Australian Cave Offers Klingon Audio Tour

schliz writes "An Australian cave system visited by 200,000 tourists a year is expanding its range of audio guides to support Klingon. Cave operators reportedly engaged the services of two 'Klingon scholars' from the US, following Star Trek's naming of a 'Sydney Class' Starship, the USS Jenolan."

Re:Dogh qoH!

[ElectricTurtle]

After a few generations of near-instant communication and transportation on the scale of 'anywhere in the world in 24 hours' I think that a planetary monoculture is inevitable. Cultural homogenization is visible throughout history and across geography. Cultural anthropologist Wade Davis among others believes that of those 6000 languages 90% will be extinct by 2050 (though I think his estimate is extreme and unscientific). In any case, the rate of language death is increasing. There were more languages going extinct in the 18th century than the 17th, more still in the 19th than the 18th, and there were almost three times as many language extinctions in the 20th as in the 19th century. With a finite number of languages and an increasing rate of extinction, it is not unreasonable that most languages will be dead in a few generations. (Especially as contemporary knowledge and commerce increasingly focus on a very limited set of languages.)

However, there is a mitigating element in the form of the advancement of computer generated translations. I remember translating pages with early versions of BabelFish and how they were still practically impossible to understand, but now when I translate pages I can actually get most of the information that they were intended to convey. If people don't necessarily "need" to learn other languages to access information and communicate cross-culturally, it may encourage them to retain and pass on more of their native language.

If I were a betting man, I would wager that in the next century or two the number of languages in common use will reduce to one or two hundred. Where things will be after a millennium or two I won't hazard to guess. I expect that in the not-to-distant future spoken and written language will be supplanted by a purely electronic communication between people via a neural interface of some kind. It's the only natural development I can imagine for the rudimentary neural interfaces currently extant.