Should everybody learn to speak English? Yes: 1. Network effects of a common language are stronger than ever in History 2. It's the 1st time these are global 3. English is the most spoken / written language & the fastest growing
Only one thing can prevent this
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1k years ago, ppl mostly spoke with those around them. Little need for a lingua franca. In Europe, Latin was enough, learned by the Church and the elites.
After the printing press, suddenly you can learn & communicate w/ ppl far away. Incentive to understand each other ➡️ languages appear around the dialects most published. In Europe you go from a gradient of languages to German, English, French, Spanish...
That lasts until the 20th C, when you still have a few state-sponsored gatekeepers (TV, media) that produce most of the language that ppl consume outside of their geographic immediate vicinity.
But that changes w/ Internet
Suddenly everybody can read stuff written by anybody else. If you don't understand each other, you miss out on the vast majority of the potential info you can consume.
You miss out on billions of ppl you can exchange ideas with
The value of one single lingua franca becomes huge
Now that the benefit of one single language becomes overwhelming, the question becomes: which one? As Ulrich Ammon says (edited):
"There is virtually no indicator for the global rank of a language which does not place English at the top"
GDP
Speakers (including 2nd language)
High growth in native speakers
High growth of learners
Most countries in which it's official
High proficiency in many countries where it's not the main official language
There are other languages with more native speakers
But the potential of the main alternatives (Hindi, Mandarin) is low, because only natives speak them, and the # of natives is going to peak soon
So English will become the language that we all speak.
Unless the Klingon discover us and we realize the entire galaxy speaks Klingon, in which we should all learn Klingon.
Or unless... the network effects break.
They can.
With interoperability.
This is how the network effects can be broken: when you don't need to join the network to get its benefits.
That's how phone monopolies were broken.
It's how you can break the monopoly of English. How?
Make ppl understand each other without the need to learn English
Google Translate already does an amazing job.
Even in live, spoken language
With good enough tech, ppl will be able to understand each other without learning each other's language.
So now it's race between mankind's learning English and translation tech to get good enough. Who will win? 🤷♂️
But knowing all this has consequences for tech workers, politicians, professionals, investors, English speakers, and everybody else. What are these takeaways? I expand on all of this and detail the takeaways in this week's article.
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S curves are everywhere. Learning to identify them is a superpower
They're how epidemics evolve
How memes spread
How investment unfold
How businesses grow
How muscles contract
How technology us adopted
How animation flows
How popcorn explodes
How ice melts
How water evaporates
How countries are formed
How magnets snap
How atoms spin
How transistors change their charge
How ppl get promoted
How they succeed
How they're fired
How they're born
How they die
We don't always recognize them because, depending on where we are on an S curve, it might not look like one.
It might look line a horizontal line
Or a vertical one
Or an oblique one
Or an exponential
Or a noisy surve
Amazon didn't create one business. It consistently reinvented itself, one S curve after another.
It knew how to identify invisible asymptotes and how to pre-empt them.
The 1st S curve was an online bookstore.
Now in retrospect it sounds trivial that they would move beyond that. But it wasn't.
How many online bookstores do you know that moved on from doing just that?
Bezos picked books because they benefitted from having millions of SKUs, ppl didn't need them immediately, and they weren't perishable. Internet had an advantage over physical locations for them.
Why are some Caribbean countries richer than others?Why do some islands speak one language, and others another?
Why are there still colonies there?
Why are there difference races in each?
Why is the Caribbean the way it is?
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When the Spaniards arrived at the end of the 1400s, they were looking for riches. There were few in the Caribbean islands. So they didn't pay too much attention.
Eventually, they found silver on the Continent: in Mexico (Zacatecas) and Bolivia (Potosí).
They needed a way to transport all of that silver back to Spain. They transported the Mexican riches to Veracruz, and the Bolivian ones to Cartagena de Indias.