Multilingualism vs International Auxiliary Language (IAL)

How long will peoples united in all fundamentals, including race, scientific outlook and the essential aspects of religion, remain divided by hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects? Ever-increasing political and economic ties demand a solution to the growing expense of both translation and mistranslation. Those offered generally fall into two categories: multilingualism and an international auxiliary language (IAL)

Multilingualism means learning and using other existing "national" languages as a viable way forward. Until recent times the idea had merit: the average speed of travel being such that the vast majority of Earth's citizens were monolingual, or at most bilingual - very few coming into contact with more than a handful of languages during their lifetimes. Today of course there is more international exposure, including via the Internet - but it remains as true as ever that even an expert polyglot will fail to master more than a tiny fraction of the languages on offer.

Another major drawback with multilingualism is that it tends to aggrandise major languages at the expense of minor. This happens because time and facilities for learning languages are limited, so there is a corresponding imperative to learn only major languages in order to access the largest amount of information and the maximum number of people. Historically, the effect of this dynamic is obvious, with many minority ethnic languages or dialects having become extinct - whether or not transcribed and recorded beforehand. The trend has been such that 96% of the world's population now speaks only 4% of languages, and over 50% one of just six languages: Chinese (Putonghua), Spanish, Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, English and Russian.

Nevertheless a multiplicity of languages remains, and machine translation has occasionally been promoted as the panacea for international communication, subject to technological progress. However, it appears that mechanised translation is always going to have limited efficacy. Human beings persist in talking and writing in idiosyncratic ways: continually using idiomatic expressions and bending grammatical rules for novelty and emphasis. Such tactics play havoc with machine translation, even to the extent of being seriously misleading.

The alternative to multilingualism is, of course, an international auxiliary language (IAL) designed to be used by all delegates at international conventions and learned by every school-child in addition to the respective mother-tongue. And since purely visual or auditory languages have evident limitations, the chosen IAL would certainly be a language as the term is normally understood, realisable in both speech and script. It's an old and well-understood solution - so why hasn't it yet been followed? Why have we seen neither the formal adoption of an existing language - as partially realised in the past by Latin, Arabic, French and English - or the worldwide implementation of a new constructed language such as Solresol or Esperanto?

An IAL would gradually eliminate the necessity for learning more than two languages - one's mother tongue and the IAL - thereby sustaining minority languages, since - given an IAL of increasing capacity - the current imperative to learn major existing languages in order to reach the largest amount of information and the maximum number of people would be halted and slowly reversed. An IAL would therefore enhance linguistic diversity. The following excerpt from a talk given by 'Abdu'l-Bahá is as good an introduction to the concept of an IAL as any:

"....the most important thing in the world is the realization of an auxiliary international language. Oneness of language will transform mankind into one world, remove religious misunderstandings, and unite East and West in the spirit of brotherhood and love. Oneness of language will change this world from many families into one family. This auxiliary international language will gather the nations under one standard, as if the five continents of the world had become one, for then mutual interchange of thought will be possible for all. It will remove ignorance and superstition, since each child of whatever race or nation can pursue his studies in science and art, needing but two languages - his own and the International. The world of matter will become the expression of the world of mind. Then discoveries will be revealed, inventions will multiply, the sciences advance by leaps and bounds, the scientific culture of the earth will develop along broader lines. Then the nations will be enabled to utilize the latest and best thought, because expressed in the International Language.

If the International Language becomes a factor of the future, all the Eastern peoples will be enabled to acquaint themselves with the sciences of the West, and in turn the Western nations will become familiar with the thoughts and ideas of the East, thereby improving the condition of both. In short, with the establishment of this International Language the world of mankind will become another world and extraordinary will be the progress...."

   Edinburgh Esperanto Society, 7 January 1913 (printed in "Star of the West", Vol 4, No 2)