Language As Economic Infrastructure

I was recently witness to a debate about which language will dominate commerce and scientific publication in the next century. This discussion arose from the fact that Chinese and Indian economies have grown substantially and are possessed of a large population that could insist on using alternatives to English in commerce and scientific endeavour.

In the talk above, Patricia Ryan, a teacher of English in one of the nations in the Persian Gulf presents an interesting view about the need to accommodate a variety of languages in interactions. Stopping short of saying that the dominance of English imposes costs on growth of knowledge from diverse sources, she argues convincingly that the mass of publications in English stifles the ability of other alternatives from arising. It is true that to equate intelligence or capability with the knowledge of English is not proper.

In her eloquently delivered talk, she mentions that a language goes extinct every two weeks and with this trend, humanity may find that the diversity of languages shrink from 6000 to 600 in short order.  I am unaware of the accuracy of her estimates and the certainty of her figures but her assertion leads to an interesting question. It is clear that there is an enormous advantage to approaching problems of science and communication through diverse languages. What I find interesting is whether there may be an optimal number of languages in the world. I ask this because the distribution of speakers across the 6000 languages would probably show a Power Law, with English spoken by a disproportionate number and other smaller languages spoken by a few hundred at the most. For that reason alone, it is an onerous task to try to interpret every available publication into each language.