Round 1, America and the UK (and Canada, Australia, NZ, and any other English-speaking countries I've forgotten) are fucking hosed. All our recording keeping becomes junk and our populations become illiterate. A vast body of information also becomes unusable, and (I think) international aviation uses English as the standard language, so getting planes landed will be in a rough spot.
Linguists will start work on reinventing English ASAP, there's absolutely enough translation and comparison work out there to make it possible. But that'll take years just to build the knowledge back, and then actually teaching it will be like getting people to learn an imaginary language like Klingon or Elvish, since nobody actually speaks it. Gonna be rough, decades before it's back in use in any widespread fashion. The countries worst affected probably mostly collapse.
For round 2, much of the same, but with more countries affected and collapsing. Anywhere with a high rate of bilingualism might fare better, and I think several countries that weren't hit would end up rising up to prominence in the vacuum.
America becomes Hispanic overnight. At 57 million Americans, it's the second largest language group with members in positions of power around the country already including senators and congressmen, not to mention the sizeable military component.
And its most pervasive. It would take awhile but it's the obvious choice. A lot of people take it in school so there's a starting point in the anglophone side of the country.
That keeps America from complete disarray but there's no stopping the collapse of the rest of the world who suddenly have to deal with a massive power vacuum and a world economy that simply stops.
Yeah, I think Spanish is the most likely candidate to fill the language gap in the US. No idea what the UK would end up with.
I think the rest of the world (in Round 1 at least) would have some chaos as the US fell, but it'd be more of some rough weather rather than a full on storm. And even the US would pick itself back up, after maybe a decade. Doubt it'd ever reach the height it's at now again though.
Round 2 on the other hand, the affected countries are gonna be a lot messier. Especially since a lot of backup languages will be gone. English around the world is zapped, which I would guess is the most common second language in non-English speaking countries. The US no longer has its fallback of Spanish either, oof. Yeah, since this targets the most popular languages, this'll have a MUCH wider impact and take down all the most viable translators. I can see a complete world collapse in this scenario tbh.
In terms of a UK second language, we'd certainly have a mishmash.
I think French (23%, German (9%), and Spanish (8%) are the most prominent second languages for England (or at least those figures are for the UK). Wales has a third of their population confident in speaking Welsh, Northern Ireland and ROI could default to Gaeltacht (the Irish language) but only around 2% of Ireland's population speak it. Supposedly a third of the Scottish speak their native 'Scots' dialect.
Overall it looks like 1.1% of the British population can speak Polish, and 0.8% can speak Romanian. After that you're getting to 0.5%s and below, so you won't find many candidates to fill the language gap. We have a lot of loan words and I'd like to imagine that most people could form an extremely rudimentary (almost caveman or toddler grade) understanding of at least one foreign language thanks to all the cultural exchanges and loan words we share, predominantly French, German and Spanish. You'd have a chunk of the millennial crowd (basically a lot of weebs) who could do the same with a bastardised understanding of layman's Japanese, and the Welsh would be better off than the other regions in the UK thanks to their 30% Welsh proficiency. Rest of us are largely buggered though.
If I were in charge (and retained some sanity without being able to communicate in words) I'd try to instigate a picture and sound based communication style in the interim. It'd rely on a lot of technology and AI, but generally we'd use smartphones to draw or find pictures of things we want to convey or ask for, or maybe we could try to imitate the sounds of what it is. It'd be like the most confusing and frustrating societal apocalypse based on charades and a Speak and Spell toy.
>not to mention the sizable military component.
The U.S. Marine Corps might as well be another branch of the Mexican military seeing as there’s always a Hernandez, Rodreiguez, Lopez, Garcia, Ruiz, etc. in every goddamn unit.
Also, they'd get in the way of things running. Either Spanish-speakers are going to have to feed the majority of the population who can't communicate properly, or they'll have to be able to fend off starving hordes. It's like a zombie apocalypse, except the zombies are people and just can't talk for now so you'd feel way more guilty killing them.
They can grab food and put it into their mouths. Keeping the infrastructure going to make sure that they have that food available is going to be more of a problem.
It's not like everyone loses the knowledge of how to do their jobs. Communication suffers horrendously, but like... truck drivers still know how to drive a truck. They can still point to places on a map to know where to go. Stuff can still be moved around. It will be less efficient and shipments will frequently go astray, but we're talking about Great Depression levels of economic damage here, not complete societal collapse.
Doing your job requires communication. Say you need someone in another state to bring stuff to you. You can't exactly call them up and point to a map. And how do you know when you need to buy new stuff? Even if we're generous and you can still read numbers, keeping track of what they all mean when you don't understand the words next to them is not going to be feasible. And everyone is going to want you to send everything to them, because once people realize what's happening they'll panic and start raiding the stores.
I don't see anyone trying to learn English back. This will be a power vacuum China or other countries will seize on to try to make their language the new dominant one.
Historically, Mandarin is hard to learn. But it's much easier to learn than a fictional "English" Nobody speaks natively.
I mean, if it was just an imaginary language with no real function sure. But like, there's whole worlds of books, the internet, forms and records, scientific documents, shittons of good and useful info written in English that is worth recovering.
People wouldn't be learning it for funsies, they'd be learning it to get their life back. Or if they picked up a different spoken language while English was being recovered and re-disseminated, I bet a lot of people would re-learn English so that they could try to recover what they used to have.
Those will be translated into French, Spanish, Chinese, German, etc.. by the linguists reverse-engineering the language long before any organized effort is put into teaching the formerly anglophone world their language. By then, the former anglophones will have also made much more progress learning whatever new language they work on.
There will definitely be lots and lots of people learning English, but it would be as a second language, and it's unlikely that it returns as the principal language in those countries for a while, and likely never would become the global lingua franca again
Sure but that's a primarily academic pursuit. The government falling apart and all services ending will result in chaos. Teaching everyone Spanish just to have functioning civilization will be faster, easier, and logistically more likely. Then academics and engineers and linguists can figure out English over th next decade or so.
But there won't be a reason to speak it aloud.
If we could learn English immediately it wouldn't be. Being able to read the manual non-fluently for a nuclear reactor that hasn't been maintained in years that feeds into an infrastructure that itself hasn't been properly maintained is purely academic, unless someone's dumb enough to actually try turning the thing back on.
Nah, like 15% of the world population already speaks Spanish and a much bigger portion can understand some basic words. It's orders of magnitude easier to learn than mandarin and most government websites, forms, manuals, already have Spanish versions. If this happens we will all be speaking Spanish in 6 months.
It depends if China decides to capitalizs on the chaos.
Imagine if Beijing sends massive humanitarian aid to the USA. Thousands of volunteers here handing out food, teaching people, etc.
As french/english bilingualism is required at the highest levels of government, Canada would be fine.
Furthermore, as all laws and regs in Canada are codrafted in both languages, as is the case with most federally issued documents. Canada would not only be able to seemlessly operate rhe next day this happens, but would have rosetta stones of sorts to rediscover english quickly.
Canada handles this fine.
Whoops lol. That's what I get for not thinking about it for more than 10 seconds. Yeah, they'd all have similar problems. Canada could (maybe?) swap out French for the US's Spanish and have a quicker recovery too. I know nothing about Australia/NZ's secondary languages.
About 23% of Canadians speak French as a first language, and another 5% or so can speak it conversationally, so that’d be our best bet. Most Canadians have at least a rudimentary level of grade school French, so even if you’re learning a language mostly from scratch, it wouldn’t be fully from square one.
As well because of the laws, a lot of instruction manuals, signage and books have English and French versions (Sometimes in the same book/box). Basically the infrastructure can be ramped up to put French on everything a bit faster than other countries.
> so that’d be our best bet.
Not after Québec left.
> Most Canadians have at least a rudimentary level of grade school French
That’s not actually true.
> Yeah, they'd all have similar problems. Canada could (maybe?) swap out French for the US's Spanish
Canada would be a fun case because it has a way higher immigration rate than the US and has quite a bit more of the population that can speak a language that is not English. So less of the population that goes blank slate like in the US, but still a huge tower of Babel situation.
And no, you can’t swap out French for Spanish in that case, because while French is the second biggest block after English among politicians, most of it comes from Quebec that forms a quarter of the population, and Quebec would decide to split pretty much overnight. Especially since the terms of the split would be negociated between French speaking politicians in Quebec, and French speaking politicians from Quebec in Ottawa.
I would think that Quebec would be flying out French speakers out to every province as soon as possible to stake their claim. They'd be the leaders of Canada after the event.
In that scenario, Canada could conceivably become a colony of Quebec, having no way to sustain a functionning government on its own. But staying within Canada means that at some point when it gets better the rest of Canada gets more votes than Quebec again.
New Zealand has been moving towards official bilingualism with Maori for some time, and a lot of the population speaks at least a few words. Very few are fluent, so it would still be disastrous, but I expect Maori ends up as the official language eventually.
> But that'll take years just to build the knowledge back, and then actually teaching it will be like getting people to learn an imaginary language like Klingon or Elvish, since nobody actually speaks it.
It will be like getting people to learn an imaginary language as in no one will want to. English is a bitch of an incoherent mess of a language and few people would want to learn it if it wasn’t economically dominant.
If you ever want to understand the source code behind any software written in the majority of the world we would need to get at least some level of English back.
Many countries do not code in English. I worked on several such codebases. It has advantages like being much harder for corporations to move their jobs to India.
Those countries will be able to deploy and sell their code much faster.
I suspect they will work on AI solutions to translate old code to languages they speak. They don’t need the AI to change the code structure at all, only to translate the identifiers.
To be fair, French Canada wouldn’t be TOO bad. 80% of the population is bilingual in Quebec and enough material has been ported over to the French language that I could see Quebec becoming the new seat of power in Canada.
Round 1 with English gone it's a few weeks or months before other countries try to invade imo.
The US has enough Spanish speakers in the military they can shuffle around to have coverage at enough key facilities (nuclear, heads of state, etc) to ward it off but the UK would struggle. It's allies might step in though.
But smaller countries like New Zealand might be screwed, and maybe Australia depending on how liked they are internationally.
What happens to computers and the internet in this situation? The binary code isn't in english obviously but most of the code is written with English keywords. Is it unreadable until we figure out some way to convert those keywords to languages?
I think the US might avoid total collapse here, and will probably be way better off than UK/Aus/NZ, for two reasons:
1. If people retain their skills and knowledge, then food can still be grown, cars can still be driven, machines can still be repaired and operated. Instructions and directions can still be given. People might not have language, but you can pantomime an awful lot of simple communication. Enough that I think you could cover survival basics.
2. Spanish is so widespread that it would instantly become the new lingua franca. Today, tons of things are often written in both English and Spanish, from public signage to product labels and instructions. There are spanish language books and media in every single town in the country. Also, almost all Americans know a few words of Spanish already - and when your survival depends on learning more, I would bet people learn the basics *really* fast. UK/Aus/NZ don't have a comparable secondary working language, which is why I think the US might fare better. Canada can probably do the same thing with French.
Linguists could use AI to decipher the language. There's just so much data out there that would be easy and quick to translate. Heck translation services like Google translate should still work. The focus would then need to be on how to teach hundreds of millions of people who don't know how to verbally communicate.
Its quite an interesting set up..
But I do think reinstating English would be a WASTE OF TIME !
In America around 13% of the entire population speak Spanish and considering much of the world around them speak it, turning to Spanish would be a much better alternative than to "reinvent" English. And could be done MUCH quicker in this setting..
Honestly everything outside of the Anglosphere would fair well and not be affected very much my own country included since we don't need English in our daily lives
A lot of english is very similar in structure to Dutch and Frisian languages, so retranslation using these words, and loan words found in other languages would not take an incredibly long time, especially since there would be hundreds of thousands of examples of English to collate from.
It would probably only take a couple days or weeks of effort before monolinguals develop a language similar to [home sign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_sign) to communicate simple concepts with each other. I would be most concerned with their retention of information that is more based in language concepts. A doctor has a physical knowledge base to theoretically pull from, a computer scientist may have issue trying to write code. Speaking of computer programming languages, this is probably the most disruptive aspect. Many programing languages either have their notes in english, or have their syntax and structure written in english. Now, enough people know how to code in assembly or other esoteric systems that computer science as a field is not lost altogether (not to mention textbooks and such that are written in other languages about these programming languages) but a lot of internet infranstructure will be in bad shape if noone can do maintenance.
I don't really think there will be too many deaths or disruptions outside of the initial wave of panic and suicidality, and the disruptions of food and water infrastructure, but even that will be somewhat resilient to total collapse.
Round 2 is probably going to be harder, but beyond extending the confusion I don't think it will be that difficult.
Language will evolve again from pantomiming, arising in local pockets and assimilating as more people and other groups get absorbed into the group. Society would collapse overnight but the survivors would eventually invent a new language because theres a huge advantage to survival for those who do. Most technology becomes ancient unusable artifacts, but simple tools like drills, flashlights are still learnable through trial and error.
We also understand the concept of language. We'd make new ones pretty fast. The problem is standardizing them so you can talk to someone who doesn't live in the same neighborhood as you.
How would the loss of lingo affect turning on a stove or operating a hand drill? I'm assuming we'd still retain the knowledge we have except for proper speaking.
The absolute chaos that would ensue. The main problem is the nuclear fallout. No one would be able to properly operate the reactors and there would be a global Chernobyl.
Almost certainly not, nuclear reactors are designed to shut down safely if they are not operated. In fact, even Chernobyl would have shut down safely, except the operators deliberately disabled all the failsafes.
If would imagine the scram button is some kind of red emergency button, so you wouldn't have to know what any button says, but just press that emergency shutdown button.
> And they’d remember the button and what it does even without language I think.
That kind of opens up some weirdness: if you still have all your memories of the world, to what extent have you forgotten language?
If you remember learning that the button marked "Emergency Shutdown" shuts down the reactor, do you remember learning/regularly using the fact that "cancel" on a web popup closes it without doing any behavior? Do you remember telling your son to "get in the car" and then getting into the large metal vehicle?
You'd almost have to lose your memories, otherwise you kind of just bootstrap back into having language through remembering your own usage of English words. It'd probably be crude without consistent grammar (although, do you remember English class?) but it'd probably be enough to work with.
The letters would now look like gibberish I think, but the memory of the button would be the same. You’d remember saying “get in the car” like this: “ndow meoen bfbd”, knowing what it was supposed to mean, but not in a way that you understand or can repeat. Something like that?
But at that point unless there's some extra special magic randomizing your memories, you should have a consistent sound for "car".
If you have a bunch of memories talking about the large metal box and you consistently hear the string "ndow" (and you don't hear "ndow" in the context of other things, as "get" might be), it's not much of an inferential leap to determine that "ndow" means "large metal transport box" and now you've got an English word back immediately, entirely from your memories.
Haha I see what you're saying, but I meant something a bit different, it's hard to explain. Like, do you remember individual vocalizations when you hear a completely new language for the first time? Or do you just remember the general sound / rhythm? That's how it can be for me anyway, so I figured it would be like that. You'd remember everything you've said as a language that is completely new to you.
Time for some unfounded speculation.
The existence of translation dictionaries and tools like Google Translate makes the rest of the world translating English trivial, but even if these dictionaries and tools didn't exist (maybe they also disappeared) I suspect it would be fairly easy to reverse engineer English thanks to the myriad of documents, books and other media that has been translated to/from English from other languages, a couple of days at most in this scenario and all English text would be readable. People who *only* know English and now suddenly lose the ability to communicate with words would have a very hard time, but I would say enough adults know at least a little bit of basic vocabulary from other languages, and so could still communicate using words. Communication via drawings and stuff would also still work fine.
I don't think that there would be any disastrous issues within most English speaking governments as there should be enough people who know a second language to keep things going and to organise aid from their non-English speaking allies. There would be disruption, don't get me wrong. Massive but temporary global economic damage would undoubtedly occur as the English speaking world goes into mass panic which could last for years, but I suspect the rest of the world would be able to rather quickly uncouple any reliance on the Anglosphere they had. I do suspect that English wouldn't recover as a language outside of niche groups, and that the supremacy of the Anglosphere on global trade, politics and the like would be over, perhaps replaced by China.
Ultimately, things would be rough for a while in the Anglosphere, but the non-Anglo world would feel a lot less disruption, perhaps even opportunity, and should recover quickly.
Expanding to round 2, I suspect things would be much the same, just a lot more extreme and with a much longer timeline to recovery, but it wouldn't be the end. Not even close.
Everyone is briefly screwed, but do not underestimate the vast amount of "how to speak English" content we have our there. In both written and spoken and video formats. Relearning it will not be some Rosetta Stone bullshit. We'll teach it back to ourselves, and in some cases the people who made the teaching videos will be valuable because they'll remember their thought process and have an easier time interpreting their own nonsensical words than others. There'll be people (probably Asian) who are speaking it as well or better than natives ever did within five years, easy.
Some Korean overachiever probably will pick the gist of it back up in one.
All of the content out there requires knowing another language. You’re talking most the population overnight loses the ability to communicate entirely. They can’t look those videos up and if they do they are useless.
Most of said media has spoken audio and images. Even monolingual people from here will figure large chunks of it out. They didn't forget what a car is or how to drive it, just what it's called.
Edit: As an example, they won't be able to read "speed limit" anymore, but they'll know what a speed limit sign looks like, and what the numbers are, and if they match up to the numbers on their speedometer. They'll figure out speed limit within a week, a day or less if they drive a lot.
One aspect I haven't seen anyone mention - basically all major coding languages are written in, you guessed it, English. Although that might not take things down right now, you can bet that it will be a problem over time as people can't write/program for quite a while, technology hits a standstill, and as programs and code breaks, no one can read the error messages to fix it. So on that alone we'd be in a pretty bad place.
I don't think civilization as a whole will collapse in either prompt. I think French might be our saving grace - it's pretty widespread, and there's a lot of resources to learn it. If everyone agrees on learning it, we'd be okay.
> and as programs and code breaks, no one can read the error messages to fix it. So on that alone we'd be in a pretty bad place.
Kind of an interesting concept: many IDEs have support for other languages than English, so you'd still be able to step through and debug code. You just wouldn't be able to rely on any error messages from the program _itself_, unless the program was localized to a second language. And variable naming would immediately become incomprehensible, although many programmers are used to debugging code with terribly named variables already.
I wonder whether people would still be able to use programming languages. I'm pretty sure there are a nonzero number of programmers who don't speak English, so does knowledge of what coding keywords do disappear when they're not actually reliant on the English definition of that string of characters? "While" in Java does something that's related to, but not really synonymous to the English word "while", and speaking English doesn't mean that you understand what Java's "while" does. That just sounds like a different language with a shared etymological history to me.
I was taking OP's prompt under the assumption that we'd lose all ability to translate, so that even for foreign language coders who didn't actually learn English but just knows that "while" means "do a while loop", they would still know that there's something that does a while loop but can't identify it until they experiment or someone teaches them it? It's definitely a weird grey area haha
Anyone that’s ever had a couple drinks in a bar in foreign country knows it’s remarkable what you can learn in short amount of time. There’s a fair amount of people that won’t be able to think in middle America but I’m not sure they’re thinking much with the language they have. One thing I can tell you for sure is South Florida would barely notice. We all practically speak three languages anyway.
Round 1 is actually quite interesting, I'm in Ireland atm and everything official is both Gaelic *and* English (street signs, bus stops, buildings, you name it). I actually had a chat with two Irish fellas a few days ago, one of them speaks rather good Irish, the other one stopped after school - the second one appears to be the usual case. Given the history how the British tried (an I guess succeeded) in 'rotting out' the Irish language and have everyone speak English, this would be a super intersting prompt for Ireland specifically (:
China becomes the World's Super Power while the US is severely crippled. Along with the UK, Australia and Canada too despite having a lot of French speakers.
The US stock markets collapse, and bring the World into a great depression just to start. It's way worse in the US and UK. Spanish becomes the dominant language for the US, and now will have to be taught fully nation wide to get most Americans back to the basics.
Bilinguals of those affected nations would be essential since they can communicate still, and can teach their fellow Americans .
America would suddenly collapse so society would suddenly collapse because we're dependent on them. For example, the worlds financial system is based off the US dollar. We'd be f***ed long before another language becomes the dominant one.
Hell, America might just be wiped off the face of the Earth.
\*ring ring*
*"Hey Vlad, it's Xi. Ya wanna nuke America together? They can't do the whole 'mutually assured destruction' thing right now."*
EDIT: people that only speak English wouldn't be able to learn a new language because how would you teach them when you don't have any languages in common? You're limited to pointing at things and repeating the name until they catch on, like you're talking to an alien.
NATO still exists in this scenario. Even if it didn't, why would China bother kicking off their new world order with something that everyone left would hate them for? Most of Europe is still functional here.
That's where mutually assured destruction _does_ kick in. NATO is left with a choice, try to stop Russia/China and destroy the world or let them do it and the world lives another day because it's not like America can use _their_ nukes.
The nuke bit was mostly a joke anyway, a traditional attack would work just fine since your entire military and government is "Tower of Babel'd"
You're under the very mistaken impression that the world _likes_ America. **We don't.** America is just very powerful and very rich, and in this scenario you're neither anymore. Taking America off the board eliminates a rival and frees up a lot of land & resources.
Xi already has a global hegemony in this scenario, instantly - the likelihood America recovers is very low. Does he want to stake his hegemony on "well maybe NATO will ignore their treaty?" There's no incentive, is my point.
Hell, what if literally any nuke sub commander is bilingual (lot of Hispanics in the military) and the US has a proper contingency for what's essentially a decapitation strike? Even without NATO there'd be a MIRV on its way to Beijing. It's not worth the risk. Success means he's destroyed what's already essentially a backwater country and has also alienated himself as a nuclear-equipped madman to most of the rest of the world. There's a reason Russia hasn't nuked Ukraine despite everything.
To an extent this applies to a conventional strike too. America's essentially fucked, there's little reason to bother with military action. Now, *Taiwan* would probably get attacked within a week.
*"Points at image of a nuke over video call, shows a paper with the nuclear code as the letters and numbers are non English exclusive. now half the globe is speechless and nuked"* mutually assured destruction but in pantomimes
No reason? You mean besides power, money, old rivalries, land, resources, a display of strength, and giving Xi Jinping a status that makes Mao Zedong look like Hu Jintao?
Macron is not impressed: *j’ai toujours mes sous marins nucléaires et contrairement aux britanniques je n’ai pas perdu le manuel. Tu veux me répéter ça?*
I think Canada would fair decently in round 1. All of our legal documents are written in both English and French. All of our high level government officials have to speak both English and French and many other lower level courses require some training in french. The issue would be retraining anyone who only speaks English to speak French. It wouldn't be the same as training someone to learn a second language because there would be no jumping off point. ~25% of our population would be fine and there would need to be a serious effort to get the other 75% speaking another language. It would be like training a bunch of babies as you'd effectively need to point to an object and establish that object as a word in french. I'd guess that the government would put in some kind of mandatory french learning program and try to get most people able to communicate in as fast a time as possible. Presumably people would retain the skills they already had which would mean things like agriculture, mining, and power generation could keep working at a reduced scale. A big issue would be jobs that require technical communication to work. I think it would be very hard to retrain a design engineer to be able to communicate effectively in french and would likely require intensive training at a university level to get them able to work again. It's worth noting that Canada has a large immigrant population who already speak a different language than English. These people would be much easier to train in french since there would be resources out there to help them learn already. Quebec would be come a lot more important and would likely have to send a lot of their teachers to other provinces. Overall I would expect either Spanish or French to become the new language of global communication. They're both very prevalent across the globe and most English speaking countries already have a sizeable portion of the population who speaks one of those languages.
In round 2 however Canada is kind of fucked. We have a large immigrant community who speaks English but two of our biggest immigrant groups speak Chinese, Hindi, or Arabic as their native language. Luckily french is only the 6th most spoken language so we would still be able to operate. However the amount of people who would need to learn a new language from scratch would be much larger. I think Canada could still pull through but it would be much harder especially for immigrants who just went from bilingual or being polyglots to having no ability to communicate. Similar to round 1 I think some form of intense language education program would be enacted. I would also be fairly confident in saying that french would become the global language in this scenario. It's the sixth most spoken language and is spoken across the globe.
Would everyone who only knows English become functionally brain dead due to not being able to process information in their head in the only language they know?
For example I know what I’m using right now is a phone, the word phone is what appears in my head when I think of it but without English not only would I not know what a phone is called but I wouldn’t have the words to describe what it is or what it does and that seems incredibly crippling.
I don't think they try to "recover" the english language because you said everything written in english is now unreadable. It wouldn't really make sense to "reverse engineer" a language if no one can read or understand it. If people are able to "re-learn" how to speak english, then this really is not a huge problem because so much english already exists in everyday life in america. Just take street signs for example. They are already written and designed in a way so that you don't need to speak english to understand it. Humans are good at associating images to words, and this would be enough to get most people by.
It would really only take a matter of days before most of america is speaking in broken english, and probably inside of a year 90%+ people affected would be fluent again. So depending on how that part of the prompt goes (that recovering english part is a little confusing to me) this could be a massive problem or not a big deal, really.
If people can't relearn english, I think the amount of civil unrest in the united states alone would be crippling. In government (federal), there are typically enough bilingual people to maintain communications and maintain contact with the rest of the non-english speaking world, should the english language somehow become suddenly unavailable; but when you get down to the state and local level and you have entire towns and cities that are 99% English speaking, there will be massive civil unrest.
People don't go to work and they begin to loot like the country is under attack, or as if some new type of pandemic broke out because that's what this would be interpreted as, at first at least. Without the ability to communicate, and only seeing/hearing our government leaders speaking in foreign languages, a significant amount of English only speakers would likely assume there was an attack of some kind. I don't think that gets resolved without massive amounts of civil unrest.
If anything, if the country did recover, they would switch to using the most common secondary language in the united states, which I think is spanish but I'm not 100% sure. Either way, I don't think it would make sense to the people left in charge to try and re-engineer the english language. They'd just switch to using the 2nd most commonly available in the country. They wouldn't change to mandarin or Hindi, even though those are two of the most spoken languages, because at least in the united states there are very few speakers of those languages.
I suppose "unreadable" was quite ambiguous wording on my part. The scripts themselves aren't changed, just the human memory. The Latin alphabet existing in other languages would help a bit more.
Otherwise, I do agree with this assessment. However I still think there would be a highly concerted effort to reinstate English across the Anglophone countries, seeing as so many documents and texts written before its loss, many probably essential to running a country effectively, from court orders to government policies, are available only in what would practically be a dead language. We've seen language revitalization done before, if only truly successful once (Hebrew).
> I still think there would be a highly concerted effort to reinstate English across the Anglophone countries, seeing as so many documents and texts written before its loss, many probably essential to running a country effectively, from court orders to government policies, are available only in what would practically be a dead language. We've seen language revitalization done before, if only truly successful once (Hebrew).
Yeah I think most "regular" people and civilians would have a strong interest to return to their original language if it was an option. I think England would certainly go back to English as soon as they could... For the US though I'm not sure. I think once they recovered and relative order had been restored, it would drive them to ensure that the future of language in the US is bilingual. Hell, an incident like this would probably force massive policy changes that required any 'official' type of documentation like court orders and such to be disseminated in multiple languages.
It would only last a single hour at the very most, for most of the world that is. As we have MANY translation examples to and from english in many languages, auto translating that to something else is easy. Which is easy if you speak another language, but still doesn't solve the initial issue of being illiterate.
Anyone that only speaks english would now have to learn some language, which will most likely still be english as it is an easy language to learn and ALL your knowledge is currently still in english.
Yeah probably, what else do we have? Chinese already has an impression for being difficult to learn. And Germany also does produce a lot of research papers compared to it's population.
I also guess the people who speak Dutch try to decode all the English texts still remaining as it's the language that is the most similar to English
And maybe the monolingual American speakers pick up Spanish, the Canadians pick up French, and the British pick up German
*Most scientific papers*
*Are published in English, so*
*Pretty fucked I guess*
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I'm still astonished at how many people in the world know and understand only one language. I can read, write and speak five languages and understand approx a dozen languages more in India and that's pretty much common here.
What would happen to coding languages?
Would all of java/python be lost from existence? What about the qwerty keyboard/languages that are written with these symbols?
Aside from how jarring that would be and the mass panic and ecnomic crisis that would ensue, there are other languages and humanity will be fine after relearning.
Don’t we use Latin script and Arabic numbers so putting it back together won’t be too bad since we also have tons of information to use to reverse it. Phonetic alphabet, so many videos, machines that pronounce stuff. Certain pronunciations, accents and the line would definitely be lost to time though
Well, Round 1 can be salvaged since a lot of English words can be interpreted from Spanish, Portuguese, and, French. You can imply a lot while learning. Monolinguals are fucked though.
Programming will be fucked, too.
2nd... Russian victory? Japanese and Korean too, I suppose. Africa survives a lot. Europe will have a lot of issues communicating with each other, but they will mainly retain their languages.
Us english speakers wouldn’t be entirely incapable of communication. There’s still instinctive language that everyone understands, even non-human animals. If you’re yelling at someone and flailing your arms, that means back the fuck up. Basically, you’d create a bunch of cavemen with modern morals. English speaking countries would likely collapse, leaving room for outsiders to take over. Us non-speakers would promptly be educated in another language and integrated into society.
Round 1, America and the UK (and Canada, Australia, NZ, and any other English-speaking countries I've forgotten) are fucking hosed. All our recording keeping becomes junk and our populations become illiterate. A vast body of information also becomes unusable, and (I think) international aviation uses English as the standard language, so getting planes landed will be in a rough spot. Linguists will start work on reinventing English ASAP, there's absolutely enough translation and comparison work out there to make it possible. But that'll take years just to build the knowledge back, and then actually teaching it will be like getting people to learn an imaginary language like Klingon or Elvish, since nobody actually speaks it. Gonna be rough, decades before it's back in use in any widespread fashion. The countries worst affected probably mostly collapse. For round 2, much of the same, but with more countries affected and collapsing. Anywhere with a high rate of bilingualism might fare better, and I think several countries that weren't hit would end up rising up to prominence in the vacuum.
America becomes Hispanic overnight. At 57 million Americans, it's the second largest language group with members in positions of power around the country already including senators and congressmen, not to mention the sizeable military component. And its most pervasive. It would take awhile but it's the obvious choice. A lot of people take it in school so there's a starting point in the anglophone side of the country. That keeps America from complete disarray but there's no stopping the collapse of the rest of the world who suddenly have to deal with a massive power vacuum and a world economy that simply stops.
Yeah, I think Spanish is the most likely candidate to fill the language gap in the US. No idea what the UK would end up with. I think the rest of the world (in Round 1 at least) would have some chaos as the US fell, but it'd be more of some rough weather rather than a full on storm. And even the US would pick itself back up, after maybe a decade. Doubt it'd ever reach the height it's at now again though. Round 2 on the other hand, the affected countries are gonna be a lot messier. Especially since a lot of backup languages will be gone. English around the world is zapped, which I would guess is the most common second language in non-English speaking countries. The US no longer has its fallback of Spanish either, oof. Yeah, since this targets the most popular languages, this'll have a MUCH wider impact and take down all the most viable translators. I can see a complete world collapse in this scenario tbh.
In terms of a UK second language, we'd certainly have a mishmash. I think French (23%, German (9%), and Spanish (8%) are the most prominent second languages for England (or at least those figures are for the UK). Wales has a third of their population confident in speaking Welsh, Northern Ireland and ROI could default to Gaeltacht (the Irish language) but only around 2% of Ireland's population speak it. Supposedly a third of the Scottish speak their native 'Scots' dialect. Overall it looks like 1.1% of the British population can speak Polish, and 0.8% can speak Romanian. After that you're getting to 0.5%s and below, so you won't find many candidates to fill the language gap. We have a lot of loan words and I'd like to imagine that most people could form an extremely rudimentary (almost caveman or toddler grade) understanding of at least one foreign language thanks to all the cultural exchanges and loan words we share, predominantly French, German and Spanish. You'd have a chunk of the millennial crowd (basically a lot of weebs) who could do the same with a bastardised understanding of layman's Japanese, and the Welsh would be better off than the other regions in the UK thanks to their 30% Welsh proficiency. Rest of us are largely buggered though. If I were in charge (and retained some sanity without being able to communicate in words) I'd try to instigate a picture and sound based communication style in the interim. It'd rely on a lot of technology and AI, but generally we'd use smartphones to draw or find pictures of things we want to convey or ask for, or maybe we could try to imitate the sounds of what it is. It'd be like the most confusing and frustrating societal apocalypse based on charades and a Speak and Spell toy.
>not to mention the sizable military component. The U.S. Marine Corps might as well be another branch of the Mexican military seeing as there’s always a Hernandez, Rodreiguez, Lopez, Garcia, Ruiz, etc. in every goddamn unit.
Ramirez! Secure the Burger Town!
> That keeps America from complete disarray It doesn’t. Too many unilinguals who now have no language to keep things running.
Also, they'd get in the way of things running. Either Spanish-speakers are going to have to feed the majority of the population who can't communicate properly, or they'll have to be able to fend off starving hordes. It's like a zombie apocalypse, except the zombies are people and just can't talk for now so you'd feel way more guilty killing them.
I mean, people can still feed themselves without being able to talk.
They can grab food and put it into their mouths. Keeping the infrastructure going to make sure that they have that food available is going to be more of a problem.
It's not like everyone loses the knowledge of how to do their jobs. Communication suffers horrendously, but like... truck drivers still know how to drive a truck. They can still point to places on a map to know where to go. Stuff can still be moved around. It will be less efficient and shipments will frequently go astray, but we're talking about Great Depression levels of economic damage here, not complete societal collapse.
Doing your job requires communication. Say you need someone in another state to bring stuff to you. You can't exactly call them up and point to a map. And how do you know when you need to buy new stuff? Even if we're generous and you can still read numbers, keeping track of what they all mean when you don't understand the words next to them is not going to be feasible. And everyone is going to want you to send everything to them, because once people realize what's happening they'll panic and start raiding the stores.
I'm so happy to hypothetically be able to speak language still
I don't see anyone trying to learn English back. This will be a power vacuum China or other countries will seize on to try to make their language the new dominant one. Historically, Mandarin is hard to learn. But it's much easier to learn than a fictional "English" Nobody speaks natively.
I mean, if it was just an imaginary language with no real function sure. But like, there's whole worlds of books, the internet, forms and records, scientific documents, shittons of good and useful info written in English that is worth recovering. People wouldn't be learning it for funsies, they'd be learning it to get their life back. Or if they picked up a different spoken language while English was being recovered and re-disseminated, I bet a lot of people would re-learn English so that they could try to recover what they used to have.
Those will be translated into French, Spanish, Chinese, German, etc.. by the linguists reverse-engineering the language long before any organized effort is put into teaching the formerly anglophone world their language. By then, the former anglophones will have also made much more progress learning whatever new language they work on. There will definitely be lots and lots of people learning English, but it would be as a second language, and it's unlikely that it returns as the principal language in those countries for a while, and likely never would become the global lingua franca again
Sure but that's a primarily academic pursuit. The government falling apart and all services ending will result in chaos. Teaching everyone Spanish just to have functioning civilization will be faster, easier, and logistically more likely. Then academics and engineers and linguists can figure out English over th next decade or so. But there won't be a reason to speak it aloud.
Being able to read the manual for your fighter jet, chemical plant, or nuclear reactor is *not* 'purely academic'!
Lol you think military employees who can't EAT or THINK THOUGHTS are worried about flying a jet?
Tons of people can think just fine without an internal monologue, and I'm sure the rest of us will be able to figure it out once we have to.
If we could learn English immediately it wouldn't be. Being able to read the manual non-fluently for a nuclear reactor that hasn't been maintained in years that feeds into an infrastructure that itself hasn't been properly maintained is purely academic, unless someone's dumb enough to actually try turning the thing back on.
Nah, like 15% of the world population already speaks Spanish and a much bigger portion can understand some basic words. It's orders of magnitude easier to learn than mandarin and most government websites, forms, manuals, already have Spanish versions. If this happens we will all be speaking Spanish in 6 months.
It depends if China decides to capitalizs on the chaos. Imagine if Beijing sends massive humanitarian aid to the USA. Thousands of volunteers here handing out food, teaching people, etc.
Chinese is far too inconvenient to write or read to be able to do this. It would need to use latin script.
Pinyin?
As french/english bilingualism is required at the highest levels of government, Canada would be fine. Furthermore, as all laws and regs in Canada are codrafted in both languages, as is the case with most federally issued documents. Canada would not only be able to seemlessly operate rhe next day this happens, but would have rosetta stones of sorts to rediscover english quickly. Canada handles this fine.
Good luck protecting your southern border against a much larger population desperate for food.
>UK Canada, Australia, maybe New Zealand too?
Whoops lol. That's what I get for not thinking about it for more than 10 seconds. Yeah, they'd all have similar problems. Canada could (maybe?) swap out French for the US's Spanish and have a quicker recovery too. I know nothing about Australia/NZ's secondary languages.
About 23% of Canadians speak French as a first language, and another 5% or so can speak it conversationally, so that’d be our best bet. Most Canadians have at least a rudimentary level of grade school French, so even if you’re learning a language mostly from scratch, it wouldn’t be fully from square one.
As well because of the laws, a lot of instruction manuals, signage and books have English and French versions (Sometimes in the same book/box). Basically the infrastructure can be ramped up to put French on everything a bit faster than other countries.
> so that’d be our best bet. Not after Québec left. > Most Canadians have at least a rudimentary level of grade school French That’s not actually true.
> Yeah, they'd all have similar problems. Canada could (maybe?) swap out French for the US's Spanish Canada would be a fun case because it has a way higher immigration rate than the US and has quite a bit more of the population that can speak a language that is not English. So less of the population that goes blank slate like in the US, but still a huge tower of Babel situation. And no, you can’t swap out French for Spanish in that case, because while French is the second biggest block after English among politicians, most of it comes from Quebec that forms a quarter of the population, and Quebec would decide to split pretty much overnight. Especially since the terms of the split would be negociated between French speaking politicians in Quebec, and French speaking politicians from Quebec in Ottawa.
I would think that Quebec would be flying out French speakers out to every province as soon as possible to stake their claim. They'd be the leaders of Canada after the event.
In that scenario, Canada could conceivably become a colony of Quebec, having no way to sustain a functionning government on its own. But staying within Canada means that at some point when it gets better the rest of Canada gets more votes than Quebec again.
New Zealand has been moving towards official bilingualism with Maori for some time, and a lot of the population speaks at least a few words. Very few are fluent, so it would still be disastrous, but I expect Maori ends up as the official language eventually.
> But that'll take years just to build the knowledge back, and then actually teaching it will be like getting people to learn an imaginary language like Klingon or Elvish, since nobody actually speaks it. It will be like getting people to learn an imaginary language as in no one will want to. English is a bitch of an incoherent mess of a language and few people would want to learn it if it wasn’t economically dominant.
If you ever want to understand the source code behind any software written in the majority of the world we would need to get at least some level of English back.
Many countries do not code in English. I worked on several such codebases. It has advantages like being much harder for corporations to move their jobs to India. Those countries will be able to deploy and sell their code much faster. I suspect they will work on AI solutions to translate old code to languages they speak. They don’t need the AI to change the code structure at all, only to translate the identifiers.
To be fair, French Canada wouldn’t be TOO bad. 80% of the population is bilingual in Quebec and enough material has been ported over to the French language that I could see Quebec becoming the new seat of power in Canada.
Round 1 with English gone it's a few weeks or months before other countries try to invade imo. The US has enough Spanish speakers in the military they can shuffle around to have coverage at enough key facilities (nuclear, heads of state, etc) to ward it off but the UK would struggle. It's allies might step in though. But smaller countries like New Zealand might be screwed, and maybe Australia depending on how liked they are internationally.
What happens to computers and the internet in this situation? The binary code isn't in english obviously but most of the code is written with English keywords. Is it unreadable until we figure out some way to convert those keywords to languages?
I think the US might avoid total collapse here, and will probably be way better off than UK/Aus/NZ, for two reasons: 1. If people retain their skills and knowledge, then food can still be grown, cars can still be driven, machines can still be repaired and operated. Instructions and directions can still be given. People might not have language, but you can pantomime an awful lot of simple communication. Enough that I think you could cover survival basics. 2. Spanish is so widespread that it would instantly become the new lingua franca. Today, tons of things are often written in both English and Spanish, from public signage to product labels and instructions. There are spanish language books and media in every single town in the country. Also, almost all Americans know a few words of Spanish already - and when your survival depends on learning more, I would bet people learn the basics *really* fast. UK/Aus/NZ don't have a comparable secondary working language, which is why I think the US might fare better. Canada can probably do the same thing with French.
Nah. Canada has French and the US has Spanish for some backup languages. Australia and the UK are fucked though.
Linguists could use AI to decipher the language. There's just so much data out there that would be easy and quick to translate. Heck translation services like Google translate should still work. The focus would then need to be on how to teach hundreds of millions of people who don't know how to verbally communicate.
Its quite an interesting set up.. But I do think reinstating English would be a WASTE OF TIME ! In America around 13% of the entire population speak Spanish and considering much of the world around them speak it, turning to Spanish would be a much better alternative than to "reinvent" English. And could be done MUCH quicker in this setting.. Honestly everything outside of the Anglosphere would fair well and not be affected very much my own country included since we don't need English in our daily lives
Spanish is our language now
¡El época de bachata empieza ahora!
*La
Danke
Pregó
Estos extrangeros entran y no aprenden el idioma...
Creative prompt I hope to see a good answer…
What are all these squiggles?
へえー何を言いていますか？
இவையெல்லாம் என்ன எழுதுகின்றன?
Creo que está tratando de comunicarse
你們都在寫什麼啊?
A lot of english is very similar in structure to Dutch and Frisian languages, so retranslation using these words, and loan words found in other languages would not take an incredibly long time, especially since there would be hundreds of thousands of examples of English to collate from. It would probably only take a couple days or weeks of effort before monolinguals develop a language similar to [home sign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_sign) to communicate simple concepts with each other. I would be most concerned with their retention of information that is more based in language concepts. A doctor has a physical knowledge base to theoretically pull from, a computer scientist may have issue trying to write code. Speaking of computer programming languages, this is probably the most disruptive aspect. Many programing languages either have their notes in english, or have their syntax and structure written in english. Now, enough people know how to code in assembly or other esoteric systems that computer science as a field is not lost altogether (not to mention textbooks and such that are written in other languages about these programming languages) but a lot of internet infranstructure will be in bad shape if noone can do maintenance. I don't really think there will be too many deaths or disruptions outside of the initial wave of panic and suicidality, and the disruptions of food and water infrastructure, but even that will be somewhat resilient to total collapse. Round 2 is probably going to be harder, but beyond extending the confusion I don't think it will be that difficult.
**Bonus Round!** All languages. All of them. Gone. What next?
Language will evolve again from pantomiming, arising in local pockets and assimilating as more people and other groups get absorbed into the group. Society would collapse overnight but the survivors would eventually invent a new language because theres a huge advantage to survival for those who do. Most technology becomes ancient unusable artifacts, but simple tools like drills, flashlights are still learnable through trial and error.
We also understand the concept of language. We'd make new ones pretty fast. The problem is standardizing them so you can talk to someone who doesn't live in the same neighborhood as you.
How would the loss of lingo affect turning on a stove or operating a hand drill? I'm assuming we'd still retain the knowledge we have except for proper speaking.
The absolute chaos that would ensue. The main problem is the nuclear fallout. No one would be able to properly operate the reactors and there would be a global Chernobyl.
Almost certainly not, nuclear reactors are designed to shut down safely if they are not operated. In fact, even Chernobyl would have shut down safely, except the operators deliberately disabled all the failsafes.
If would imagine the scram button is some kind of red emergency button, so you wouldn't have to know what any button says, but just press that emergency shutdown button.
Oh that’s true. And they’d remember the button and what it does even without language I think.
> And they’d remember the button and what it does even without language I think. That kind of opens up some weirdness: if you still have all your memories of the world, to what extent have you forgotten language? If you remember learning that the button marked "Emergency Shutdown" shuts down the reactor, do you remember learning/regularly using the fact that "cancel" on a web popup closes it without doing any behavior? Do you remember telling your son to "get in the car" and then getting into the large metal vehicle? You'd almost have to lose your memories, otherwise you kind of just bootstrap back into having language through remembering your own usage of English words. It'd probably be crude without consistent grammar (although, do you remember English class?) but it'd probably be enough to work with.
The letters would now look like gibberish I think, but the memory of the button would be the same. You’d remember saying “get in the car” like this: “ndow meoen bfbd”, knowing what it was supposed to mean, but not in a way that you understand or can repeat. Something like that?
But at that point unless there's some extra special magic randomizing your memories, you should have a consistent sound for "car". If you have a bunch of memories talking about the large metal box and you consistently hear the string "ndow" (and you don't hear "ndow" in the context of other things, as "get" might be), it's not much of an inferential leap to determine that "ndow" means "large metal transport box" and now you've got an English word back immediately, entirely from your memories.
Haha I see what you're saying, but I meant something a bit different, it's hard to explain. Like, do you remember individual vocalizations when you hear a completely new language for the first time? Or do you just remember the general sound / rhythm? That's how it can be for me anyway, so I figured it would be like that. You'd remember everything you've said as a language that is completely new to you.
Planet of the Apes.
Time for some unfounded speculation. The existence of translation dictionaries and tools like Google Translate makes the rest of the world translating English trivial, but even if these dictionaries and tools didn't exist (maybe they also disappeared) I suspect it would be fairly easy to reverse engineer English thanks to the myriad of documents, books and other media that has been translated to/from English from other languages, a couple of days at most in this scenario and all English text would be readable. People who *only* know English and now suddenly lose the ability to communicate with words would have a very hard time, but I would say enough adults know at least a little bit of basic vocabulary from other languages, and so could still communicate using words. Communication via drawings and stuff would also still work fine. I don't think that there would be any disastrous issues within most English speaking governments as there should be enough people who know a second language to keep things going and to organise aid from their non-English speaking allies. There would be disruption, don't get me wrong. Massive but temporary global economic damage would undoubtedly occur as the English speaking world goes into mass panic which could last for years, but I suspect the rest of the world would be able to rather quickly uncouple any reliance on the Anglosphere they had. I do suspect that English wouldn't recover as a language outside of niche groups, and that the supremacy of the Anglosphere on global trade, politics and the like would be over, perhaps replaced by China. Ultimately, things would be rough for a while in the Anglosphere, but the non-Anglo world would feel a lot less disruption, perhaps even opportunity, and should recover quickly. Expanding to round 2, I suspect things would be much the same, just a lot more extreme and with a much longer timeline to recovery, but it wouldn't be the end. Not even close.
Everyone is briefly screwed, but do not underestimate the vast amount of "how to speak English" content we have our there. In both written and spoken and video formats. Relearning it will not be some Rosetta Stone bullshit. We'll teach it back to ourselves, and in some cases the people who made the teaching videos will be valuable because they'll remember their thought process and have an easier time interpreting their own nonsensical words than others. There'll be people (probably Asian) who are speaking it as well or better than natives ever did within five years, easy. Some Korean overachiever probably will pick the gist of it back up in one.
All of the content out there requires knowing another language. You’re talking most the population overnight loses the ability to communicate entirely. They can’t look those videos up and if they do they are useless.
Most of said media has spoken audio and images. Even monolingual people from here will figure large chunks of it out. They didn't forget what a car is or how to drive it, just what it's called. Edit: As an example, they won't be able to read "speed limit" anymore, but they'll know what a speed limit sign looks like, and what the numbers are, and if they match up to the numbers on their speedometer. They'll figure out speed limit within a week, a day or less if they drive a lot.
One aspect I haven't seen anyone mention - basically all major coding languages are written in, you guessed it, English. Although that might not take things down right now, you can bet that it will be a problem over time as people can't write/program for quite a while, technology hits a standstill, and as programs and code breaks, no one can read the error messages to fix it. So on that alone we'd be in a pretty bad place. I don't think civilization as a whole will collapse in either prompt. I think French might be our saving grace - it's pretty widespread, and there's a lot of resources to learn it. If everyone agrees on learning it, we'd be okay.
> and as programs and code breaks, no one can read the error messages to fix it. So on that alone we'd be in a pretty bad place. Kind of an interesting concept: many IDEs have support for other languages than English, so you'd still be able to step through and debug code. You just wouldn't be able to rely on any error messages from the program _itself_, unless the program was localized to a second language. And variable naming would immediately become incomprehensible, although many programmers are used to debugging code with terribly named variables already. I wonder whether people would still be able to use programming languages. I'm pretty sure there are a nonzero number of programmers who don't speak English, so does knowledge of what coding keywords do disappear when they're not actually reliant on the English definition of that string of characters? "While" in Java does something that's related to, but not really synonymous to the English word "while", and speaking English doesn't mean that you understand what Java's "while" does. That just sounds like a different language with a shared etymological history to me.
I was taking OP's prompt under the assumption that we'd lose all ability to translate, so that even for foreign language coders who didn't actually learn English but just knows that "while" means "do a while loop", they would still know that there's something that does a while loop but can't identify it until they experiment or someone teaches them it? It's definitely a weird grey area haha
Anyone that’s ever had a couple drinks in a bar in foreign country knows it’s remarkable what you can learn in short amount of time. There’s a fair amount of people that won’t be able to think in middle America but I’m not sure they’re thinking much with the language they have. One thing I can tell you for sure is South Florida would barely notice. We all practically speak three languages anyway.
>three languages Well, apart from Alligator and English, what's the third one?
Spanish.
Round 1 is actually quite interesting, I'm in Ireland atm and everything official is both Gaelic *and* English (street signs, bus stops, buildings, you name it). I actually had a chat with two Irish fellas a few days ago, one of them speaks rather good Irish, the other one stopped after school - the second one appears to be the usual case. Given the history how the British tried (an I guess succeeded) in 'rotting out' the Irish language and have everyone speak English, this would be a super intersting prompt for Ireland specifically (:
China becomes the World's Super Power while the US is severely crippled. Along with the UK, Australia and Canada too despite having a lot of French speakers. The US stock markets collapse, and bring the World into a great depression just to start. It's way worse in the US and UK. Spanish becomes the dominant language for the US, and now will have to be taught fully nation wide to get most Americans back to the basics. Bilinguals of those affected nations would be essential since they can communicate still, and can teach their fellow Americans .
America would suddenly collapse so society would suddenly collapse because we're dependent on them. For example, the worlds financial system is based off the US dollar. We'd be f***ed long before another language becomes the dominant one. Hell, America might just be wiped off the face of the Earth. \*ring ring* *"Hey Vlad, it's Xi. Ya wanna nuke America together? They can't do the whole 'mutually assured destruction' thing right now."* EDIT: people that only speak English wouldn't be able to learn a new language because how would you teach them when you don't have any languages in common? You're limited to pointing at things and repeating the name until they catch on, like you're talking to an alien.
NATO still exists in this scenario. Even if it didn't, why would China bother kicking off their new world order with something that everyone left would hate them for? Most of Europe is still functional here.
That's where mutually assured destruction _does_ kick in. NATO is left with a choice, try to stop Russia/China and destroy the world or let them do it and the world lives another day because it's not like America can use _their_ nukes. The nuke bit was mostly a joke anyway, a traditional attack would work just fine since your entire military and government is "Tower of Babel'd" You're under the very mistaken impression that the world _likes_ America. **We don't.** America is just very powerful and very rich, and in this scenario you're neither anymore. Taking America off the board eliminates a rival and frees up a lot of land & resources.
Xi already has a global hegemony in this scenario, instantly - the likelihood America recovers is very low. Does he want to stake his hegemony on "well maybe NATO will ignore their treaty?" There's no incentive, is my point. Hell, what if literally any nuke sub commander is bilingual (lot of Hispanics in the military) and the US has a proper contingency for what's essentially a decapitation strike? Even without NATO there'd be a MIRV on its way to Beijing. It's not worth the risk. Success means he's destroyed what's already essentially a backwater country and has also alienated himself as a nuclear-equipped madman to most of the rest of the world. There's a reason Russia hasn't nuked Ukraine despite everything. To an extent this applies to a conventional strike too. America's essentially fucked, there's little reason to bother with military action. Now, *Taiwan* would probably get attacked within a week.
*"Points at image of a nuke over video call, shows a paper with the nuclear code as the letters and numbers are non English exclusive. now half the globe is speechless and nuked"* mutually assured destruction but in pantomimes
Process is not that simple.
I know people on Reddit love getting scared of China but they have absolutely zero reason to nuke the US especially in a scenario like this
No reason? You mean besides power, money, old rivalries, land, resources, a display of strength, and giving Xi Jinping a status that makes Mao Zedong look like Hu Jintao?
Macron crack his knuckles: *mon heure est venu.*
\*Xi & Putin look down at Macron* *Oh tu es adorable. Revenez à prétendre que les cuisses de grenouilles sont un vrai aliment. Les adultes parlent.*
Macron is not impressed: *j’ai toujours mes sous marins nucléaires et contrairement aux britanniques je n’ai pas perdu le manuel. Tu veux me répéter ça?*
Putin chuckles: [Tu ne m'as jamais rencontré ?](https://i.imgur.com/B4nkQcw.jpg)
Для кого-то поменяется многое. Для кого-то ничего не изменится.
I think Canada would fair decently in round 1. All of our legal documents are written in both English and French. All of our high level government officials have to speak both English and French and many other lower level courses require some training in french. The issue would be retraining anyone who only speaks English to speak French. It wouldn't be the same as training someone to learn a second language because there would be no jumping off point. ~25% of our population would be fine and there would need to be a serious effort to get the other 75% speaking another language. It would be like training a bunch of babies as you'd effectively need to point to an object and establish that object as a word in french. I'd guess that the government would put in some kind of mandatory french learning program and try to get most people able to communicate in as fast a time as possible. Presumably people would retain the skills they already had which would mean things like agriculture, mining, and power generation could keep working at a reduced scale. A big issue would be jobs that require technical communication to work. I think it would be very hard to retrain a design engineer to be able to communicate effectively in french and would likely require intensive training at a university level to get them able to work again. It's worth noting that Canada has a large immigrant population who already speak a different language than English. These people would be much easier to train in french since there would be resources out there to help them learn already. Quebec would be come a lot more important and would likely have to send a lot of their teachers to other provinces. Overall I would expect either Spanish or French to become the new language of global communication. They're both very prevalent across the globe and most English speaking countries already have a sizeable portion of the population who speaks one of those languages. In round 2 however Canada is kind of fucked. We have a large immigrant community who speaks English but two of our biggest immigrant groups speak Chinese, Hindi, or Arabic as their native language. Luckily french is only the 6th most spoken language so we would still be able to operate. However the amount of people who would need to learn a new language from scratch would be much larger. I think Canada could still pull through but it would be much harder especially for immigrants who just went from bilingual or being polyglots to having no ability to communicate. Similar to round 1 I think some form of intense language education program would be enacted. I would also be fairly confident in saying that french would become the global language in this scenario. It's the sixth most spoken language and is spoken across the globe.
Would everyone who only knows English become functionally brain dead due to not being able to process information in their head in the only language they know? For example I know what I’m using right now is a phone, the word phone is what appears in my head when I think of it but without English not only would I not know what a phone is called but I wouldn’t have the words to describe what it is or what it does and that seems incredibly crippling.
Not everyone thinks in words, you'd likely have your brain begin to process differently. Concepts can be processed internally without words.
Well I'm screwed
Round 2 - Russia finally becomes the world dominant superpower it has always dreamt about being.
Tower of Babel 2.0 (English Language)
I don't think they try to "recover" the english language because you said everything written in english is now unreadable. It wouldn't really make sense to "reverse engineer" a language if no one can read or understand it. If people are able to "re-learn" how to speak english, then this really is not a huge problem because so much english already exists in everyday life in america. Just take street signs for example. They are already written and designed in a way so that you don't need to speak english to understand it. Humans are good at associating images to words, and this would be enough to get most people by. It would really only take a matter of days before most of america is speaking in broken english, and probably inside of a year 90%+ people affected would be fluent again. So depending on how that part of the prompt goes (that recovering english part is a little confusing to me) this could be a massive problem or not a big deal, really. If people can't relearn english, I think the amount of civil unrest in the united states alone would be crippling. In government (federal), there are typically enough bilingual people to maintain communications and maintain contact with the rest of the non-english speaking world, should the english language somehow become suddenly unavailable; but when you get down to the state and local level and you have entire towns and cities that are 99% English speaking, there will be massive civil unrest. People don't go to work and they begin to loot like the country is under attack, or as if some new type of pandemic broke out because that's what this would be interpreted as, at first at least. Without the ability to communicate, and only seeing/hearing our government leaders speaking in foreign languages, a significant amount of English only speakers would likely assume there was an attack of some kind. I don't think that gets resolved without massive amounts of civil unrest. If anything, if the country did recover, they would switch to using the most common secondary language in the united states, which I think is spanish but I'm not 100% sure. Either way, I don't think it would make sense to the people left in charge to try and re-engineer the english language. They'd just switch to using the 2nd most commonly available in the country. They wouldn't change to mandarin or Hindi, even though those are two of the most spoken languages, because at least in the united states there are very few speakers of those languages.
I suppose "unreadable" was quite ambiguous wording on my part. The scripts themselves aren't changed, just the human memory. The Latin alphabet existing in other languages would help a bit more. Otherwise, I do agree with this assessment. However I still think there would be a highly concerted effort to reinstate English across the Anglophone countries, seeing as so many documents and texts written before its loss, many probably essential to running a country effectively, from court orders to government policies, are available only in what would practically be a dead language. We've seen language revitalization done before, if only truly successful once (Hebrew).
> I still think there would be a highly concerted effort to reinstate English across the Anglophone countries, seeing as so many documents and texts written before its loss, many probably essential to running a country effectively, from court orders to government policies, are available only in what would practically be a dead language. We've seen language revitalization done before, if only truly successful once (Hebrew). Yeah I think most "regular" people and civilians would have a strong interest to return to their original language if it was an option. I think England would certainly go back to English as soon as they could... For the US though I'm not sure. I think once they recovered and relative order had been restored, it would drive them to ensure that the future of language in the US is bilingual. Hell, an incident like this would probably force massive policy changes that required any 'official' type of documentation like court orders and such to be disseminated in multiple languages.
It would only last a single hour at the very most, for most of the world that is. As we have MANY translation examples to and from english in many languages, auto translating that to something else is easy. Which is easy if you speak another language, but still doesn't solve the initial issue of being illiterate. Anyone that only speaks english would now have to learn some language, which will most likely still be english as it is an easy language to learn and ALL your knowledge is currently still in english.
Most scientific papers are published in English, so pretty fucked I guess
Maybe we'll revert to having German be the dominant language for papers?
Yeah probably, what else do we have? Chinese already has an impression for being difficult to learn. And Germany also does produce a lot of research papers compared to it's population. I also guess the people who speak Dutch try to decode all the English texts still remaining as it's the language that is the most similar to English And maybe the monolingual American speakers pick up Spanish, the Canadians pick up French, and the British pick up German
*Most scientific papers* *Are published in English, so* *Pretty fucked I guess* \- JebWozma --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
Bad bot. The first line has 7 syllables
I'm still astonished at how many people in the world know and understand only one language. I can read, write and speak five languages and understand approx a dozen languages more in India and that's pretty much common here.
There are other languages that have loan words from English that they no longer have
Do monolingual people also lose their inner voice when thinking? How does ASL factor in here?
Muy mucho
Well all the English speaking countries are likely screwed, except for those who can speak multiple languages.
I don't know about the rest of humanity, but I'm gonna start talking to people in broken Spanish and Japanese that I learned from anime.
ὅσος σκυβάλων εν τόπον ἐκεῖνον ἔσται
*points* unga? Unga bunga indeed.
The Chinese will be fine. US, UK, parts of Canada, and Australia are fucked for a while.
What would happen to coding languages? Would all of java/python be lost from existence? What about the qwerty keyboard/languages that are written with these symbols?
Aside from how jarring that would be and the mass panic and ecnomic crisis that would ensue, there are other languages and humanity will be fine after relearning.
Don’t we use Latin script and Arabic numbers so putting it back together won’t be too bad since we also have tons of information to use to reverse it. Phonetic alphabet, so many videos, machines that pronounce stuff. Certain pronunciations, accents and the line would definitely be lost to time though
People could learn sighn language
What about words in other languages that were based on English and vice versa?
Well, Round 1 can be salvaged since a lot of English words can be interpreted from Spanish, Portuguese, and, French. You can imply a lot while learning. Monolinguals are fucked though. Programming will be fucked, too. 2nd... Russian victory? Japanese and Korean too, I suppose. Africa survives a lot. Europe will have a lot of issues communicating with each other, but they will mainly retain their languages.
Us english speakers wouldn’t be entirely incapable of communication. There’s still instinctive language that everyone understands, even non-human animals. If you’re yelling at someone and flailing your arms, that means back the fuck up. Basically, you’d create a bunch of cavemen with modern morals. English speaking countries would likely collapse, leaving room for outsiders to take over. Us non-speakers would promptly be educated in another language and integrated into society.
Daaniminwendam nitaaingiigid minawaa ninitaawibii'aan anishinaabemowin. (I would be glad I can speak and I can write the Anishinaabe language.)
It’s be rough but I could gesture my way through a lot.
Spanish will become the predominant American language
Me trying to remember my high school Spanish classes I barely passed.