Originally posted by Jack Squat
language barriers disappear.
I'll comment on this because it's my area and I know more about it than pollution or ecology.
Language, as a conceptual system, varies from individual to individual within a community, with the end result that most differences are minute at the
interpersonal level in a given location. However, societal roles/subcultures and domains (church, school, work, etc.) lead to overlapping realities of
language in just one person's mind as he or she navigates their social spaces on a daily basis.
Zooming out, we could know discuss dialectal differences, which are often dismissed as trivialities or stereotypes from folk-based, lay perspectives
(such as "black people speak uneducatedly" or "ain't isn't in the dictionary" or "Pahk the Cah in Hahvahd Yahd" and so on), are actually quite
intricate and include different syntax, semantics, morphology, lexicon and phonology (linguistic terms for different grammar, vocab and sounds, more
or less).
Assuming travel conditions and population demographics of, let's say, before 1492, hypothetically a person could leave their village on the edge of
one end of any continent and travel to the next nearest village, transmitting a message to a new person who will travel to the next nearest village,
and so on and so forth almost like a huge game of telephone meets a very slow relay race. In most cases, the message would be easily transferred from
one village to the next, though I doubt the message would maintain its original meaning (much like the game telephone). In most cases, it could easily
skip a village or 4. However, if our first villager were to go to the exact opposite end of the continent we would be talking total communication
breakdown.
This is what we call dialect continuum. Again, it's hypothetical and I'm stretching the idea for simplification and brevity's sake.
As far as a one-world language. Good luck with that. Any imposed language will breakdown over time. Need
proof...Portuguese/Galician/Spanish/Leonese/Asturian/Catalan/Occitan/Provencal/French/Friulian/Romantsch/Italian/Neapolitan/Corsican/Venetian/Romanian
are all mutually unintelligible in anything other than short utterances or mere words. What do they all have in common? An imperial language we call
"Latin". It's not that these are all different languages that are based on Latin...
they are Latin. Latin is considered a dead language, but
that is not a correct assessment as it is very much alive in all those speakers above.
So, if a New World Order were to impose a single language, be it Mandarin, English, French, Esperanto, Arabic, or Pataxo-ha-ha-hae for that matter, it
would only be a matter of time before that single language breaks down. "Breaking down" is a combination of various factors:
Substrate interference (the original language of the speech community) will affect the local version of the "imposed language" because
you'll never totally force a speaker to forget his original language in whole, even if you succeed in wiping out their fluency, words, sounds, syntax
(word order) preferences will all remain. Examples:
-the "r" sound and lack of a "z" sound in Chicano English of the Southwest who are not necessarily speakers of Spanish
-the absence of "is" in Black English in statements like "She crazy" or "He angry" owing to West African verbal adjectives (null copula in
linguistics)
-the trill "double r" in Spanish and word for left "izquierda" as influences of the Basque people
-Explicit subject to subject pronoun relationships in languages spoken by decendents of the African diaspora, mirroring such patterns in West African
languages such as Ewe. (Ex: Haitian Creole: Neg-sa li fou [That guy he crazy])
-Brazilian Portuguese's phrase-final negation also as a result of West African languages (exemplified by Ewe as well)
-"She's after cooking dinner" (meaning: She's just done it) in Hiberno-English (English spoken in Ireland) modeled after the Gaelic language
syntax.
Superstrate (Colonizing languages) affected by the colonized:
-English "Long time no see" and "No can do" literal translations from Chinese
-Animal, plant and culturally-specific names of things from America and Asia become the natural way to say these things in the colonizer's language
(Jaguar, tomato, chocolate, shampoo, rickshaw, teepee, pow-wow, etc ad nauseum)
Clipping - gym, lab, ed, cap(pucino), 'sup?, bro (taking part of a word to mean the whole word for brevity).
Portmanteaux - Spanglish, Half-Caff, brunch, spork (basically when you take part of one word and splice it with part of another - my mind is
getting tired, so that should be enough examples)
Abbreviations/Acronyms - txt, lol, omg, imo, imho, wtf, CoIntelPro, C.O.C. (chain of custody), MRI, ATS, DNA, etc (saying "E" "T" "C"
instead of "etcetera")
Individual sound change - Currently, English speakers in the Midwest, around the Great Lakes, are saying "bus" as though it were "boss",
"boss" as though it were "bass" and so on. We call this the Great Lakes Vowel Shift and it is happening now, as we are on ATS, despite the
internet, Hollywood, globalization, etc.
I could go on and on, but the historical record and contemporary examples show that no matter how hard any one person or group wants to impose a
single language, it would eventually "erode" or "evolve" (pick your metaphor) into a series of different languages much like my anecdote above.
What we call a dialect continuum or Sprachbund.
And for those of you who will poopoo what I say because of heightened technological advances, I would only say that while a Mountain may isolate
groups to become genetically, culturally and linguistically different, so too can uniformity foster a strong need in humans to individualize
themselves, stand out or otherwise take their own spin and idiosyncrasies on things.
CAVEAT: Orwell's New Speak was certainly a controlled language, and certainly the people of Oceania (through the propaganda of IngSoc) would have
felt a need for group cohesion against common enemies (Eurasia and East Asia, namely), I would imagine that without this patriotic, propagandist
impetus, even the highly controlled language would break down under the weight of self expression. And just the same, in the book the Prols spoke
differently, using the language in a different manner. It would make sense that Orwell would have focused on this as a linguist himself. At any rate,
New Speak is not really a good example of what would occur as it never really happened (though we may be seeing it now).
That's my take on the language of the New World Order