Useful and useless languages

I hate it when people describe a language as either useful or useless. In reality, it's neither. Think about it: a language such as Mandarin Chinese can be as useless as a language like Swedish. It all comes down to what you do with your language skills. Are you going to do anything related to China and Chinese? Are you going to do anything related to Sweden and Swedish?

So, what you do determines the usefulness of any language, be it Arabic or Oromo. Of course, everything also depends on how you perceive the usefulness of your actions.

There's only one language in the world that is (or more, has become) undoubtedly useful for anyone: English. And that's only because it's used by so many people around the world to communicate with not only English speakers, but also native speakers of other completely unrelated languages. A German can easily communicate with an Indonesian by using English.

The point is, don't say that you should learn this language because it is "useful" and not learn that language because it is "useless." It's only useful if you use it, and useless if you don't.

Your second point is reasonable, and I actually agree.

Now, your first point is moot (OH HAI MOOT!). But how many years must pass before we get to the point of having unintelligible languages which are rooted from a single one? 1000? 300? At that point we can "reset" everything and create a new universal language. And I don't mean Esperanto or Lojban shit: i mean a true lingua franca, just like English is a lingua franca today.