Are you trying to not sound racist slowpoke? 
DURN IMMERGANTS
Well, we could learn more than 1 language too.
Remember the USA doesn't have an official language. As far as the government goes, it needs to accommodate the people, not the other way around.
There are a lot of languages in the world. Even if you were to learn 2-3, that's still a lot of people that would not be able to understand you. If you are going to move to another country, the very least you can do is have a passing understanding of the language. I would expect no less of an American intending to move or spend an extended period abroad.
Speaking strictly from a USA standpoint, we don't have the problem of too many languages. Far from it. Most Americans still only know one with a passing understanding of two if they're lucky, and this is a problem.
Anyway, for a long term solution, I've always liked the idea of a universal language everyone is taught (not any language that exists right now; they all suck). If we had something that everyone could use for rudimentary communication, we've pretty much solved the problem. Individual communities could speak/write whatever the hell they want.
What language would you possibly propose? English is already taking up that mantle at the moment, and that's not going to change for several decades at the earliest, it has too much inertia. (Remember how long it took for French to give way). Training everyone to use a "neutral" language would be ridiculously costly, and many people living in the developed world will use it so little that they'll just forget it once they're out of high school (languages take maintenance, and most Americans, at least, just don't interact with foreigners enough that it would be useful; and they're sure not going to be reading any books in the language, especially a "neutral" one with no native literature). The ones that do interact with people who don't speak their native language on a regular basis tend to be Europeans...and the pan-European franca is English, though occasionally German or Russian is used, too.
And
languages do not suck. Maybe the geopolitical situation that gives them their prestige does, but it's important to remember that while it's the case that English is no better than a language spoken by a 2000-person tribe in New Guinea, the other way around applies as well. If I had to guess, what you're railing against is the Eurocentrism of most proposals (Esperanto comes to mind). Except that in today's geopolitical climate...so what? Based on a quick visit to Wikipedia, the Americas, Europe and Oceania account for 75% of the world's GDP; their populations all speak, by and large, European languages, and Western European ones at that. (And, for that matter, large swathes of Africa speak English- or French-based creoles as trade languages). So there's no point in using a Swahili-Arabic-Mandarin mishmash as the world language instead. It would create far more problems than it solves. (You also don't really know how linguistic typology works if you want to create something "neutral". Neutral languages do not exist. You could, of course, figure out a lowest-common-denominator system that uses the most commonly used- by population- feature for any given construction. I think this would strike you as unreasonably Eurocentric: Arabic and the IE languages of India have gender systems, as do many languages of Africa, although those aren't very much like the ones found in European languages; subject-verb-object word order is used by the vast majority of the world's population; so is person/number marking on verbs, the great exception being Chinese, and nominative-accusative alignment [although you're likely to have no case marking], with only the IE languages of India having a different system among the most populous languages, and that only in some verb tenses; numbers will come before their nouns, which is natural to almost everyone except most Africans; relative clauses will follow their nouns; the list goes on. Half the world's population speaks an Indo-European language; although there's a great deal of variety in the family, it's silly to throw it out just because speakers of a couple branches of it conquered most of the known earth.)
And who really needs to learn this language, anyways? Western Europeans and Americans have no real reason to learn it (they're using English), and they'll forget it as soon as they're out of school. The only people who know Esperanto these days are weird Esperanto geeks, after all. So it's people living in Asia and Africa...except that they're just going to learn English as soon as they have the education and drive to do so, except the Chinese (but Mandarin's not going to eclipse English within our lifetimes). Most poor regions of the world are highly multilingual; it's not uncommon to find rural villagers in India who haven't had a lick of formal education but speak six languages on a daily basis even so. English is just a drop in the bucket. The world is always going to have an international language. It will always come about naturally, based on whoever is the geopolitical and cultural master of the day, and it may eventually fade. But you can't impose one.
TL;DR: any given proposal would create more problems than it would solve, and the whole thing smacks of some sort of bizarre White Man's Burden, anyways.
Author
Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3766885 times)