When we look at the world’s map, who amongst us hasn’t felt overwhelmed while trying to grasp its vastness? At first glance, the world is a set of land formations that are distanced from each other, bathed by a majestic body of water. But it is also the territory throughout which an endless number of cultures are spread, organized as political units, the so-called nations, which, besides having borders to define their limits, are populated by all kinds of communities. Each of these communities speaking one or more languages, with unique and exotic customs, and bearing the imprint of their particular history that has led them to evolve up to the present time, including people with different ideas and distinct feelings. Paradoxically, we are also fascinated by how often we are able to find common ground between said cultures that appear to bring us closer to a series of fundamental values and beliefs. Indeed, when we peruse through the world’s map, we see so many different regions that we rejoice imagining how each of these cultural units came to be, how they were transformed over time and what their future fate will be.
One of the key elements that marks a true difference between the different communities are, of course, languages. It is estimated that there are around 7000 languages being spoken in our world today. Many are interrelated, while other languages have a more insulated and unrelated character. This wealth of languages, as linguistics explains, results from the diversification of a group of core languages into many other ones. These core languages used to be more widespread in the past, but in time, they developed separately across different speakers’ communities living in diverse areas. According to this theory, current languages can be grouped into larger and larger families, like a family tree, until they form large cores that nourished the myriad languages we speak today, such as Indo-European and Uralic languages. Nevertheless, we must take into account that the studies that drew up these diagrams fail to include all minority languages, so not all existing languages are covered by them and therefore, the myth of a mysterious and elusive original language from which all linguistic systems stem remains strong. But what about a world where a single language is spoken? How would the world we live in and our daily reality look like if each and every person in it would speak the same language? What would happen to professional translation? Would it just disappear? Is the universal language utopia the beginning of the end for our industry?
On the one hand, universal language refers to one of several current languages which are used as vehicular languages for intercultural communication in specific areas. Such is the case with English today. On the other hand, however, the concept of a universal language can refer to a hypothetical situation in which all the inhabitants of the planet would speak the same language, homogenously. We say ‘homogenously’ because when we address the idea of a universal language for which there are different accents depending on the geographical location, we would be accepting a parameter that, in time, would translate into modifications of this universal language, which would stop being such and would branch, little by little, into a new variant.
We must admit that the idea of a single language seems quite appealing. It would represent the chance to communicate with any person throughout the world without any linguistic barrier, to visit different countries and be able to freely move around without language being an obstacle that limits what we want to express and also accessing any kind of information, from any corner of the globe. From the commercial point of view, this would represent a clear advantage, as businesses could launch their products in every country and they would be certain that the message in their advertising campaigns would have the same linguistic impact across the entire world. In other words, a monolingual world is a more agile and immediate environment in which communication is unified and people can dream of traveling and discovering it freely, preventing the existence of many languages from being detrimental to their experience.
However, what would be the fate of translation in a world without language differences? Most certainly, the main service provided by translators would not even exist or be even conceived as such, since the need to express any concept belonging to a first language in a second language would be moot, and translators, in the strict sense, would not be required. Surely, there would be other types of language tasks, such as orthographic and typographic correction, style changes, creative writing, but always within a monolingual context.
In any case, the idea of a monolingual world in which everybody speaks the same language everywhere remains quite unlikely, and this is because geographical distribution causes communities, despite being Internet connected, to develop their own linguistic styles, so that starting from a single language and with the passage of time, the same language diversifies into variants left and right, which while having a common source, exhibit unique and distinguishing features. Once again, we arrive at the situation in the real world, where we would end up with a large group of languages which ultimately stem from a common origin. In the end, it seems that evolving into greater diversification is an organic process.
Image reference: https://hbr.org/2017/03/does-work-make-you-happy-evidence-from-the-world-happiness-report
