English should be designated as the world's language

[Hekate]

148. English has been the language of international business for most of a century already

Have you not noticed this? It is the language of airline pilots and air traffic controllers. It is the language of research scientists and medicine and education in a host of areas. English is particularly useful for conducting business in cultures with a strong hierarchical and gender bias built into their own language. Everywhere that the British colonized a form of English is now spoken and taught, but nowhere does it supplant the original languages. It is useful, and so it has spread.

Why on Earth would you want to make a law about it? Languages carry culture and ways of thinking and seeing the world and interacting. Ours is not the only way of thinking and acting in the world -- in some ways we are very destructive of that world, and our very use of language blinds us to it. We need to have the others as well, to save the planet if nothing else. Trying to impose a single language on all nations by law would cause generations of war and destroy all that has been built up by the needs of commerce, science, medicine, and so on. Our country is not the only place where these things take place, and in fact in many ways we now lag behind -- but English is flexible and it is useful, and America is still politically powerful.

Think it over. We need diversity of language and culture to survive.