English: The New Tower of Babel?

Many native-English speakers have seen, and laughed at terrible, often hilarious mistranslations, particularly from Chinese to English. There are whole websites devoted to making a mockery of this pseudo-language! At times, it seems as though they were poorly translated on purpose-no one hired to do these translations has ever heard of spellcheck?! According to the article, From English to Chinglish: The Globalization of Languages, in part due to the 2008 China Olympics, the government began cracking down on such infamous translating errors such as, "if you are stolen, call the police”. What I found interesting was that this crack-down didn’t occur sooner. The Asian culture as a whole is oft noted for their pride in academic success, so how did all these grammatical errors slip by? The answer may be as simple as that there are so many non-native English speakers using English as their "lingua franca", that what has long been considered "proper" grammar may soon become obsolete. It is predicted by 2020, people whose first language is English, will only account for 15% of the population that learn English. Even now, the majority of conversations in English are by non-native speakers using it as a means to bridge the language barrier between foreign lands. As it is pointed out in Wired Magazine, this influx of non-native speakers communicating in English, many changes in syntax and grammar will become the norm. Languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Mandarin do not use pronouns. The practice of not making certain nouns plural will be disregarded. If they eliminate them in their native tongue, why not eliminate them in their bastardized English? It only makes sense to make English more efficient for its growing supporters. Interestingly, it was because of this same linguistic influence that Western Europe split into "realms" of language-Romance and Germanic languages. English was in fact, a fusion of both! Ergo, it is not surprising that this trend of English evolving to include other languages is lending to the depletion of lesser known, indigenous languages. To that end, there are both pros and cons; if more people can communicate across borders, certain prejudices will die away and ignorance will (hopefully) diminish. An example listed in From Chinglish to English is in India, where although Hindi is considered to be the country's official language, only 1/6th of the population is native-Hindi speakers. In this case, English is used as an "ethnically neutral choice" to avoid cultural preferences. However, despite the major pluses for this new lingua franca, there are negatives to be seen. With more and more of the populace speaking the same language, albeit with different dialects, the cultures that make the world so diverse will have less of a place in society. Certain cultural practices, and possibly certain cultures themselves, will become as archaic as the languages that they are connected to. It is estimated that a language becomes extinct approximately every 2 weeks. This is due to some languages lacking a written form, and others because sometimes as little as 10 living people speak it, so when they die out, so does their native tongue. There is a silver lining to this though; there have been recent efforts to preserve these endangered languages. Many of these languages being indigenous, the people of which have a deep-rooted link to nature and what it has to offer, allow for us to study naturalistic points of view and research that modern science might otherwise fail to unearth.