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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Actually, the Simplified Chinese character set was a created as a government effort specifically to increase the literacy rate by making the writing system easier to learn.

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gwern's avatar

Reading a Smithsonian article reminded me: why do you say that this is a problem when the 20th and 21st century have witnessed the deaths of many languages with thousands of language extinctions estimated in the future?

"The general consensus is that there are between 6000[2] and 7000 languages currently spoken, and that between 50-90% of those will have become extinct by the year 2100.[1]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... or: "The top 20 languages spoken by more than 50 million speakers each, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, whereas many of the other languages are spoken by small communities, most of them with less than 10,000 speakers."

Isn't this exactly what you would expect on economic and coordination grounds? With an increasingly developed global economy, small languages lose their benefits compared to the opportunity costs, with ever more coordination on a few very widespread languages and a single lingua franca, while medium size languages poke along and the top languages enjoy outsized benefits (consider how many people speak any form of English even after the fall of the English Empire).

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