When COVID-19 vaccines were being developed in 2020, researchers worldwide raced to share their findings. But there was a catch: to reach the global scientific community, everyone—from German virologists to Chinese epidemiologists—had to publish in English. A Brazilian scientist with a breakthrough insight faced the same requirement as a researcher in Boston. The language of discovery had already been decided.

This isn't just about convenience. The dominance of English in science, technology, and global commerce represents one of the most profound cultural shifts of our era. Every two weeks, a language dies. By century's end, half of the world's 7,000 languages may vanish. And the rise of English—accelerated by smartphones, streaming, and social media—is hastening this extinction in ways that would have seemed unimaginable even thirty years ago.

Consider this: roughly 95% of scientific papers indexed in major databases are written in English. If you're a physicist in South Korea, a marine biologist in Argentina, or a public health researcher in Nigeria, your work essentially doesn't exist unless it appears in English-language journals. This wasn't always the case. Until the mid-twentieth century, German was the dominant language of chemistry and physics. French led in diplomacy and law. Russian dominated certain fields during the Soviet era.

The shift accelerated after World War II as American universities and research institutions gained global prominence. The Cold War funneled massive resources into English-speaking scientific establishments. When the internet emerged in the 1990s—built largely by English-speaking engineers—English became the default language of digital knowledge. Today, the pressure is so intense that universities in non-English countries increasingly teach in English, even to domestic students.

The consequences run deep. Knowledge systems embedded in other languages—traditional ecological wisdom, indigenous medical practices, local historical understanding—struggle to enter global discourse. A Japanese researcher might have insights that translate awkwardly or lose nuance in English. A researcher in Senegal might understand local conditions brilliantly but lack the English fluency to publish in top journals. The monopoly doesn't just privilege native English speakers; it filters what counts as knowledge.

Takeaway

When one language becomes the gatekeeper to legitimacy, entire ways of knowing the world get locked outside.

In 2010, there were approximately 6,900 living languages. Today, linguists estimate that a language dies every two weeks. The pattern is clear: languages without digital presence are dying faster than ever. When children grow up with smartphones, tablets, and streaming services that don't speak their parents' language, they learn early that their heritage tongue has limited utility. Why learn Navajo when YouTube, TikTok, and video games all speak English?

The economics are brutal. Building a keyboard, voice assistant, or autocorrect system for a language requires significant investment. Tech companies prioritize languages with large user bases. The result is a feedback loop: languages with small speaker populations don't get digital support, which makes them less useful in daily life, which accelerates their decline, which makes investment even less attractive. Of the world's 7,000 languages, fewer than 500 have any meaningful digital presence.

This digital extinction differs from historical patterns of language death. In the past, languages disappeared when speakers died or were forcibly assimilated over generations. Today, languages can lose their intergenerational transmission within a single childhood. A teenager in rural Wales or the Philippines might understand their grandparents' language but respond in English—the language of their screens, their aspirations, their imagined future. The smartphone in every pocket has become an engine of linguistic homogenization.

Takeaway

Technology doesn't just reflect language preferences—it actively shapes which languages seem worth learning to the next generation.

France famously defends French with legal force. The Toubon Law requires French in advertising, public signage, and workplace communications. The Académie Française polices vocabulary, proposing French alternatives to English loanwords. Critics mock these efforts as quaint nationalism. But France isn't alone—and the underlying logic isn't merely about pride.

China blocks many English-language platforms while investing billions in Mandarin-language alternatives. Russia promotes Russian across former Soviet territories. South Korea enforces Korean-language requirements in education. These efforts vary in motivation—some genuinely aim to preserve cultural heritage, others serve authoritarian control, and many blend both impulses. But they share a recognition that language shapes thought, identity, and power.

What these resistance efforts reveal is how much is at stake. When a community loses its language, it loses more than words. It loses ways of categorizing the world, expressing relationships, and transmitting knowledge across generations. The Hopi language encodes time differently than English. The Pirahã language of the Amazon reportedly lacks number words. Aboriginal Australian languages contain precise ecological vocabulary that exists in no other tongue. Each extinction forecloses possibilities for understanding the human experience. Resistance isn't nostalgia—it's an assertion that diversity of thought matters.

Takeaway

Language preservation isn't about freezing culture in place—it's about maintaining humanity's cognitive diversity for challenges we haven't yet imagined.

Understanding this linguistic shift historically helps us see it clearly. English dominance isn't natural or inevitable—it emerged from specific power arrangements, technological choices, and economic incentives over the past seventy years. These forces could theoretically be redirected. Machine translation improves. Minority-language digital tools expand. Some endangered languages are finding new life through apps and social media.

But the window is closing. Languages lost today take their unique knowledge systems with them permanently. The question isn't whether English will remain important—it will. The question is whether we'll preserve enough linguistic diversity to maintain different ways of thinking about the world. History suggests that monocultures, whether agricultural or intellectual, eventually prove fragile.