this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
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If a language is easy to learn and easy to use, more people will speak it. The languages that don't adapt die with the people who still insist on using it. There is an evolution and there is a goal, as you said, to communicate. A simpler language is bound to be chosen over one that adds obstacles to communication.
In the same way evolution is mostly driven by an animal's ability to pass off its genes, language is mostly driven by it's ability to be used and learned.
Now I'm thinking about Esperanto, maybe that is not completely true, idk
I would argue that this is just humans attributing intent to a natural process that has none, and is the same sort of erroneous conception as when people say that history has some grand end goal it's working towards. I believe this is amply demonstrated in the lack of success found by Esperanto and similar conlangs that were deliberately constructed in order to be easy to learn for a wide range of people as a neutral lingua franca. If what you claim about the purpose and goal of language were true, these conlangs should have seen widespread adoption and be the most widely spoken languages today, rather than their current status as quirky ideas that are mostly of no interest to people who aren't complete nerds for studying languages.
But the point of a language is not to spread to the most people, it is for the peoples using it being able to use it in a way that makes it possible to communicate with their own in a way that makes sense within the local population, its culture and history.
Different languages have a different learning curve based on what language you grew up with. What is hard for you might be a cakewalk for someone coming from a different language, especially if you are coming from a different family of languages.