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.
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.