I believe in diversity and advocating a single language, although could bridge some communication gap, would discourage the promotion of other languages. I personally am proficient in five languages and I can see how different each one of them is when compared to each other. If we consider English, there are some things that has no words for it, for example can you name a word for a person who has lost his child, ie., the opposite of orphan?

http://www.ukauthors.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=16850

Every language has its own strengths and weaknesses and when it comes to the literature aspect, it can be seen that there are a great many number of masterpieces written in other languages which have been translated into English loses its flavour altogether. Enforcing the usage of one particular language would kill a lot career prospects for linguists and translators. It would also limit creativity and cause further chaos when it comes to choosing the language as the country with native speakers of that language would have a clear advantage over the others.

There are thousands of languages throughout the history of civilisation and it also gives an insight to the conditions and mentality of a particular community of people.
http://www.lsadc.org/info/pdf_files/howmany.pdf

Learning languages also helps develop the brain.
http://www.parentinginformation.org/braindevelopment.htm

It will be great to have everyone speak one language. It would be easier to communicate, to have your message be understood and of course to have a more peaceful world. :)

I agree with nikky24 though. She has a point but there's a solution to that.

It's not that we're going to abolish other languages. Those native languages will stay. We'll just add English in the languages we must learn.

Here in the Philippines, an average person knows 3 dialects. One is our national language, Pilipino (Tagalog), second is English, then third a vernacular language depending on what province or region we are in.

From preschool, kids here will be taught how to speak and write in English and Pilipino at the same time. It isn't really hard, almost all kids get by. Some schools even have additional lessons for their own vernacular language.

I think it's possible to implement one international language. But of course, let's not leave the native ones die out. Most non-English speaking countries are now trying to put English in their curriculum which is great idea. I think after about maybe 50 years, the world can speak English already! ^^

language of love and brotherhood

No I wouldn't advocate a single language for the entire world.

But I would advocate a single *second* language for the entire world. And we are already heading in that direction, with people everywhere increasingly learning English as a second language from an early age. This has all the benefits of a single world language without the drawback of squishing diversity and losing people's own culture and heritage.

It's how people working in the offices of a Japanese company in Holland communicate with each other, or the language in which an MBA class in France is taught to a body of students from all over the world.

Having just one language in the world would be a big loss for us all, because languages help to shape how people think and how they view the world. It would be a loss if everyone thought the same way, and it would stifle a lot of creativity that comes from multiple different ways of looking at things.

For this reason it'd be great for everyone to be bilingual.

The only drawback with the direction we're already going is that there's ever less incentive for native English speakers to learn other languages! At the moment there are still lots of people that don't speak English at all, or only speak it in a basic way. But the day may come when everyone in the world speaks pretty good English, and learning other languages won't have the same appeal to English speakers as it does now.

Esperanto was an attempt to do that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

http://traduku.net/ for online translation.

Search the web via an Esperato portal (courtesy of Google): http://www.google.com/intl/eo/

The last time we had a single language we screwed it up. While it would be nice to have again, I'm sure we'd out progress ourselves so fast we'd end in ruin once again.

Yes I would, but with three provisos.

First, studies in linguistics have shown that grammar can affect the thoughts that people with a left-hemisphere preferred cognitive mode can form.

People of a right-hemisphere preferred cognitive mode are not affected that way, but those of a left-hemisphere preferred cognitive mode (75% of females and 25% of males) literally cannot form a concept unless and until they can associate a word to the concept.

For those people, if the vocabulary is insufficient, then there are some concepts that they simply cannot grasp unless there's a word for it, which means humanity would be handicapped if the common language settled upon was short on vocabulary.

Examples of how that could make trouble would be if the common language followed the vocabulary of that of certain people living in south American jungles where they have no word for "orange". They have words for yellow and red, but not for orange, and so when they an orange it's a toss of the coin over whether the call it yellow or red, and that would be a nuisance for Dutch, who definitely have a social reason to have a word for orange.

Therefore, you have to make sure there's sufficient vocabulary.

Second, there's an underlying logic to grammar that can in some ways affect the way a person will be able to reason things out with words.

The different grammars of different languages can affect the extent to which, and the way, people will reason things out, such that in some language, things like certain scientific or spiritual concepts cannot be thought through because the structure of their grammar does not allow for formations of logic that follow those lines.

It's known that all grammars are actually constructed from a more primitive proto-grammar (first elucidated by the linguist Noam Chomsky) that can be understood by all people up until about the age of three, at which point the imprinting of their limbic system locks the particular grammar of their language down as a subset of the meta-grammar that people are actually capable of, so a language for everyone would have to have an extended grammar so that people would be able to use language to think in all forms of logic.

Third, different languages are constructed from different subsets of the total set of phonemes that people can actually hear, and again, around the age of three people 's limbic systems will gel into an imprinting that can only understand a subset of those phonemes (the way Asians have trouble distinguishing L from R is an example).

Linguists worry about this one when they talk about "lost languages"... they are afraid that some phonemes will be lost that do not exist in other languages, but in fact, it's possible to reconstruct the phoneme sets from combination's of other phoneme sets, so it's not as bad as they worry, except for one... there is one language that has phonemes in it that are not found in any other language, and that's Japanese, such that if Japanese were to disappear, then indeed it would be impossible to reconstruct the Japanese phoneme set by picking through other languages.

Therefore, one would have to make sure that the the ideal language has all the phonemes that humans can hear, in particular, those special ones found in Japanese only.

So, if you can make sure that the vocabulary is comprehensive enough, and if the grammar is extensive enough, and if the phonetic sound-set is inclusive enough, then actually... having one language for everyone would be a good idea and would go a heck of a long way towards ironing out some problems that different groups of people are having with each other... not just because they can't understand each other... but because the way the languages are sorted out now, sometimes two groups can't communicate because they *think* different as a function of their language's grammar, and it would be very useful to humans as caretakers of this planet to get rid of that pesky problem.