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The broadest description of my theory that the number of distinct languages in an area was once much higher. The more specific idea is that there is an invariant involved related to travel. That a travel with substantial effort would always yield a new language or significantly different dialect to talk to.
This means that there would have to be multi-lingual people in the educated class needed by the powerful. My claim is this would be true from the late Neolithic to the modern day. Because you would have people who spoke differently always within range of war and trade.
As movement improved via horse, boat, and road, languages became more expansive, but it would always take roughly the same time or expense to escape your toungue. The exception would be today because travel has increased much faster than languages can die. But because Europe is only a day away from the US (actually all the world is only about a day away from everywhere else), we're due to reduce our languages to 1-4.
I think because French, German, and Scandinavian languages are soon to die to English we should be moving all of their unique concepts to English to preserve the value. That will happen on its own late in the game. As English becomes truly dominant in Europe some terms from the original language will become slang and useful slang travels and will travel beyond the region. But that will be very lossy. Getting ahead on it will preserve more and make a better English.
Balkan languages are probably first on the block to die. But I think everything will go all at once. Once it becomes trendy to speak English in most conversations anywhere in Europe that trend will hit everywhere and you are only about a generation away from all of those languages being dead.
But back to the theory on history is that a good percent of people who could read write would have been multi-lingual. Someone needed to be in any society and it makes sense they'd be the ones to do it because it would be a useful skill to help the powerful and serving the powerful is what literate people did for most of human history.
Yes.
I've heard this before elsewhere. It's logical.
Also there were some universal traveler dialects/languages/sign languages, especially useful in trade.
Not sure what you mean by, "we should be moving all of their unique concepts to English to preserve the value." As I don't speak other languages I can't bring stuff in. Since before Shakespeare there's no shortage of "English" words that have been adopted from other languages, like toupee, lingerie, bidet, tourniquet.
My friend Emma has been translating her father's work from Ukrainian to English, but really he spoke more Belarussian. When she visited there decades ago the Belarussian language had pretty much died out. The violent Bolsheviks had forced everyone to drop it for Russian - and over decades and generations it has pretty much faded out.
It was a major pain in the ass to write this Wikipedia article using an older Google-Translate to go from Latvian to Russian to English. (A few years later I met Latvian Gravi on SaidIt.)
I've been all over North America. Alaska to Key West, Newfoundland to Mexico. Never beyond. And I haven't travelled much in the last dozen years. The last 2 weeks I've been working with a very clever 18 year old lad who's never even been to London Ontario two hours away or Detroit just across the river. Many people simply never travel, some do, with interests and/or opportunities. There are good and bad reasons to be xenophobic - and anti-centralized-government.