Biologist Mark Pagel gave a talk on TED, How Language Transformed Humanity, where he outlined the evolution of language from 200 thousand years ago to today. What I found fascinating about the talk was that he was not only highlighting how spoken language is the one thing that makes us unique from other animals but that it is the one thing that prevents us from communicating too. That is, the mere diversity of languages prevents connectivity globally.

Pagel described how language first developed through a need to cooperate, to convey ideas and to share. The cumulative cultural adapation that occurred, which he called social learning, produced a different outcome for us, as Homo sapiens, than our ancestors. He says that language developed to overcome social learning as a form of visual theft:

“If I can learn from watching you, I can steal your best ideas and I can benefit from your efforts without having to put in the time and energy you did to develop them.”

From this point, human evolution reached a fork in the road. It could’ve taken a shorter path, like that of the Neanderthals or Homo erectus, and maintained knowledge and growth, for example the advancement of tools or medicine, in small knit family groups. Or, and clearly this is the path our ancestors chose, it could form co-operative societies where knowledge was shared and developed.

To do this Homo sapiens had to develop language; “this solved the crisis of visual theft,” says Pagel.

“Language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of co-operation, for reaching agreements, for striking deals and for coordinating our activities.”

It also meant that humans were now able to advance exponentially. And we did. In less than 100 thousand years Homo-sapiens spread the world over. “Whereas other species are confined to places where their genes adapt them to, with social learning and language we could transform the environment to suit our needs,” explains Pagel.

It seems ironic then that the one thing that brought us to modernity is also the one thing that prevents globalisation fully encompassing the Earth. Humans seem to naturally gravitate towards isolating knowledge and personalising power. It is logical that as humans developed and spread across the different continents the languages also developed and changed. However, as Pagel describes, the greatest density of different languages on Earth is found where people are most tightly packed together, like in Papua New Guinea.

“We use our language not just to cooperate but to draw rings around our cooperative groups, to establish identities and perhaps to protect our knowledge, wisdom and skills from eavesdropping from outside. Different languages slow the flow of ideas between different groups. They slow the flow of technologies and they even slow the flow of genes.

If language really is the solution to the crisis of visual theft, if language really is the conduit of our cooperation, the technology that our species derived to promote the free flow and exchange of ideas, in our modern world we confront a question:

In this modern globalised world, can we really afford to have all these different languages?”

Pagel offers the European Union as an example of effort and expense with the multitude of languages needed to communicate at the conferences. There are officially 23 recognised languages in the EU and more than 250 translators required to address those language needs. Pagel suggests that the world would be far simpler if there was just one language.

In fact, he suggests that evolution will determine the outcome for us. “Nature knows no other circumstance where functionally equivalent traits co-exist. One of them,” says Pagel, “always drives the other extinct.” The metric system, the universality of time, even how we network & communicate socially online has become (or is becoming) standardised for the ease of cooperation and the sharing of ideas.

Pagel is careful not to suggest any one language as the destined ‘one language’ though, but I think that evolution’s decision, for better or for worse, has already been made.

Despite the fact that of a population of 6.9 billion people on Earth, 1.3 billion people (or one-fifth of the population) speak Mandarin Chinese, yet English, which only has 400 million people speaking it as a first language, is fast becoming the universal language of globalisation and communication, especially with the increase of online technologies.

I don’t personally think that a universal ‘one language’ is a good thing, nor do I think that language necessarily needs to be English. Fortunately though, I’ll never see the world of one standardised language, to the exclusion/ extinction of others. I can’t imagine how culturally bereft it would be.

What do you think the world would be like with one language?