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Universal language may refer to a hypothetical or historical language spoken and understood by all or most of the world's people. In some contexts, it refers to a means of communication said to be understood by all humans. It may be the idea of aninternational auxiliary language for communication between groups speaking different primary languages. A similar concept can be found inpidgin language, which is actually used to facilitate understanding between two or more people with no common language. In other conceptions, it may be the primary language of all speakers, or the only existing language. Some religious and mythological traditions state that there was once a single universal language among all people, or shared by humans andsupernatural beings.
In other traditions, there is less interest in or a general deflection of the question. The writtenClassical Chinese language is still read widely but pronounced differently by readers inChina,Vietnam,Korea andJapan; for centuries it was ade facto universalliterary language for a broad-based culture. In something of the same waySanskrit inIndia andNepal, andPali inSri Lanka and inTheravada countries ofSouth-East Asia (Burma,Thailand,Cambodia) andOld Tamil inSouth India andSri Lanka, were literary languages for many for whom they were not theirmother tongue.
Comparably, theLatin language (quaMedieval Latin) was in effect a universal language ofliterati in theMiddle Ages, and the language of theVulgate Bible in the area ofCatholicism, which covered most ofWestern Europe and parts ofNorthern Europe andCentral Europe.
In a more practical fashion, trade languages, such as ancientKoine Greek, may be seen as a kind ofreal universal language, that was used for commerce.
Inhistorical linguistics,monogenesis refers to the idea that all spoken human languages are descended from a single ancestral language spoken many thousands of years ago.
Various religious texts, myths, and legends describe a state of humanity in which originally only one language was spoken.
InJewish andChristian beliefs, the story of theTower of Babel tells of a consequent "confusion of tongues" (the splintering of numerous languages from an originalAdamic language)[citation needed] as a punishment from God.
Myths exist in other cultures describing the creation of multiple languages as an act of a god as well, such as the destruction of a 'knowledge tree' byBrahma in Indic tradition, or as a gift from the GodHermes in Greek myth. Other myths describe the creation of different languages as concurrent with the creation of different tribes of people, or due to supernatural events.
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Recognizable strands in the contemporary ideas on universal languages took form only inEarly Modern Europe. In the early 17th century, some believed that a universal language would facilitate greater unity among mankind largely due to the subsequent spread of religion, specifically Christianity, as espoused in the works ofComenius. But there were ideas of a universal language apart from religion as well. Alingua franca or trade language was nothing very new; but aninternational auxiliary language was a natural wish in light of the gradual decline of Latin. Literature in vernacular languages became more prominent with theRenaissance. Over the course of the 18th century, learned works largely ceased to be written inLatin. According to Colton Booth (Origin and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England (1994) p. 174) "The Renaissance had no single view of Adamic language and its relation to human understanding." The question was more exactly posed in the work ofFrancis Bacon.
In the vast writings ofGottfried Leibniz can be found many elements relating to a possible universal language, specifically aconstructed language, a concept that gradually came to replace that of a rationalized Latin as the natural basis for a projected universal language. Leibniz conceived of acharacteristica universalis (also seemathesis universalis), an "algebra" capable of expressing all conceptual thought. This algebra would include rules for symbolic manipulation, what he called acalculus ratiocinator. His goal was to putreasoning on a firmer basis by reducing much of it to a matter of calculation that many could grasp. Thecharacteristica would build on analphabet of human thought.
Leibniz's work is bracketed by some earlier mathematical ideas ofRené Descartes, and the satirical attack ofVoltaire onPanglossianism. Descartes's ambitions were far more modest than Leibniz's, and also far more successful, as shown by his wedding ofalgebra andgeometry to yield what we now know asanalytic geometry. Decades of research onsymbolic artificial intelligence have not brought Leibniz's dream of acharacteristica any closer to fruition.
Other 17th-century proposals for a 'philosophical' (i.e. universal) language include those byFrancis Lodwick,Thomas Urquhart (possibly parodic),George Dalgarno (Ars signorum, 1661), andJohn Wilkins (An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, 1668). The classification scheme inRoget'sThesaurus ultimately derives from Wilkins'sEssay.
Candide, asatire written byVoltaire, took aim at Leibniz asDr. Pangloss, with the choice of name clearly putting universal language in his sights, but satirizing mainly theoptimism of the projector as much as the project. The argument takes the universal language itself no more seriously than the ideas of the speculative scientists andvirtuosi ofJonathan Swift'sLaputa. For the like-minded of Voltaire's generation, universal language was tarred asfool's gold with the same brush asphilology with littleintellectual rigour, and universalmythography, as futile and arid directions.
In the 18th century, some rationalist natural philosophers sought to recover a supposedEdenic language. It was assumed that education inevitably took people away from an innate state of goodness they possessed, and therefore there was an attempt to see what language a human child brought up in utter silence would speak. This was assumed to be the Edenic tongue, or at least thelapsarian tongue.
Others attempted to find a common linguistic ancestor to all tongues; there were, therefore, multiple attempts to relate esoteric languages toHebrew (e.g.Basque andIrish), as well as the beginnings ofcomparative linguistics.
The constructed language movement produced such languages asEsperanto (1887),Latino sine flexione (1903),Ido (1907),Interlingue (1922), andInterlingua (1951).[1]
English remains the dominant language of international business and global communication through the influence of global media and the former British Empire that had established the use of English in regions around the world such as North America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand. However, English is not the only language used in major international organizations, because many countries do not recognize English as a universal language. For instance, theUnited Nations use six languages —Arabic,Chinese,English,French,Russian, andSpanish.
The early ideas of a universal language with complete conceptual classification by categories is still debated on various levels.Michel Foucault believed such classifications to be subjective, citingBorges' fictionalCelestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge's Taxonomy as an illustrative example.
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