Language of Desire PDF

The question remains though: how useful or indeed desirable is it to have one global language? Despite an Language of Desire enormous increase in international travel by Americans since World War Two, interest in learning foreign language has actually declined. Might it not be better to adopt a "laissez-faire" attitude toward language, and neither imposes laws to "protest" a tongue from outside influences nor discriminate against a minority language by banning its use?

One can segue that it is pointless to make language use a subject for laws and regulations even within a country, much less attempts to create a world language by decree. Instead, let all 2,796 languages compete openly with one another. The weakest-those that are least expressive, hardest to pronounce, or most cumbersome to read and write-will gradually fall out of use. Such tongues are being extinguished each year in the remote backwaters of South America, equatorial Africa, and New Guinea. But those that are most adoptive and convenience will survive by the process of voluntary choice.

Rather than the complete domination by one language of all others, the eventual result of such linguistic "laissez-faire" might be a merging of languages. English itself was formed in this way from the blending of Anglo-Saxon, French, Greek, Latin and Germanic words and grammar over centuries. Afrikaans, Swahili, and Indonesian are hybrids that eventually developed a literature and received official recognition. Today, with the rapid spread of new words and ideas made possible by electronic communications, the process of language merge could occur much more rapidly.

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