New Mars Forums

Hello everyone...I'm a serious oldtimer here and I've been gone for a long time.  I was in the Civ-Culture group for 2 years, and that was two years ago.  I figured it was time to get back to flexing my brain.  So here goes...

Assuming you were to have an "official language" on Mars (that is debatable by itself, and there have already been some good posts on that point) you would have to pick a language based on just a couple categories.

1)  Is it a practical choice?  (This has 2 components)
a)  Is the language already conveniently established?
b)  Is the language capable of supporting technical communication?
2)  What political impact will the choice have?

Clearly you would not pick a language that is not already widely in use.  Starting everybody off in the same boat may seem like a fair idea, but its a very poor idea.  If you have no native speakers the initial transition will be ugly, very ugly.  The initial difficulties will probably create long term deficiencies in the general language skills of the community, resulting in half-hearted adoption of the "official language" and a maintenance of native tongues.  And this is only one of probably fifty reasons to picked a pre-established language.

The more important practical selection criteria is to pick a language that supports technical communication.  At least at first Mars will be a scientific place.  A population of scientists engaged in scientific undertakings.  To that end you need a language that already has a rich technical lexicon.  It must also be a language that lends itself to quick adoption of new  words and meanings.  For this purpose we must immediately reject all the romance languages.  Being a 6 year student of latin myself (I minored in Classics and Classical history in college) I can atest to the general charge among linguists that the Romance languages are woefully inadequate at adding technical terms.  They are all superior languages for commerce.  And by extension, diplomacy, but Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portugese are all failures on this critical second point.  They also presents difiiculties in transmitting very precise information (although that is splitting hairs). 

Of the major languages that are thus left, the most technical languages are Germanic.  Basically German and English.  Between the two the more logical selection is English.  The reason being that English has proved to be better at borrowing romance language vocabulary, lending itself to international diplomacy and commercial transaction more than German. 

The final practical consideration for adopting an official language relates to the expressed concern that English is diificult to learn.  I had a linguistics professor in college dispute that notion as ridiculous on its face, but I would refute it on more logical grounds.  In all likelihood the initial colonists will all be Western or Russian by extraction.  This group of people have had extensive exposure to English as a secondary language.  By some recent estimates as many as 80% of college eduacated Europeans speak English at the 'semi-fluent' level.  A large percentage of Japanese also.  One can only imagine the trend that must be taking place in the Russian space agency, given the new interaction with NASA.

Thus your initial population will have a fairly sophisticated level of English at its disposal, as opposed to any other language.  This has a direct bearing on the last qualifying point, English should be more politically acceptable because the initial population will already speak the language. 

People generally don't hate a language they already speak.  They may not love it, but it is politically acceptable nonetheless.

Remember also that the following colonists will not be average citizens.  For a prolonged period the only colonists will be educated people with necessary technical skills.  These people will have mostly the same exposure to English in their primary education as the original colonists, and they will find it convenient to have mastered it before they travel to Mars because English would guarantee they could speak to almost any community, regardless of what that community's primary tongue may be.

Convenience breeds comfort.  And comfort breeds acceptance.  Politically, therefore, English would be an optimal choice as an official language.