There’s an awful lot of people on Planet Earth and that we speak an awful lot of different languages. Getting all seven billion people – or however many people there will be in the world fifty or a hundred years from now – to all speak one language does seem like it might be a bit tricky. So let’s be generous this time around: let’s look at the chances of ending up with a language that’s spoken by about half of the global population. Enough people, presumably clustered together tightly enough that businesses can make it their primary business language. What do the prospects look like?

No-one can be certain what the future holds, but we can look at past precedent. History is full of examples of “trade languages” or any other lingua franca used to communicate across cultural borders: just think of the pan-European power of Latin throughout Roman times and even well into the Middle Ages. Or the astonishing reach of Mandarin Chinese across most of China. The term “lingua franca” is itself named after a trading language that was used all around the Mediterranean Sea for eight hundred years. But each of these languages was ultimately limited. Travel far enough, and eventually you’d always reach someone who couldn’t understand a word you were saying. This pattern holds true no matter how far back through history you go: there has never been a universal human language. Even when the very first human ancestors started to use language, different tribes probably used different words and different rules to describe the world around them. More.

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