What if there was one language?
Everyone on Earth speaks the same language. Jokes travel across borders, and so do scams.
No translator needed at the market any more.
Day 1
In a busy port market, a buyer and a seller understand each other for the first time without a cousin translating in between.
Songs on the radio are understood everywhere the bus goes.
Year 1
Contracts cross borders without translators. So do arguments, sermons and scams. A rumour that starts in one city has reached all of them by nightfall.
Grandparents still dream in their old language for a while. Their grandchildren answer them in the new one, and the old words slowly stop being used at home.
Year 10
Place names are mostly what’s left. A river keeps a name nobody can translate any more, because nobody remembers the language it came from.
Poets have a far bigger audience and fewer words to work with. Some things could only be said in the old languages, and now nobody can say them.
Who wins
- Anyone who gets stuck at a counter abroadThe sentence gets through.
- TradeDeals no longer need a translator.
- JokesThe ones that used to die at the border now travel.
Who loses
- Small languagesThey go first, and they don’t come back.
- TranslatorsThe work shrinks to old documents.
- Private conversations in publicEveryone around you understands every word.
- SongsLyrics written for one language rarely survive the switch.
Lots of people already share a second language at work, in airports and in labs. Losing all the others would be something else: thousands of languages, each with words that exist nowhere else.
Would you trade your language for this?
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