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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GinoLR, post: 8541164, member: 128351&quot;]The natural evolution of human languages has always been diversification, not unification, thus &quot;progress on this front&quot; would mean even more languages spoken.</p><p>The Mediterranean has always been surrounded by peoples speaking a lot of different tongues, but I don&#039;t think there was ever a real language barrier between them, for since the prehistoric times people have always been aware that different languages existed, and they can roughly understand other languages than theirs. </p><p>There was also a special phenomenon in the Mediterranean: the use of a &quot;lingua franca&quot; in the medieval and modern period. In the 1600-1700s for example, in every port city around the Mediterranean, merchants and sailors of different nations could use a kind of special language based on Italian with a lot of Arabic and Turkish words. It was called &quot;lingua franca&quot;, &quot;the language of the Francs&quot;, and obviously developed since the middle ages, in the 12th c., when Italian merchant fleets dominated the whole Mediterranean. </p><p>In Antiquity it was the Greek language that was understood almost everywhere. Today it is &quot;globish&quot;, a simplified form of English, and the existence of a global language does not affect the development of national or even regional languages and dialects.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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