An essential aspect that we are missing to talk about and that also characterizes a civilization is the language. The important point is that language is the way of people to communicate and to understand to each other, and the religion is the inner believe, customs and way of living of people. Also, if we analyze a group of people through a timeline, there are features in this group of people that evolve faster than others, there are also features that are just ephemeral. For example, the economic wealth is not something that defines a civilization in a proper way. Throughout the years we have had different empires who have experienced periods of high and low wealth. For instance, we cannot compare the chinese economy 100 years ago with the current economic "boom" they are living right now. Hence, economic wealth is a volatile or unstable feature that seems to be part of other geopolitical aspects such as the economic model or the way of government. In the same way, features such as the literacy or digitalization level are too new features that started to show up recently in some nations and do not trace the timeline of a civilization for enough time, they even seem to be irrelevant right now. As an example of this, we have the Tsarist Russia that used to have literacy rate around 20% before Lenin showed up and the Russian revolution happened. However, this occured just a bit more than 100 years ago. We also have the high digitalization of countries such as South Korea, which is a phenomena with just few decades. Thus, we have elements within a group of people (population) which are too unstable and highly complex, or too recent and likely to be ephemeral. These features are not able to tracer and capture the essential aspects of a civilizations throughtout its many hundreds (as the Latinoamerican civilization) or thousands of years (as the Hindu civilization). Nevertheless, features such as the religion or in the case of this post, the language, seem the be key elements that have remained bonded in a inherent way to a population throughout the years. Hence, these last features are elements that we can call macros (in terms of longevity), and are able to stick and evolve together with a civilization through the whole timeline of this, becoming relevant when we talk about such civilization. Other features that are less relevant as we discussed before can be dubbed as micros.
Figure 1: Percentage of the world popular that speaks a given native language (labels in different colors). Notice that for the Arabic language I did not find data before 2010, so I cut the curve.
Now I proceed to use the data (no forecast) from the The CIA's World Factbook from recent years to plot the percentage of people who speak a particular native language (see Fig. 1) and also people who speak native and non-native languages (see Fig. 2). If we focus in Fig. 1 we can notice that in recent years, it is the Chinese language the one which dominates the world language demography. In second place, as a native language we have the Spanish, which is a heritage from Spain to the rest of the American continent, being this a major language which is spoken from Tijuana (north of Mexico) until the Patagonia (south of Argentina). Afterwards, we have a "technichal draw" between the English, principally spoken in a native way in United States, United Kingdom and Australia (ironically the same countries that form the strategic military alliance AUKUS, which covers the "rimland"), and the Arabic, which is the language by excellence for the Middle-East (demographically even before Persian). Next we have two languages such as the Hindi and Bengali, which are wide-spoken languages in India, a country with a high linguistic wealth. While Hindi (not confused with Hindu, religious term) is the most spoken language in the center of India, the Noreast region called "West Bengal" has a quite high population that speaks Bengali. In the same way, as we approach to the south of India, we will find another dialects that are more spoken than Hindi or Bengali, such as Marathi, Tamil, Urdu (also spoken in Pakistan), Malayalam, and so on. In our previous post (part 2) related to religion, we mentioned some differences between China and India, and here we can also stress that while India is a country with many religions and languages where people from different regions may not be able to communicate among themselves, the same issue does not occurs that often in China. In China, the Mandarin Chinese is the standard language for a population of 1.4 billion people, while the second most spoken language in China is the Cantonese, with only around 60 million people that use it (not negligible of course). Hence, it seems (as an hypothesis) than the contrast in religion in India also come along with a constrast in the language, but in China the religious differences seem to be alleviated by a linguistic parsimony, which provides more armony to the population, mainly located at the southeast region of the country. This of course, is not a law, but in the big picture, it is more likely that there is armony in a country with many religions and one single language, than in a country with many religions and many dialects. Finally, we have in the last spot (but still being important) to the Russian language which is spoken by almost 200 million people. In the same way as in the religious case, we can notice the demographic disadvantage of Russia who will have to work in the upcoming years to enhance its population, even if that means to open the country to foreign visitors (as recently was done by removing visa to people from India with touristics purposes). This does not mean a mixing of civilizations at all, but the learning of the Russian and Orthodox values to people who choose to immigrate to the Heartland. Russia is the heart, or at least the center of the Orthodox civilization, which at the same time is also the Heartland (using Mackinder's terminology). However, such civilization also has the lower numbers in terms of demography, and thus also language and religion. Hence I go back to my previous thesis which can be summarized in the following sentence: "In the same way the world superpowers hold a militar equilibrium that prevents from a major direct attack, there should also exist a demographic equilibrium that will prevent further destabilization strategies".
Figure 2: Most spoken languages throughout the world in the recent years. The plot includes people speaking a native as well as non-native laguages.
Finally, we combine the number of native and non-native speakers in Fig. 2, so we can provide other sort of interesting remarks. For example, first we can observe that Mandarin Chinese seems to still have a high percentage of population which speaks the language, being this one a difficult language to learn despite the interest people may have due to the economic (and geopolitical) chinese growth. However, we have languages such as Bengali that now shows less relevance compared to Hindi, that together with English, are languages that people can use to communicate among themselves in India and turn out to be useful to be learned (being English even more important nowadays, depending on the region), while Bengali is encapsulated into a specific region of India which holds a high population. Arabic and Spanish languages seem not to vary a lot (although Spanish shows a slight enhancement at native and non-native speakers), being Arabic a language that might not look appealing for people in other continents to learn, if not by religious or business purposes. However, while Spanish is a language that will not allow you to interact worldwide, Spanish has a broad list of countries that are native speakers, especially in the Latinoamerican region, making spanish an appealing language to learn, but not driven by religion purposes at all. The Russian language, although it seemed (according to Fig. 2) to have an increase in population before 1980, likely to be due to the big international role the Soviet Union used to have, seems now to be declining. Also, Russian seems to be a more complex language to learn compared with other languages, based actually in the cyrillic alphabet. Finally, the English shows a remarkable upturn since 1990. This could be due to the fact that English is easy to learn compared to other languages or its linguistic simplicity (although one should never rule out geopolitical reasons). English thus has become a simple but powerful tool for worldwide communication. Fig. 2 also seems to show that English became more important after the Soviet Union. After the collapse, we entered into a period of economic and political globalization, where world superpowers (United States and United Kingdom) played the role of main actors and their language got more relevance. Nevertheless, on this aspect I concur with Samuel Huntington, it does not seem that this upturn of the English language means an actual heritage of Western values to the rest of the world, but rather an anglo saxon tool that is useful to communicate with the rest of the world. Learning of English does not imply learning of Western values, but given its simplicity and versatility, as well as being the native language of world superpowers who have won their wars, it became the international language. Thus, although the statistics from Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 show an upturn of English, this element is not only the language of the Western civilization, but it seems to be posed as the current language for international communication among civilizations. This goes beyond international affairs, simply, a person from Russia will usually travel to germany and will interact to people there either in German (native language) or English (international language), but not in Chinese or Spanish. It is also worth noting that Western has a linguistic advantage in the English language, quite often there emerge new terms in English that often become popular at international level. Going from simple terms such as "google it" or "tweet it", up to new terms that represent Western values such as "grooming" or "EDI", or geoestrategic terms such as "Heartland" or "Rimland". Faced with this fact, I also concur with ideas by A. Dugin, who proposes that we should also develop the language, building a sovereign terminology so our speech is sovereign as well. Funny enough, this could be also seen as another sort of equilibrium, not a military or demographic equilibrium, but a linguistic or etimological equilibrium, where the narrative or discourse of one civilization is not a product from the rules or concepts from the other civilization's language (or use nation instead of civilization if you prefer to). Thus, in terms of language, which is what concerns to this post, for a long time we have been playing with the Western terminology, and it will be necessary to the rest of civilizations and nations that they start to create terms, either in English or in their respective language, and not only transfer to themselves what is developed by the West. This will allow the world to become sovereign and multipolar. In the same way that it is difficult to understand quantum mechanics without learning first the mathematical language of linear algebra, or to understand the theory of general relativity without knowing the mathematical language of tensors, it will be difficult to understand the new emergent multipolar world if we do not come along with a sovereign language provided by the different civilizations.