It is likely that most people worldwide will one day have a language that they share in common. Barring some major catastrophic event, globalization/the internet will continue to make it more and more useful to be able to communicate with people all over the world. However, even if this does happen, I think that the ability to speak other languages will continue to be useful for a variety of reasons and will never go away entirely.
I have spent the last twelve years working in a variety of settings with people who speak English as a second language. Almost all of them will slip in and out of their first language depending on context: they use it to build relationships with others who share that language, to make dirty jokes in front of authority figures, to say things that English doesn't have a good vocabulary for, etc. I think that there are too many advantages to being to speak a language that not everybody knows for that skill to ever disappear entirely.
02 Mar 2019, 2:34 pm
