The United Nations vs. the Klingons:
I’ve had an idea for a story rattling around in the back of my mind for years. Among Star Trek fans, some like to dress up and act like Klingons. There are so many of these people that while other people are going to Renaissance faires and Civil War reenactments, these Star Trek fans go to monthly Klingon conventions. (This is the real-life background to the story so far; I haven’t started making anything up yet.) These people wear Klingon uniforms and armor, fight each other with Klingon weapons, and eat imitations of Klingon food. The Klingons on Star Trek even had their own language that someone made up, and you can buy Klingon-English dictionaries, where you can learn to speak Klingon.
The story begins with a bunch of people from all over the world flying across the ocean, on their way to an international Klingon convention. Then a nuclear war breaks out, and most of the world’s population is annihilated. The plane crashes into the ocean, but the passengers escape and land on a deserted island. They have everything they need on the island, and the island escaped the nuclear war perfectly intact. The survivors on this island set up a village. There’s just one catch: The only language all of these Klingon reenactors speak in common is Klingon.
Nobody ever comes to rescue them. As the years go by, they settle in to life on the island more and more, and build their village up to a town. Since the island is isolated from the rest of the world and they have no way off it, essentially, it’s now a country. Where the official language is Klingon.
You remember what I said in the last book about native languages being lost by the third generation of immigrants living in America? The people who first settled on Klingon Island would speak Klingon because they had to. To everyone it would feel like a foreign language, but if they were all such hard-core Klingon enthusiasts that they all spoke Klingon fluently, for everyone to speak the language that everyone was already fluent in would be a lot easier than trying to teach some of the people English or whatever other real-life language.
Suppose the settlers of Klingon Island happened to be fairly evenly divided between men and women (by some coincidence). A lot of those people would hook up with romantic partners who spoke their own native language, so they wouldn’t have to speak Klingon all the time. Those people’s children would grow up learning English or whatever at home, but they would learn Klingon outside of the home, because that’s what most people in their community would speak in talking to each other. To the children of the settlers of Klingon Island, who grew up learning both languages, Klingon would be a lot more useful. That means the second generation on Klingon Island wouldn’t feel like Klingon was a foreign language, and they would be a lot more inclined to speak it because it was a lot more useful than English. So when parents talked to their kids in English, the kids would feel like answering in Klingon, because while they understand both languages, the only difference between the two as far as they’re concerned is that one is a lot more useful than the other. That’s exactly what happens in a lot of families of foreign immigrants living in America, except the parents are speaking Spanish or Vietnamese or Italian or something, and their kids answer them in English.
The second generation on Klingon Island would grow up speaking Klingon to each other, and would speak it at home just like they spoke it everywhere else. As a result, their kids wouldn’t learn the first generation’s native language. By the third generation on Klingon Island, the native languages of the original settlers would be old-fashioned traditions from the old world. Those languages would be foreign languages now, and Klingon would be the native language of the third generation.
Like so many scenarios I propose in these books, this sounds absurd. So how could it be possible?
This fictional alien language becomes the official language of real-life humans on Earth because the people in the country agree that it’s the language they’re going to speak to each other. That choice isn’t one they made actively, because everyone involved just did whatever worked best for them, which turned out to be what worked best for everyone else too. At first, a fictional language of an alien race became the official language of this country because there was no other language that would’ve worked as well. Then, if the people built a school in their town, where children would go to be taught things they would need to know as grown-ups, that school would teach them how to read and write in Klingon, because out of all the languages that could be taught in school, that one would be the most useful to everyone in the town.
Like a language, the United Nations is not a physical object. The United Nations is an idea that we have all agreed upon. The United Nations is a thing that exists in the world now because everyone in the world agrees that it exists—or at least, is aware that most people in the world agree it exists. Where did that agreement come from?
For thousands of years, countries had been making treaties, forging alliances, and fighting wars against each other individually. The people who founded the United Nations founded it because collectively they realized there had to be a better way to conduct international affairs, and, having lived through World War II and facing the threat of a nuclear war, collectively they realized that they’d better find a new way to conduct international affairs. So these people agreed upon the United Nations.
To the people who lived around the time the United Nations was founded, it was a new way of doing things that worked better than the old way of doing things. Those people grew up accustomed to things being done a certain way, but that way obviously didn’t work anymore. Now these people found a new way to do things that, one way or another, worked better for each of them, so they agreed to do things in a new way that worked better for all of them.
The United Nations was not as personally meaningful or directly important to anyone as a language—nobody had to learn any “United Nations language”—so the transition from absence-of-United-Nations to presence-of-United-Nations was made in just two generations. Kids who were in school when the United Nations was formed, and all the kids who were born after that—beginning with the baby boomers—grew up learning about this new agreement that existed in the world called the United Nations. They never knew of things being done any other way, and the former ways of doing things didn’t work as well anyway. So now we’ve all agreed to do things this way.
Like the adoption of Klingon as the official language of Klingon Island, the United Nations is an agreement that people made, not because they collectively preferred it over another idea that would’ve worked almost as well, but because out of all the ideas they had to choose from, this one worked way better than any other. While the formation of the United Nations was a much bigger undertaking than speaking a language that was foreign to everyone on an island but everyone on the island understood, it was, in the same way, instinctive for everyone involved to do whatever worked best for them—meaning, whatever all of them perceived to offer the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA. One way or another, doing this new thing worked best for everyone, so everyone agreed to do it, and this new way of doing things became the way things were done now.