Why we should stop learning languages other than English

English is already the world’s universal language. Why do we still fight that?

Introduction

Let’s start with a question:

Would it be great if all people in the world understood each other, regardless of language?

If you answer “No” to this question, this article isn’t for you, and it would be pointless to try to convince you that in fact, it would be great, from all sorts of viewpoints, if everyone understood each other, regardless of their native language. You might also want to seek professional help.

I’ll therefore assume we agree that,

It would be great if all people in the world were somehow able to understand each other, regardless of their native language.

How might this be possible though?

1. With the help of AI and machine translation, which already works remarkably well, even for difficult languages, compared to when I started writing this essay in 2008.
2. If everyone learned basic English and used it to communicate with others whose native language might not be English.

Why English? Why not Chinese or some made-up language like Esperanto? Should people stop learning the language of their country?

Read on.

Introduction

I am a native Romanian speaker, and English is my second language. My background includes a professional translator accreditation, two translated books, and six years in the localization/globalization industry, of which four at Yahoo!. Since 2008, I have been advocating for a very simple cause:

The world would be a better place if everyone (also) spoke a common language.

We’ve already been doing that on a global scale in the past ~30–20 years or so, on the Internet. Using English online has been helping us communicate better, work and play together better, and become a more united humankind.

Why a global language?

Here are some major advantages of the world using a global language for communication that goes beyond one’s immediate surroundings.

Languages have killed millions of people and cost billions of dollars

Many armed conflicts and international crises have been started by slight mis-translations. Have a look at this compilation — Has a poor translation ever caused a war or other serious crisis?. And remember, these are only the documented cases.

Translation errors have also caused serious financial loss, embarrassment in the media, and much human suffering.

And of course, translation, editing and proofreading have staggering monetary costs — almost $100B/year.

In other words, we pay an annual tax of $100B/year because we haven’t been able to unify our languages. That is a lot of money.

To put this in perspective: $100B/year can very well end world hunger.

Unfortunately, we seem to be completely oblivious to this choice we’re actively making.

Languages make knowledge inaccessible

Just consider the huge amount of online and offline knowledge that’s simply unavailable to you for the silly reason that it’s written in a language you don’t understand. Should we encourage this status quo by promoting the learning of more languages so that people can generate more knowledge in more languages? Should we keep translating from the most common languages into a myriad of other languages?

How about instead we focus on one language, and better knowledge, for instance by making it as easy as possible to learn that language, and by translating knowledge into it?

A brilliant idea is just as brilliant whether it is explained in Arabic, Swahili, English, or any other language. But, unfortunately, far fewer people will be exposed to it if it is not expressed in English.
— EF English Proficiency Index survey, 2018. ENGLISH AND INNOVATION.

Standards are good. Multiple languages are an anti-standard.

Did straying away from standards ever help in the long run? Aren’t you glad all power outlets are the same in your country and hate it when you can’t plug your device in an incompatible outlet because you need an adapter? Language is pretty much the same: a vehicle for communicating ideas among humans. I claim that ideas are more important than language itself.

Learning other languages but English is an economic and time waste

Economic studies have shown that for US English speakers, learning Spanish, French or German has a very low return on investment — between 1.5% and 4% annually. Keep in mind that learning a language is a very intensive process — high school students spend about 1/6 of their time learning foreign languages, yet only 1% of Americans claim they speak another language fluently (which suggests the number who actually do, is even smaller). So overall, learning foreign languages is an economic waste.

Learning English on the other hand, has an annual ROI of 10–20%, according to studies in Russia, Israel and Turkey.

Where we are today

Have a look at the global ranking of countries below. What do you think these countries are ranked by?

GDP? Quality of life? Technological advancement?

Global ranking of countries by English skills.

These countries were ranked by English skills, in the English Proficiency Index 2019 survey. Do you think English might have played a role in the economic and social development of these countries, or that it’s merely a correlation that the most advanced countries in the world (by a variety of metrics) also tend to speak the most English?

Anyway, it’s pretty clear which language has the best chances of becoming the global language.

From sheer numbers of speakers,

More than a billion people speak English as a first or second language, and hundreds of millions more as a third or fourth. — EF English Proficiency Index, 2019

To English being used across a variety of domains:

Modern English, sometimes described as the first global lingua franca, is the dominant language or in some instances even the required international language in communications, science, information technology, business, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomacy. […] A working knowledge of English has become a requirement in a number of fields, occupations and professions such as medicine and computing; as a consequence over a billion people speak English to at least a basic level. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. — Wikipedia: English language, Significance

To English carrying the world’s scientific knowledge…

“All 100 of the world’s most influential scientific journals […] publish their articles in English” — EF English Proficiency Index, 2018

…in particular in the software realm, where all programming languages and libraries use English keywords. Any significant software project with globally distributed developers has its comments and documentation written in English. We live in a world more and more driven by software, and the prevalence of English in software development cannot be neglected. An excellent post on this topic was written by renowned software engineer and entrepreneur Jeff Atwood.

English simply has immense momentum:

Generally speaking, English is the universal language on the Internet […] The position of English can only be altered by major world-scale political and economical changes, such as increasing importance of the European Union or a coalition between Japan and China. — English — the universal language on the Internet?

English correlates with GDP:

English is without a doubt the actual universal language. It is the world’s second largest native language, the official language in 70 countries, and English-speaking countries are responsible for about 40% of world’s total GNP. English can be at least understood almost everywhere among scholars and educated people, as it is the world media language, and the language of cinema, TV, pop music and the computer world. All over the planet people know many English words, their pronunciation and meaning. — English as a Universal Language

And even the Pope uses it:

I am talking in English because it is the modern Latin. — Pope John Paul II reported in the Sunday Telegraph, 1 December, 1985.

English has seen extensive adoption among immigrants…

About nine-in-ten second-generation Hispanic and Asian-American immigrants are proficient English speakers, substantially more than the immigrant generations of these groups.
— Pew, 2013

…and has served as a common language where local languages failed to gain traction:

English is the common language used to communicate with Indians from other regions and it is the second most commonly spoken language in India. On a global level, there has been an upward trend towards adopting English as the official language among companies and institutions and with this, it becomes imperative for individuals in India to embrace the language to order to compete in the job market.
— Business World India, 2018

I have presented this argument in numerous public forum entries since 2008, and have collected the feedback. There seems to be a consensus among my opponents that everyone speaking a common language would be beneficial for humanity, but however, that language should not necessarily be English! Therefore, I’ll skip expanding on why a common global language would be beneficial. I’ll instead challenge my opponents to explain exactly what language should become universal, and how they’d go about teaching it to the whole world.

Criticism

I’ll address below several common criticisms my proposal has received; feedback is welcome. Before replying, please read my argument in its entirety, and click hyperlinks when not familiar with the hyperlinked item.

“Advocating English as a universal language is ethnocentric”

I am not advocating the propagation of English culture (particularly not pop culture). I advocate teaching English purely as a vehicle for worldwide human communication. I don’t advocate my native language for this position, and I’m curious which non-English speakers would seriously advocate their own language. So far, the second best candidate would be Mandarin Chinese as a spoken language and Classical Chinese as the written form, but that’s thanks to China’s huge population. I don’t think any Chinese speaker in their right mind would advocate learning tens of thousands of characters. China’s own government realized the problem and has issued several simplification reforms since the 50’s. Moreover,

Since 2000, China’s focus has shifted to developing a worldclass scientific community and cultivating soft power abroad. Recognizing that English proficiency is key to meeting those objectives, China has expanded English instruction to schools across the country, transitioned from memorization-driven to communication-driven teaching, reformed the national assessment tool, incentivized foreign-educated Chinese talent to return home, and invested in transforming its leading universities into world-class research institutions that publish in top English-language journals.
— EF English Proficiency Index, 2019

We already have significantly different cultures using English, which shows that culture can be decoupled from language: India (which had to choose English over several mutually unintelligible dialects), the United States (many subcultures), the UK, Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand.

The point is that for a universal language you have to either invent one, or make a pick among languages. I’ll demonstrate below why I think the best pick would be English.

“English is a bad choice for a universal language”

English is full of irregularities, its spelling is counter-phonetic (which explains why even native speakers have such a terrible time spelling it), there are all sorts of dialects from Aussie to Ebonics, and it’s full of slang. If people prefer to learn Esperanto, I’m very fine with that. Interlingua would be even easier to learn. Work has also been done on simplified and normalized versions of English.

However, English is still a very simple and easy language to learn, compared to Asian languages (with the notable exception of Bahasa Indonesia). Even when compared to major Romance languages, such as French, Spanish and Portuguese, English has simpler grammar, in particular much simpler verb conjugations. English has no gender or number inflection for adjectives, articles and adverbs. More details about how much simpler English grammar really is can be found in this article by Carlos Carrion Torres.

Finally, English is (sadly for some), the most popular candidate, as I indicated in the very beginning of this article. Also,

As a non-native speaker you are always an outsider. […] If you want to get noticed in your field, you absolutely have to publish in English.
— from a University of Michigan article.

Dismissing this argument as ad numerum won’t help with the reality of how widespread English is.

“It would be too boring/homogeneous if everyone spoke English”

The more you travel, the more you realize this argument doesn’t hold much water. Have you experienced the grit and intensity of New York City, vs. the laid back atmosphere in Hawaii? How about the technology and startup obsession in Silicon Valley, vs. the relaxed music-filled evenings in Nashville or Austin? All these cities not only speak English, but they’re in the same country. Yet they are so, so different.

Language is only one dimension of what makes the world an amazingly diverse place. I’d argue that if we all understood each other, we could travel the world much more freely, wouldn’t feel as isolated in a “foreign” place as we do now if we don’t speak the local language, and the world would actually become even more diverse, with people flowing without the language barrier and bringing their culture along to share.

There are far more interesting regional aspects than language: culture, geography, society, cuisine, customs etc. Culture is translatable to a very high degree — most people have read some of the Bible even though its language isn’t anyone’s native tongue any more. What I’m advocating for is skipping this translation phase and sharing a common language to unite us.

“Culture would be lost”

Indeed, some cultural aspect are hard to translate. One of them is humor. Some jokes (notably puns) just don’t make sense in another language. However, most do. Here’s a Romanian joke for your enjoyment:

The husband and the wife are driving in their car, mad at each other. At one point, the pass by a bunch of pigs. The husband points his head at the pigs: “Relatives of yours?” The wife replies: “Yes, in-laws”.

On a more serious note, let’s look at how culture wouldn’t be that lost, taking as an example the Chinese culture. Now, Chinese culture that’s not translated in English is only accessible to Chinese speakers. For all others, it’s as good as lost. If future Chinese speakers keep writing in Chinese, more culture will be lost. If, as I propose, everyone learns English as well, those Chinese writers will realize they can expose their culture to a much larger audience if they write in English.

To clarify my point: I propose mandatory education in a universal language (English, nowadays) starting with every child’s general education. After a few generations, assuming that everyone will be speaking the same language (be it English or Esperanto or Interlingua):

• Existing works in some language X are lost anyway to those who don’t speak language X, regardless of whether everyone speaks (also) English or not
• Which is easier, and propagates culture more: translating from language X into tons of languages A, B, C etc., or translating into just English? Yes, that presupposes that the audience can read English, which is in the interest of the audience anyway, in today’s hyper-competitive world.

“Learning another language is ‘fun’, a good challenge and helps expand your thinking”

This is something I agree with. However, not all languages are equal. If you’re keen on learning a spoken language, it has been demonstrated that Esperanto is about 6 times as beneficial to learn as English:

What Helmar Frank’s research at Paderborn and for the San Marino International Academy of Sciences shows is that one year of Esperanto in school, which produces a communication ability equivalent to what the average pupil reaches in other European languages after six to seven years of study, accelerates and improves the learning of other languages after Esperanto.
— from Propaedeutic value of Esperanto.

But, if you actually want to develop your thinking, then learning a programming language is much more beneficial to one’s intellect and rigorous thinking, than learning another human language. Want a challenge that can also help you transition into a new career? Learn JavaScript.

“Machine translation will solve the language problem anyway”

With the advent of deep learning and AI, machine translation has become spooky good in some cases.

That is, in fact, an argument to not learn any other languages for reason other than sheer fun. Machine translation will do the job for you eventually.

In practice, as of 2019, machine translation works decently, but not yet great, for a number of languages. I’ve been traveling through South America in 2019, and Spanish and especially Portuguese have significant room for improvement.

“You can just use Google Translate”

This naive argument suggests that every single reader should use Google Translate (or some equivalent automatic translation software) for the language they need to read, say Russian. Here are some counter-arguments to this:

1. Why waste so much effort, when the author or publisher could use Google Translate once into English? Then only readers who don’t know English will have to use automatic translation. Which on a global scale, is a far smaller number than readers who don’t know Russian.
2. Google Translate works well online, but what about printed materials? Or talking on the phone? The app has an “interpreter” mode, but it’s not quite there yet. In my travels in South America, I’ve always been grateful when businesses (e.g. a dentist or hair salon) had some text messaging interface for making appointments (Facebook, WhatsApp). If I had to call, it would’ve been much more difficult.
3. Say there’s some useful information online in Russian. What is the chance that you’ll search for it in Russian, if you’re not Russian? Pretty much zero. But if you’re Russian, there’s a decent chance you’ll search for the English keywords that will lead you to that information. The same applies to every other language speaker. Knowledge published in English is far easier to search and find online, than knowledge in any other language. If you’re German, chances are you’ll never search for the Chinese keywords to “best way to visit the Great Wall”. You’ll probably use English.

Painful examples of how not using English results in #FAIL

Below are examples I’ve personally encountered of how not using English is simply foolish.

Asking in some local language for help with software

Software is universal. The vast majority of software developers use English. Famous software developer and entrepreneur Jeff Atwood published an excellent essay (it’s worth linking to it again), on why every programmer should learn English.

When it comes to software or apps, I’ve seen many examples of discussion/support boards online that have a “German section”, “Russian section” etc. just because one of the authors speaks that language. This is not just silly, it’s detrimental to the development of that app:

1. The vast majority of users use English. If you ask in Russian, your chances of getting a reply are much smaller than if you ask in English.
2. Once you somehow get a reply in Russian, that knowledge is lost to anyone else but Russian speakers.
3. The same FAQs will get asked over and over in English, Russian, German and so on.
4. The software authors who also speak that language waste their precious time answering questions in it, because they’re one of the very few people who can. One advantage of user forums is that users can help each other, letting developers focus on developing code. This is possible and does happen if users ask for help in English.

Having “<language X>” sections on forums splits the community and doesn’t help in the long run.

Marketing to thousands of computer pros… in Dutch

HAR 2009 (Hacking at Random) was an international security and technology conference held at Vierhouten in the Netherlands, reuniting thousands of information technology professionals. Yet this particular restaurant in the area advertised their pizza special deal in Dutch:

International software conference attendees, come get pizza if you can read this!

Life-saving information… in German only

Germany’s and Europe’s largest automobile club, ADAC, has conducted hundreds of crash tests on hundreds of vehicles. For the informed car buyer, the car crash test results are life-saving information… in German! Since this information can be accessed for free anyway, why did ADAC not just publish it in English?

The following are not strong counter-arguments:

• “You can use Google Translate to translate the page anyway.” See the heading above regarding Google Translate.
• “It’s ADAC’s information and they can do whatever they want with it.” Sure, ADAC has no duty to translate their findings, but we’re talking about crucial safety information here. They could be considerate to the rest of the world who doesn’t speak the superior German language.
• “You can read through the information in German anyway, it’s mostly car model names and star-ratings.” True, at the first superficial look. But there’s interesting information about each crash test, which savvy (German-speaking only!) customers can use.
• “Translation has its costs”. But so does crashing luxury cars in order to determine safety ratings. By publishing information in English, other testing agencies worldwide may not need to repeat the same crash tests. Even if safety standards vary from country to country, relative rankings will be the same (e.g. model X is safer at test Y than model Z).

Final thoughts

Ask yourself what the economy would look like if every time companies from different countries tried to work together, they had to go through translation. Would any of the Internet giants exist, if their employees could basically not communicate with one another? Heck, I’m not sure the Internet would have spread outside of the US. Does anyone remember Minitel? It was “one of the world’s most successful pre-World Wide Web online services”[1]… in France, and in French.

Let’s stop this post-tower-of-Babel language mess. I myself have quit my job as a translator and stopped producing any public content in Romanian.

What can you do?

1. If you are a bilingual speaker, write all globally-relevant public content in English (even blogs about your city in Japan — there may be international tourists looking for information about it). This will also help yourself and your readership pick up more English.
2. Encourage members of discussion groups or forums in languages other than English to join the English group if their topic is universal (e.g. computers). As an example of such advocacy, see my post on the German forum of the otherwise excellent Android phone synch software MyPhoneExplorer.
3. Point out that the huge amounts spent by multi-billion dollar companies on translation would be better spent on educating children in poor countries (if you haven’t clicked any link so far, click this one — it’s a superb inspirational YouTube music video clip).
4. If you are learning a language other than English, double-check your reasons. Learning some basic expressions is always useful, and will earn you the appreciation of the locals, but is it worth embarking on learning the whole language?
5. Point out that learning a language to a reasonable level of proficiency takes YEARS. To those who want to learn a foreign language other than English: is your life so in order, and have you accomplished all your other goals, that this is the best thing left to do?
6. When asked to translate something from English, consider imparting some English knowledge to the asker.
7. You can also travel the world (and make money if you like) by teaching English. Consider teaching conversational English (any English speaker can do that) through GlobalVolunteers.org, or through Go Abroad.

Spread this idea!

See you in 50 years. I hope you will have made a difference. I trust that natural selection, applied to languages, will.