While linguistic diversity is celebrated, from a purely utilitarian perspective, a single global language would be the most efficient system for humanity. The existence of 7,000 languages is an accident of historical separation, not a designed feature for optimal communication or flourishing.
Thought is fundamentally non-linguistic. Evidence from babies, animals, and how we handle homophones shows that we conceptualize the world first, then translate those concepts into language for communication. Language evolved to express thought, not to be the medium of thought itself.
The push to save endangered languages often ignores the practical burden it places on marginalized communities. It asks them to invest immense effort in learning highly complex languages that offer little economic utility, primarily to satisfy the aesthetic and cultural desires of affluent Westerners.
The popular idea that grammar dictates thought is mostly false. For every cherry-picked example, there are countless counter-examples showing that linguistic features don't correlate with cultural traits. Culture and environment shape a language's vocabulary, not the other way around.
Today's rapid language death is primarily fueled by utilitarian choices, not just oppression. Speakers of smaller languages voluntarily switch to dominant ones like English or Swahili to provide their children with better economic opportunities, viewing the ancestral tongue as a barrier to prosperity.
Unlike the past, when languages could diverge into new forms within centuries, modern widespread literacy and constant media exposure act as a brake on linguistic change. English in a thousand years may still be largely comprehensible to us, a stark contrast to previous rates of evolution.
Creole languages, born from language contact, strip away needless complexities like grammatical gender and irregular verbs. They are radically easier to learn than older, "gunked up" languages yet remain fully expressive, making them a model of efficient linguistic design.
No language is inherently "faster." Languages that pack more meaning into single words (polysynthetic) are spoken more slowly, while those with simpler words (like English) are spoken more quickly. This trade-off creates a universal, constant rate of information transfer across all human languages.
Most endangered languages are extraordinarily complex. The biological reality is that after age 13, it's nearly impossible for a non-native to master them. This inherent difficulty, more than a lack of will, dooms most revival movements that aim to create new generations of fluent speakers.
Far from being an empty hesitation, the word "like" is evolving into a pragmatic particle that adds specific shades of meaning, similar to grammatical markers in other languages. Editing out every "like" can strip away intended nuance, making speech less, not more, articulate.
Modern audiences struggle with Shakespeare because hundreds of words have subtly changed meaning over 400 years (e.g., 'generous' meant 'noble'). This cumulative semantic drift makes the original text functionally a different language, requiring prior study, not just cultural appreciation, to understand.
Contrary to popular belief, research doesn't support that being bilingual raises IQ or executive function. Its most significant scientifically-backed cognitive benefit is more practical: it appears to delay the onset of dementia by several years, making it a valuable public health tool.