Your challenge, should you come to accept it, is, with a POD no earlier than 400 AD, produce a world with a single language.
Your challenge, should you come to accept it, is, with a POD no earlier than 400 AD, produce a world with a single language.
Single in multi-inteligibility, i think the only problem is that it needs the invention of radio to be pushed back.By the way: written or spoken language? And with "single language" you mean total mutual intelligibility regardless the local origin of the speakers? or just universal written standard?
Single in multi-inteligibility, i think the only problem is that it needs the invention of radio to be pushed back.
If you mean, universally intelligible as a spoken language, yeah. You'd need centuries of something equivalent to radio, press and TV. Uhm...
Could an earlier invention and spread of press be the POD? Let's say... in Middle East around 600?
Radio has been around for almost a century now, and languages still appear to be changing and dialects diverging just as always.
I would say that this is downright impossible. Even more difficult than getting a single world religion.
Seconded. You might get Arabic, some Chinese language, English, or whatever known everywhere, but replacing every other language? Not by 2011.
Even with technology racing forward relative to OTL, the amount of change necessary to do this is staggering.