Can speaking a common language bring world peace?

The origins and future of language have long interested not only linguists but many curious minds. Anyone researching the subject is very likely to encounter the biblical story of Babel. According to this account, people who wanted to reach the heavens by building the Tower of Babel were punished by God: the languages of people who had spoken one common language from the beginning were confused, leaving them speaking different tongues. What made this such a severe punishment was that different peoples could no longer understand one another and therefore came into conflict. In this article, I would like to tell the story of humanity’s adventure in seeking revenge for the Tower of Babel.

Constructed languages such as Toki Pona, Interlingua, and Esperanto were developed both to unite humanity through one language and for other reasons. Among them, the relatively best-known may be Esperanto, which many of you have probably heard of. Its creator, the linguist L. L. Zamenhof, developed it around a dream; the name Esperanto itself expresses hope. His dream was for people to understand one another without a language barrier and, in doing so, help shape a more tolerant and peaceful future. Although Zamenhof was no longer alive when Iran proposed using Esperanto for international relations at the League of Nations in 1920, the proposal offered a major opportunity for his hopes. Unfortunately, after ten delegates voted in favour, France’s opposition caused the proposal to be shelved. As disappointing as this was for Esperanto, it was minor compared with what would happen under the Nazi regime. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler described Esperanto as a conspiracy intended to unite the Jewish diaspora. The internationalism, peacefulness, and pacifism at Esperanto’s heart stood directly against Nazi ideals of an “Aryan” race. Esperanto was therefore suppressed in Nazi Germany, and three of Zamenhof’s descendants lost their lives in concentration camps. Today, although Esperanto is known by millions and is actively studied by thousands, it has remained far short of Zamenhof’s dream.

After Esperanto—the most successful, and in another sense unsuccessful, language created to bring humanity together—I would like to go a little further back in time to a language developed for a different reason. When Johann Martin Schleyer, a German Catholic priest, began developing Volapük, his sole motivation was a dream in which God told him to create a common language. However unusual that reason may seem, Volapük became the first constructed language to achieve major international success. Perhaps it owed some of that success to a vocabulary based on English, German, and French. The third Volapük congress, held in Paris, was conducted entirely in Volapük, earning it the distinction of being the first congress held in a constructed language. Unfortunately, after reaching its greatest prominence within ten years of its creation, Volapük gave way to other constructed languages, above all Esperanto. With a history that could itself echo the biblical story at the beginning of this article, Volapük is now studied only in certain niche circles. A language most of us may never even have heard of thus took its place in history as an unsuccessful attempt to unite the world through one common language.

Perhaps instead of focusing on why these constructed languages failed, we should question the aims that brought them into existence: uniting the world and guiding it towards peace. Although the idea of bringing the world together through one language may initially excite many of us, are people who speak the same language really more peaceful? There may be no definitive answer, but it is certainly an interesting subject to discuss. From one perspective, we can say that speaking a common language makes it easier for people to understand the cultures and thoughts of those unlike themselves. A common language might therefore guide us towards a more empathetic and peaceful society. Yet history has also repeatedly shown communities that share a language and similar cultures turning against one another. For example, the suggestion that a common language would bring peace might seem deeply implausible to a Serb, Bosniak, or Croat. Even so, it would go too far to say that these hopeful attempts to unite humanity are inevitably doomed to fail every time.

Having looked at the history of attempts to unite humanity through a common language, it is worth considering the situation today. Although constructed languages have not succeeded in building a shared bridge between all people, English continues to succeed in that role. Of the world’s estimated 1.6 billion English speakers, approximately 360 million speak it as their first language. French, which established a presence in Africa through its colonial past, also has approximately 220 million speakers, and this number is expected to grow substantially because of high birth rates. Although linguists broadly agree that there are more than seven thousand languages in the world, two thirds of the world communicates through only twelve. This raises another question: will people’s convergence on common languages also bring about the end of minority languages? Many Indigenous languages slowly disappear as they are overshadowed by dominant languages at school, on the internet, and on television. This is particularly visible in places such as the Americas and Australia, where English serves as a common language alongside many Indigenous communities. In multilingual societies, languages can also disappear as different languages blend into hybrid languages.

Perhaps technology, through translation and artificial intelligence, will overcome this centuries-old problem of not understanding one another. Computers capable of simultaneous translation could allow everyone to communicate with people around the world, regardless of culture, ethnicity, or country, without having to learn another language. Of course, as in almost every field, technology’s presence in translation would bring risks as well. Although simultaneous translation could let us communicate without a language barrier, it could also place our ability to express ourselves entirely in the hands of the organisations providing the translation. It is difficult to predict whether humanity’s desire to unite through a single language will be realised through technological innovation, the formation of hybrid languages, the gradual disappearance of languages, or everyone learning a constructed language. But humanity’s challenge to the story of Babel seems likely to continue for many years to come.