Cav's Place

I don’t think anyone’s going to deny that we need good international communication, both at the highest level and among regular people. But that will be very difficult to achieve as long as different people use different languages, so I believe we need to have one world language that everyone should know and use. Other languages could be preserved, of course, as anyone would still be able to learn as many languages as they want and are able to and countries could still use their own national languages in parallel if they so choose, but all of these would become secondary, everyone needing to know this one language before any other.

There have been some attempts, the most famous of which being Esperanto, but they never stood any real chance. One major problem was that nobody already knows a constructed language, everyone has to learn it, and they have to do so from books and other such sources since they couldn’t go somewhere where it’s spoken frequently and try to “catch on”. What’s more, this lack of existing speakers means that people trying to learn such a language would also be unable to practice it in “real life” situations, making the process even more difficult. And then you have the fact that such languages were created to be secondary languages, which means that people might pay less attention to them and many won’t care to study them at all just because they don’t want to bother with a language which is by definition less important than one they already know.
The world language would have to be the world’s primary language and it would have to already exist and be spoken, at least at an intermediate level, by a statistically significant number of people in as many countries and regions as possible. (Variants and dialects would be included when determining this, as long as they wouldn’t be so different as to make even basic communication difficult between those who speak them.) That’d mean that less people would have to learn it and those who would learn it would find it relatively easy to get in contact with those who already know it and practice, including in “real life” scenarios. Also, in order to facilitate this learning process, it would have to be a language that’s already being taught in schools in many countries, so the structure already exists and teachers aren’t hard to find. About the language itself, it would preferably be one that isn’t especially difficult to learn, so one that uses a common writing system, without unique or even rare characters, and doesn’t have a particularly difficult grammar. The use of that common writing system would make it hard for native speakers of languages that use different, less common, writing systems, but that can’t be helped.

The obvious first measure would be to somehow persuade all countries and territories to adopt the world language as an official language and include it into their educational programs from the earliest possible age, so new generations would learn it in parallel with what is now considered to be their native language. But something could be done even sooner than that by using computers and the Internet. If you’d find a way to discourage this current localization trend for software and websites, you could once again have a very good method of making people learn the world language, or at least its written part, as they go, through regular use.
The next step would be requiring everyone who works in a position that’s likely to put them in contact with foreigners to learn it. This is already done in many places, but different languages are sometimes required in different areas, which shouldn’t happen if you truly mean to have a world language. What’s more, this requirement should spread as time progresses, a good grasp of the world language eventually becoming mandatory for anybody who deals with other people professionally, from top politicians to the lowest salesperson. This would ensure that communication would stop being a problem both for top officials and for regular people who travel abroad, no longer forcing them to rely on translators or stick to certain touristic areas.
Later, it should be expected of all people under the age of 35 to have a good grasp of the world language just as it is now expected of them to know their native language. The countries where the national language uses a different writing system should be given a significantly longer amount of time to reach this point, but they would all have to reach it nevertheless. Then this age limit would have to be increased constantly, by at least three years for every two years that pass, eventually being eliminated once it’d reach 75, all people being expected to have a good enough grasp on the world language from that moment forward.
Once so many people know the world language well enough, it must be ensured that they continue using it at least as much as they use their native language, and eventually even more so. Everything intended for public use would have to be in the world language, formal education should see it more and more as the primary language to teach in instead of a foreign language that should be taught separately… Ultimately, people should be expected to use the world language for any communication, or at least any communication which is not specifically intended to be completely private. They should still be free to use any other language in public whenever they choose to do so as long as they don’t demand of anyone else to understand them, of course, but it should become as natural for everyone to use the world language as it is now for them to use their respective native languages, and perhaps even more so.
In the end, the world language would become everyone’s primary language, everyone’s native language, completely destroying this barrier. All other languages would become “foreign”, learned as secondary languages by those who choose to do so. If some of them would become practically extinct as a result of this, so be it. It’s far more important to be able to easily understand each other. Besides, everyone having the same native language would help people realize that we’re all in this together, we’re all citizens of the Earth, not just of our respective countries.

Currently, it’d make perfect sense to pick English as the world language, as I don’t think any other could even remotely challenge it in terms of suitability. This won’t happen overnight, especially when it comes to people whose native language uses a completely different writing system, but that’s just one more reason to start implementing this immediately.