AHC: Single World 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.
 
Your challenge, should you come to accept it, is, with a POD no earlier than 400 AD, produce a world with a single language.

Massive Arab or Chinese wanks are the "easiest" ways.
Less likely, Uber-Britain (or other European colonial superpower), some mess about an extraordinarily successful Church spreading Latin (or with minor chances, Syriac or Greek), or a immense worldwide plague that leaves only a small group of Burushaski or [insert random vernacular unheard of before here] speakers alive in the word.
 
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?
 
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.
 
The closest examples IOTL of a single world language are English, Castillian, Arabic, and to a lesser extent, Portuguese. However, a full single world language is going to be difficult to achieve.
 
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?
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.

Staggering, yes. Totally impossible, only if you require TOTAL spoken mutual intelligible performancy between any couple of random speakers irrispective of any other factor.
I suppose that a centuries-long totalitarian world-wide state could get very close to it by 2011, with the implausible assumption that linguistic uniformity is the foremost goal of its policy... possible, but extremely unlikely.
 
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