In an era of Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, the age-old dream of a universal language, contemplated by thinkers from Dante to Sylvia Pankhurst, has found a new and vibrant home. The impulse to foster global harmony by communicating across continents has manifested in technologies such as real-time speech-to-speech translation in the Metaverse, bringing us once step closer to transcending the curse of Babel. Philip Seargeant delves into the persistent allure of a universal language, shedding light on its potential pitfalls and the shadows it casts over our modern world. A decade after the end of the First World War, the social rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst wrote a short book outlining her recipe for a brighter future for humankind. A key ingredient, she argued, was a universal language. According to Pankhurst, the existence of a single world language would…

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