I gotta say, the Freakonomics commenters are definitely some of the sharpest on the Net. A lot of the responses to the quorum on globalization and Language that we got to participate in were as interesting as the official post! Here are some things I learned from the 80-some posts that are up so far.

Even though as John mentioned in his contribution to the post, there isn’t a country that has volunteered to change its language to English for economic reasons, a commenter named Ari Fromm says there’s an industry that has done so.

English is currently mandatory for ALL air traffic control worldwide. That’s a pretty strong indication of what the universal language of the world is……

It’s clear that with the rise of English, multi-lingualism is on the rise as well. But what’s the most bilingual continent? According to a commenter named Bjog, it’s Africa, which makes sense when you think about it.

Every African is minimally bilingual–more than any other people on the planet. Every African speaks their native language, the language of nearby ethnic communities, plus the language in which their country was colonized–any of the Europhone languages.

The Koreans are hedging their bets when it comes global super powers. Alan says:

…note that there are 100,000 Korean students at Chinese universities and 100,000 Korean students at American universites.

Finally, people seem really preoccupied with this notion that English is going to morph and change into pidgin or creole English. Probably half the posts on the quorum are about this idea. It seems intuitive and it’s not new to us, but a commenter named Neil Wilson has a suggestion to the contrary.

Look at the written word. It seems to me that there were far more changes to the English language between Jefferson’s words in 1776 and Lincoln’s words in 1863 than between Lincoln and Obama. This is true even though it has been 7 score and 4 years (It hasn’t been 5 years yet.)

English is far more stable today than it ever has been.

Thou art quite right, sir. ‘Tis sooth that our English tongue hath been a changling historickly.

Though were English to change as rapidly as everyone suspects, would the result be horrible and Orwellian? A commenter named Ramon Cashon says, “Yes!”

Think of the users’ manual of a Japanese or Chinese product and apply that to the spoken word. THAT is the English language that will gain dominance… if you can still call it a language at that stage.

At least information about any language is available now. It didn’t occur me to that it’s easier to pick up a local tongue of another locality than ever before until this comment from Tieler:

You can’t go to your local library or bookstore and buy books on Kurdish, but go online and there is a wealth of resources for grammar, vocabulary, online dictionaries, and so on.

All in all, it’s great to see how much interest there is in this topic. And I can’t wait to see if I’m speaking pidgin, Mandarin or the Queen’s English in five years.

Since Ebaby! TV was officially launched today, I figured it was time to share the story of the genesis of the Ebaby! soap opera.

First of all, in case you didn’t know, all the dialogues in the Ebaby! lessons are improvised since the whole point of them is to teach people real, conversational English. We just start with a topic and see where it goes, and then I take the recordings back to the office and make lessons out of them.

While most of us are pretty straight forward in the scenes, Amanda is the only member of the Ebaby! cast who is an actress by trade, and she likes to throw us curve balls for fun. Most of them don’t make it in the lessons because they tend to be a little risque. Her goal is to make the other person in the scene laugh.

Amanda’s main target for these shenanigans has always been Mason. She would just throw in some comment that would imply they have a child or are married or are dating or were dating but now she’s mad at him. Marni started trying to keep track of it, as though it were a plot line, “But, wait, last month you were just dating and now you have a child? What’s going on?” Which gave me an idea.

I had also noticed that the cast, particularly Mason, had some fans among the members. There are occasional broken English comments of the oh-you’re-so-cute nature. So I figured, what better way to tantalize these members who had developed a crush on Mason from watching him talk about movies and music than to actually depict him in a relationship?

All I needed was a plot. Luckily, around this time I went on a couple of dates with a girl I really liked. I met her through a friend and asked him if he thought it would be a good idea to try to date her. He said go for it; he’d date her himself if they weren’t so close. Then one day, whoops, they started dating. Sound familiar?

The cast didn’t know that I was basing the soap opera off my life until a couple of months ago when we filmed this scene in which Mason apologizes to me for giving me the go ahead to date Amanda and then making a move on her himself.

Now, even the soap opera episodes are improvised, so no one really knows what’s going to happen exactly until the scene is over. The direction for this scene was just, “OK, Mason, you sit down with me and apologize for pulling a 180 and I forgive you. Ready? Action.”

So when the scene was over, Amanda asked if I would really be that forgiving if I were in that situation. So I told her that I actually had in been in that situation and I was.

I mean, if there’s anything I’ve learned in this life, it’s that there’s no point in wishing for things that are impossible or trying to get people to do something they don’t want to do. What, was I going to steal my Amanda back from my Mason? Forget it. Couldn’t be done. So my options were, be angry at a friend who meant me no harm, or not be angry with him. Life’s too short to waste it being angry at your friends, so the choice was obvious.

The 19th episode of the soap goes on the site today, and it’s actually the first one that isn’t loosely based on my life. My Mason and Amanda actually aren’t seeing each other anymore, and if I wanted to keep basing the soap on their lives, I’d need another male cast member. But that’s another story.