Human augmentation may radically lower the difficulty of learning a new natural language. Maybe they’ll give us a drug that puts our brains back into child mode for language acquisition.
If that happened, then the market for conlangs might look interesting.
Child mode for language acquisition is a myth. It only helps with pronunciation. For every other aspect of language acquisition that has ever been studied, adults learn faster.
Edit: I mean adults learn faster per hour of effort, which is the relevant axis. In practice, children often learn faster per calendar year because they have nothing better to do.
I must admit that every linguist and developmental psychologist I have talked to has insisted that this is wrong, but they have not given me a single source. I believe that they correctly quote the textbooks, but that the textbooks repeat the myth without evidence. Here is a survey. (ungated pdf, but large)
Ooh there’s a cool idea, I hadn’t thought of that.
Another angle is the possibility that vastly-improved directly-implanted translators—a babelfish, basically—might make the whole thing moot. You learn your first language and then have absolutely no need, ever, to learn another. Language could be more or less frozen wherever it stands at the time. That’s if the technology is universally available—things get even more interesting if it was only available to the wealthy, or to citizens of wealthy nations.
Language could be more or less frozen wherever it stands at the time.
No it wouldn’t—language is for signaling, not only communication. There would probably be a common language for business and travel, but languages would continue to develop normally, since people would still want to use language to determine how they present themselves.
You’re right, that was a little overbroad. I was thinking specifically in terms of the death or spread of individual languages.
If I have a device that translates anything said to me and renders it into my own language in real time—Pierre says something to me in French and I “hear” it in English—I never have to learn language other than my first, and my first—whether it’s English or Tagalog or Swahili—is no more or less useful, no more or less universally comprehensible than any other.
So you’re right that languages would still develop internally—English speakers would still speak to other English speakers and alter the language among themselves as they do now—but the cross-pollination of languages and their growth or decline over time would be affected.
The native language of my own country is almost dead—on life-support, so to speak—because English was more useful. English was what you taught your kids if you wanted them to have any chance of success. If you could, you taught them English as a first language. With a universal translator that pressure would be removed. Why would anyone go to the trouble of always speaking to their children in their second language so that the children acquire it as their first?
The number of people who learned any given language as their first would be pegged to the population speaking that language at the point when the technology was introduced. So the only reason for a language to die would be if that population declined over time due to to emigration or low birth rates.
Of course this is all pretty woolly, given that it’s an imaginary technology, possibly centuries away from even being possible.
A babelfish is probably never going to be good enough to fully replace actually knowing the language; to start with due to different word order in different languages you’ll get something delayed and awkward. It will probably never capture slang and punning properly. Some languages can express some concepts very well, others struggle with those concepts and are awkward.
Babelfish are coming, and they will be very useful, but I kind of expect them to accelerate the drive towards everyone knowing a bit of English.
Human augmentation may radically lower the difficulty of learning a new natural language. Maybe they’ll give us a drug that puts our brains back into child mode for language acquisition.
If that happened, then the market for conlangs might look interesting.
Child mode for language acquisition is a myth. It only helps with pronunciation. For every other aspect of language acquisition that has ever been studied, adults learn faster.
Edit: I mean adults learn faster per hour of effort, which is the relevant axis. In practice, children often learn faster per calendar year because they have nothing better to do.
I can definitely vouch for the pronunciation part, but is the rest really true? Source?
I must admit that every linguist and developmental psychologist I have talked to has insisted that this is wrong, but they have not given me a single source. I believe that they correctly quote the textbooks, but that the textbooks repeat the myth without evidence. Here is a survey. (ungated pdf, but large)
And very scary as well.
Ooh there’s a cool idea, I hadn’t thought of that.
Another angle is the possibility that vastly-improved directly-implanted translators—a babelfish, basically—might make the whole thing moot. You learn your first language and then have absolutely no need, ever, to learn another. Language could be more or less frozen wherever it stands at the time. That’s if the technology is universally available—things get even more interesting if it was only available to the wealthy, or to citizens of wealthy nations.
Second language might still be necessary for the cognitive development effect.
No it wouldn’t—language is for signaling, not only communication. There would probably be a common language for business and travel, but languages would continue to develop normally, since people would still want to use language to determine how they present themselves.
You’re right, that was a little overbroad. I was thinking specifically in terms of the death or spread of individual languages.
If I have a device that translates anything said to me and renders it into my own language in real time—Pierre says something to me in French and I “hear” it in English—I never have to learn language other than my first, and my first—whether it’s English or Tagalog or Swahili—is no more or less useful, no more or less universally comprehensible than any other.
So you’re right that languages would still develop internally—English speakers would still speak to other English speakers and alter the language among themselves as they do now—but the cross-pollination of languages and their growth or decline over time would be affected.
The native language of my own country is almost dead—on life-support, so to speak—because English was more useful. English was what you taught your kids if you wanted them to have any chance of success. If you could, you taught them English as a first language. With a universal translator that pressure would be removed. Why would anyone go to the trouble of always speaking to their children in their second language so that the children acquire it as their first?
The number of people who learned any given language as their first would be pegged to the population speaking that language at the point when the technology was introduced. So the only reason for a language to die would be if that population declined over time due to to emigration or low birth rates.
Of course this is all pretty woolly, given that it’s an imaginary technology, possibly centuries away from even being possible.
A babelfish is probably never going to be good enough to fully replace actually knowing the language; to start with due to different word order in different languages you’ll get something delayed and awkward. It will probably never capture slang and punning properly. Some languages can express some concepts very well, others struggle with those concepts and are awkward.
Babelfish are coming, and they will be very useful, but I kind of expect them to accelerate the drive towards everyone knowing a bit of English.