World language needs planning not power : "Pushing the language of one or several nations, such as English, upon all other nations will not work. Whether the answer is Esperanto, Mondlango or something else, our hope lies in planned linguistic construction."
Remember Esperanto? Remember we were all going to have a world language and then some people thought English would do , quite forgetting a thousand million Chinese can't be wrong? We do need to be able to communicate quickly, efficiently and freely in a global society and we are becoming more and more global. We are connecting more and more across the world and since finance is being organised globally,the pressure for us to communicate better is becoming more obvious. There has been a trend to withdraw back into our own cultural roots too because the world has already lost 6000 languages, our aborigines are often multilingual but English is not one of their languages and so there is a melting pot of ideas at the moment. Feb 21 is UNESCO's international mother tongue day and it is about the well-being of people through acknowledging their mother tongue. We are making moves towards being multilingual rather than choosing a lingua franca. We are starting to see more and more people who can speak 4 languages like tribal people who go from tribal languages to official languages to another tribal language with remarkable ease. people in the Congo can speak their own language, French, Swahili and some are now starting to learn English as well. It bodes well if we adopt that as an approach because any language you take on is not your language. it is not you. It's an aspect of you. Your mother tongue is part of your authentic identity. Some people can become multi cultural or bi cultural as well, but that is not everyone. We do need to think about this communication thing and we do need to realise we'll blend people better if we don't threaten to take their mother tongue from them. Fortunately technology is making language learning easy.
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