If only 6 languages survive this world, which will they be?

Interesting, Walter. Thank you for sharing it with us.

Neat thread.

Definitely worthwhile to get a couple of misconceptions out of the way though.

1. Signed languages are valid languages in and of themselves. There is no UNIVERSAL sign language shared by all deaf people. If you put 2 deaf speakers of unrelated sign languages together, they will be able to communicate as well as I can with a speaker of Xhosa.

Sign languages possess complete grammars, with phonology of a sort (patterning of gestures rather than sounds), morphology (combining smaller pieces to form larger words), syntax (combining words to form sentences), semantics (interpreting the meaning of utterances) and pragmatics (meaning changing based on context).

Signed languages have dialects, standard forms in some cases, slang, jargon, etc.

They are NOT hand signals for sounds of particular spoken languages. Signed languages that co-exist alongside spoken languages such as ASL and English develop ways of expressing English words and grammar structures, but these techniques are not a part of the grammar of that signed language; nor are signed languages based on spoken languages.

Sign languages are a different manifestation of the language faculty possessed by all humans, in a gestural form rather than a verbal one.

A couple of neat links about ASL:

Facts showing that ASL is a language just like any spoken one:
http://ling.ucsd.edu/courses/lign4/asl.pdf

Ethnologue description:
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ASE

Moving on:

2. Computer languages ARE NOT languages in the sense defined by linguists (see 1st link above for a definition).

Computer languages are used to give instructions to a machine to tell it what to do when a program is run. Crucially, computer languages cannot "communicate about events removed in space and/or time
from the immediate communicative situation." They so not possess an "infinite capacity to express and understand meaning by using a fixed set of elements to produce new meanings." (quotes are from the defition of language supplied by the above link)

And finally:

3. The question of what 6 languages will survive is fun to think about, but lacks a concrete answer, due to the simple fact that languages change so drastically over time that they become unintelligible to speakers of older varieties. Would you consider Latin to have survived to modern times? Are all the Romance (Italic) languages really a single language? Well, originally, yes, but presently, no. Same goes for Germanic, Slavic, Altaic, Indo-Aryan, and so on. And going back further still, what about Indo-European? In a sense, it has survived the ages, although no speaker of any daughter language could understand the original form...

Perhaps someday we will have a situation where English, French, Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, and so on, are the only remaining MOTHER languages of the existing daughter languages, but the fact is that English, Spanish, French and Hindi originally sprung from the same source, so shouldn't they count as 1, rather than 4?

As you can see, counting this becomes a slippery issue...

Indo-European linguistic family tree:

http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/oe/oe-ie.html

No votes for Japanese?

In that case, there will be another language that will survive "Brazilian Portuguese". :wink:

In my opinion English, Spanish, French, Chinese and few other mutation or dialects created by the merge of several other languages or other dialects.

And other ways of communication, in some remote areas, we will be going back to drawings in the walls and smoke signals.

You will have to ask my brother mezzie, Harper.

english will survive because it's becoming a lingua franca (this won't last forever though but its life expectancy is like forever to me).

spanish because of the growth rate.

mandarin if china isn't dismembered.

russian because of the past, and because russians just don't speak english.

french because of culture.

arabic because of islam.

i think japanese is quite a strong language as well, partly because japan is an island.

other languages would suffer from their too few speakers, a poor economy or bilingualism in the country (hindi).

Espanol!
I would have to say....

1. English
2. Spanish
3. Portuguese
4. French
5. German
6. Russian

I don't think that Chinese would survive

I think that this will only happen if some countries be invaded by others, and I can't foresee which ones. Brazilians will hardly stop speaking Portuguese spontaneously, and I guess it's the same with the official languages of Italy, Israel, Iran, Indonesia, India, Mongolia, Japan, Thailand, etc.