English should be designated as the world's language

[Orrex]

78. You're arguing a point that's been multiply refuted

I get it--a resident of some small town in the Ozarks won't be able to converse easily with an artful dodger from East London. But so what? Geographically isolated dialects do not constitute the entirety of a language--they represent the edges of the bell curve. Compare that with Chinese dialects spoken by 90 million people or more (rather a larger number than a few thousand East Londoners, wouldn't you say?) When you get into numbers of that size, the difference in the various forms of the language become really significant.

In any case, we're not talking about the breadth of the English language; we're talking about the number of people who can already understand the language that is called English.

That number exceeds the number of people who can understand Chinese, even if you include the many dialects (dialects which multiple people and sources, including someone in this thread with first-hand knowledge) have identified as having limited intercompatibility.


I don't know what it would take to convince you, since you don't find online citations, actual numbers, or direct personal experience to be persuasive.

All I can do at this point is repeat my feeling that we shouldn't force the world to name one official language, but it we were to identify one based on the current state of the world, that language would be English.