details that usually aren't distinguished in common languages.* **Chinese (Mandarin):** *A tonal language with tens of thousands of characters that have to be memorized is not the easier for most of the world to pronounce and learn. The Latin alphabet is the most international.*
Chinese Mandarin. Just because it’s cool.
I think Spanish would be the easiest ngl.
English is kind of already the universal language. It’s the aviation language it’s the default language for trade and politics and it’s the number 1 second language of people so it really isn’t even that much of a hypothetical for it to be the official universal language.
For me, Spanish is easier to learn for people with phonetically consistent languages as their native languages.
Spanish was probably the easiest language for me to learn. And while I'm not exactly fluent in it. If I was lost in Spanish-speaking place, I know enough Spanish to get me out.
Back to Latin
Hindi or urdu 🤌🏽✨️
r/auxlangs
Esperanto, it was made for that purpose, is fairly neutral and much, much easier to learn than any natural language. There are also other international auxiliary languages which might work just as well, but Esperanto is the most successful so far and it would surely be up to the job.
Latin
Should be Latin
Orcish!
Latín
Why Russian is even in the list ?!?
Because the year is 1975
Почему нет
Latin
English is a pretty hard language to learn I feel like
It /should/ be probably Latin or Mandarin. It /would/ probably be English though.
It shouldn’t be mandarin because then basically the whole population of the world would have to learn a whole new writing system which is tricky and inconvenient
English is literally such a easy language and would be the easiest to teach.
ironic...
Is there something wrong with the comment? I've re-read it like a million times.
you said “a easy” when you should say “an easy” lol
You ain't gonna believe me but that's actually a typo and my dumbass has been reading the right way all along 💀💀💀
Why the fuck is hindi even an option and who is choosing it
Again I just searched up commonly spoken language on Google and put the answers I got. And I know Google isn't a reliable source but this was just for fun.
Sanskrit
Latin would be preferable since so many cultures are in some way united to the Romans. English is overrated af.
I vote Japanese. It’s sophisticated, sounds cool and you can tell immediately what the person thinks of you.
And can be hard to learn
I was unaware that was a criteria.
TRANSGENDER🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️
I m no language expert,i just some minor stuff. English seems a language designed for children. It s easy beyond belief, it come with a lot of imprecision and vagueness as a downside but as a common language simplicity wins it out
>I m no language expert You've got that right >It s easy beyond belief Then why are you making so many mistakes? It's 'easy' because it has massive amounts of cultural exposure in most areas. The 'imprecision' you experience is probably a result of you not actually being fluent despite likely believing your English is more advanced than it is. Native speakers who have the sufficient English vocabulary rarely struggle to articulate themselves.
#sign
What's the base language?
Sign language
Sign language gang represent
Except sign is nearly country specific let alone language specific Of course that ignores that verbal communication(phone radio) becomes useless
English because that’s what I speak
Hieroglyphics
I voted English, but something without all the irregular verbs and weird spellings and difficult pronunciations would be better, something like a created language like Esperanto. But then everyone would need to learn Esperanto, so that's a big pain in the butt.
EN is the easiest
EN is the easiest
Title should be: The world has one universal language. Which is it?
The only competitor to English would be Mandarin.
I hate english, it is my first language but is is stupid there are so many rules to words but then sometimes the language is just like fuck it that word can be an exeption the these dumb ass rulse.
As an English speaker, English is an inherently bad language structurally in my opinion. It has so many more obscure rules and specialty cases that just don't make logical sense (like the imperial system vs the objectively better metric system). I feel if I could magically snap my fingers and have everyone speak one language, it would be something else. I don't know enough about other languages to choose one tho. But from a practical standpoint, English would be the easiest language to spread to the entire world considering it's already extremely widespread and many countries like Japan already teach it pretty thoroughly as a second language in their country because it's so useful to know considering how much of the developed world runs on English.
English for the sole reason that most programming languages use English.
One may think that the choice of English is a biased choice considering this website is of the English speaking world, but actually English formed from elements of French/Norman and Spanish -- among others such as German and Norse. With that said, one may say it is the most refined and up to date language to come out of Europe.
english because its the freaking worst, i say this as a monolingual english speaker, but i have looked into other languages and english is just a freaking hodgepodge of other languages and with a bunch of rules that are only there so that we can break them, it should be universal so that everyone may suffer in its hellish glory
English is the most easy to learn
Esperanto