“There will only be three languages in the world – English, Spanish and Mandarin” —Bill Walker, BBC
Created by gwern 29 days ago; known on 2112-01-01
- gwern estimated 30% 29 days ago
- gwern said “http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16536598 disagree strongly on any operationalization like, say, >90% native speaker share for those 3 languages – strong pressures to keep local languages. people are being born now who will form 2112” 29 days ago
- JoshuaZ estimated 5% and said “Almost equivalent to a large scale catastrophe destroying most humans. ” 29 days ago
- Anubhav estimated 0% and said “And that catastrophe preserves EXACTLY these three languages, Joshua?” 29 days ago
- Anubhav said “I’d place a higher probability if it said “only three LITERARY languages”… Local-language literature in India’s dying; it’s probably the same elsewhere. But there’s still Japanese + W European languages” 29 days ago
- JoshuaZ estimated 0% and said “Anubhav, good point. Updating accordingly. ” 29 days ago
- HonoreDB estimated 0% 29 days ago
- Leo estimated 2% and said “Spanish not so likely candidate. Arabic, Japanese look healthy.” 27 days ago
- faws estimated 0% and said “Even if children stopped learning any other languages tomorrow there’d still be centenarians. Basically requires extinction of humans except for a handful of survivors, e. g. a Chinese-US space crew that happens to include a Spanish speakers. ” 27 days ago
- endoself estimated 1% 26 days ago
- bobpage estimated 0% 25 days ago
- muflax estimated 0% and said “for some standard definition of “language” that puts British and American English in the same, but Portugese and Spanish in different languages” 25 days ago
- Jayson_Virissimo estimated 0% and said “I’d assign a probability of about 95% to people speaking Japanese in Japan 100 years from now.” 24 days ago
- Jach estimated 1% 24 days ago
- NathanMcKnight estimated 0% and said “Only because I disagree with gwern’s operationalization. A better interpretation is “99% of all other languages moribund,” in which case I’d put the chance near 100%. ” 23 days ago
- NathanMcKnight said “Note: According to ethnologue.org, there are 6-7000 languages. Perhaps 95% of these will be extinct in a century. Every single language you’ve heard of is likely to be in the remaining 5%, of living minority languages in 100 years.” 23 days ago
- Anubhav said “Wikipedia’s estimates are different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangered_language” 22 days ago
- NathanMcKnight said “Wikipedia uses Krauss’s figure of 60-80% currently endangered (i.e. children won’t speak them in 100 years). Which is to say 60-80% moribund by 2112. My interpretation of the BBC prediction is that the Krauss high end is low by 19%.” 22 days ago
- NathanMcKnight said “Apologies if I’ve used the term “extinct” too loosely, but I do think we should interpret the BBC prediction pretty broadly…most people would consider a language with fewer than 1000 speakers as “nonexistent”.” 22 days ago
- Anubhav said “Still not going to happen. Also… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_speakers I now know where the ‘Spanish’ comes from.” 22 days ago
- Jayson_Virissimo said “What events would lead to Japan no longer speaking Japanese and Brazil no longer speaking Portuguese? Giving this greater than 50% probability seems really silly unless they mean something different by “only” than I do.” 22 days ago
- Anubhav said “Jayson, what you’re looking for is human brain augmentation to the extent that languages become pointless. But that would affect ALL languages; no way to selectively avoid these three. ” 21 days ago
- Anubhav said “And there’s no good reason not to put that into a prediction: http://predictionbook.com/predictions/5604” 21 days ago
- Morendil estimated 1% 21 days ago
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