[removed]

Probably. It's why I learned English in school, despite living in Norway. But easy access to every part of the world is only a few decades old, and the internet is only a tiny part, or no part at all, of everyone's world as of yet. We still mostly want to talk to people in the real world, where geographical barriers have helped languages diverge for millennia. This is not quickly undone, even if people would want to.

>With the internet and ease of access to every part of the world today I imagine having a single language that everyone can understand would probably make everything way easier, right?

The internet has barely existed for a generation.
Languages die all the time but the scenario you're proposing is something that can only ever play out over the course of many many human lifetimes.

It probably would. Which would you choose?

You'll never convince everyone in the world to agree to ditch their own native language in favour of another.

That's to say nothing of the cultural aspects that would be lost in the name of making things "easier".

[deleted]

Not everyone in the world has access to the internet, and even if you do, it is very difficult to learn another language. Think about this: How much would you need to be paid to learn Mandarin? If I told you I would pay you $50k to become conversational in Mandarin, would you do it?

For a lot of people in the non-Western world, they could make more money by working more hours than they could make by dedicating a lot of time to learn English or another language.

Language isn't just words. It reflects what a culture values. For example, you might have heard that the Inuit have dozens of words for snow. This is true because, for a people who live in a snowy environment, it was useful to describe powdery snow, a light dusting of snow, refrozen snow, deep snow, etc.

So living in different places, and with different people, necessitates different languages.

Many, many languages have already died out. The world has far fewer languages today than it had 100 or 200 years ago, as people switch to using the dominant language of their region.

For example, you probably think of Ireland as an English-speaking country. But until a few hundred years ago, it wasn't. Irish Gaelic was the most common language in Ireland for most of its history; they swapped to English after England took over Ireland. (Gaelic speakers still exist, but it is now a shrinking minority language in Ireland, not the dominant one.) The same went for Wales and Scotland, both of which originally had their own languages (Welsh has been revived, Scottish Gaelic is mostly fading), and in the distant past, even England itself.

In general, since the rise of large nation-states during the middle ages, the world has been moving steadily towards using fewer and fewer languages. And that process has sped up a lot in the more interconnected world we live in today. There are only about 7,000 languages left in the world, and many of those are spoken by a tiny group of elderly people and will be lost as those people die without passing the language on.

[removed]

Cultural identities cannot die so easily. Yes common language is important so many people learn English as a second language. For most culturally rich people their culture and traditions matter a lot and so a way of preserving them is by using the language.

German will stay, its far more complex than English, what means it is harder to learn, but you can express things that can never be spoken in English.

Language is part of a civilizations' culture, lets select the universal language in a random way. If Chinese, Russian or Esperanto gets chosen.. will you give up your own native language?

add to this you now have to learn the 'universal' language.

[removed]

Language is deeply connected to culture and a universal language would mean that many cultures would be at a great disadvantage due to giving that up for the universal language. The only way it could be done without favouring a culture is to create a new language. If they kept a common language as well as other counties, there will be social punishments due to the universal language being more “efficient”.

There is absolutely no need for what you are suggesting.

The world has always had different languages since before even the beginning of recorded history, we generally just choose one of them as an intermediary, so that people are free to use their own language 90% of the time, but can reliably count being able to use a second language when the need arises.

In other words, we already have 'one language' that we use to communicate cross cultures, and none of us have had to stop using our own language in the process of learning it. What you are suggesting would actually be an incredible amount of effort towards putting ourselves in a situation with no practical or logical benefit, it would be like suggesting everyone would find it easier to have one arm when they already have two. It is like trying to suggest that bilingualism is a burden, rather than a blessing.

The unique position that English speakers have, is that since English is that language for the time being, we almost suffer from the effect of 'tyranny of choice' when choosing a second language to learn. In the times when French or Latin were used as international languages, not learning them would have been a sign of someone having very poor education, however now, lack of ability in foreign languages is pretty much the norm, and from this position, where most people have no perspective on how empowering it is to speak more than ones own native language, we find that people seriously suggest everyone else should do away with their own, for the sake of making our own lives easier than they already are.