WhyNotEnglish

From Ial

Why not (put your favourite language here)?

The truth is it is not possible to force all people to speak one language and trying doing that would even be unfair, a sort of a violence. But it is both possible, practical and desirable to have a simple international language to facilitate communication on a global level, something which is now feasible thanks to the Internet.

There are other kinds of standards on the Internet that need to be unique for it to work well and agreement had to be reached in one way or another. We also need a unique human language so that everybody can actually understand and harness Internet's power.

The reason why we don't have a common human language for the Internet yet as we have the HTTP or HTML protocols for computers is just that many people know and use English, although only at an elementary level. But still too many people find English difficult and are completely excluded and the majority of those who know English just understand simple English sentences in writing, no more than that.

So we actually have an international language, English, but it is a very bad choice for this role, like any other natural language. It is too difficult and gives an advantage to US citizens who do not have to make any effort, to the disadvantage of all others. This is why I think that there could be a way to organize a constructive reaction against English or any other kind of language imperialism and have a much better, neutral language.

This is an optimization-problem. People actually spend years just to learn a bad English, when it could be possible for them to learn well a much simpler language in one or two months only, that is to reach the same same level of communication ability that they reach in years of English usage and practice. Well, actually only very few reach that. With this super-simple international auxiliary language, everybody would be fluent enough for its purposes.