Aviation, One language to rule them all

Posted on by wanderer

From roads let us go to the next technology in transport, the sky!

But first let us briefly return to our beloved Metric as an example of how the institutionalisation of technical terms has changed how most of the people on the planet see themselves. For example, the metric is even applied to such delicate aspects of our life as how much our newborn baby weighs.

So if the Metric is so intertwined in our everyday lives, it is interesting to look at one of the first and most powerful real universalisations that actually does not use the metric: aviation. For anybody familiar with planes, they will notice that many of the indications of flight control, altitude, distances, meteorological information and other measures are in what is called the Imperial system. I.e. in feet, knots, miles etc.

Aviation, like road traffic, greatly benefits from a common universal language, and in this case it has achieved it. As with the other nascent scientifico-technical internationalisations, aviation’s global language arises hand in hand with the rapid growth and usage of the new technology, and now the neighbours are not just overland but also over air. Therefore, as with the telegraph, the previously semi-disconnected UK and US administrations are much more susceptible to fold into common standards with the rest of the western world, or in this case, to impose them.

Little more than 100 years ago, almost nobody had ever flown. Thirty years later planes were used to bomb and burn entire cities, like in the case of Guernica, sadly the most noticeable example of the use of the new aerial technology aimed at the destruction of civilian life. A decade later, after WWII, planes were routinely crossing the Atlantic. That rapid expansion needed close collaboration to manage these vehicles across multiple lands and cultural codes. No one would want to have signalling that would confound the pilots or the machine maintenance because different protocols were used in each of the landing areas, nasty results ahead otherwise.

In the early beginnings of cross-Atlantic flight, six nations grouped to divide the Atlantic into ten zones. Each zone had a letter representing that zone, and a station providing radio relay, radio navigation beacons, weather reports and rescue alerts if an aircraft went down.

To coordinate the radio signals, administrations had to agree to common protocols, technologies, radio frequencies, languages, measures and so on and so forth. That was the beginning of international flight.

Since we jumped to after WWII, the United Nations is already up and running (we will deal in detail with the UN in later sections). Therefore, it fell into the hands of the UN to set up an agency organising all the protocols and regulations of air flight: the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The ICAO has virtually universal participation (192 out of 193 nations in the UN — only Liechtenstein is out, as it lacks an international airport, but so does the puny Monaco and that does not stop it from being an ICAO member). Then, because, well, virtually everything else in the world was in Metric at the time, the ICAO’s guidelines recommended that the needed units to coordinate flight be based on the metric system.

They failed.

The fact that aviation is in Imperial lies down to the usual suspects, the US and the UK. In the basic framework that we set, technology, independent administrations and colonialism, aviation is a good example of the first-mover advantage of a big administration. A big part of the aviation sector was established in the US, especially at the moment that aviation became really international, just with the onset of WWII. From that moment, inertia took over, and whatever units the dominant player was using, these became the ones to be kept, until now. The US and UK never forced their hands. In this case, the standard just became and now in planes you find this:

  • Feet for height
  • Knots for airspeed (Nautical Miles/Hour)
  • Nautical Miles or feet for distance
  • Statute Miles or feet for weather (visibility and Runway Visual Range)
  • Inches of Mercury for altimeter settings
  • Pounds/square inch for pressure
  • Pounds for the fuel quantity on the aircraft
  • Pounds/hour for fuel flow
  • Gallons to order/purchase fuel

But, wait, what about the Cold War, how did the Soviet bloc adopt an “imperial” system? you might ask. You did well to ask, the aviation sector of the former USSR republics, North Korea and China. However, Russia changed their system to imperial in 2017 for practical purposes of internationalisation, showing how inertia can hamper or shift standardisation – we will talk about inertia and its relevance in the human world later on.

The aviation system is a good example of how things work on the drive to universalisation. Again, it is a technology linked with a global connectivity which forces the policymaking institutions and a highly technical sector to agree to a common understanding. Here geographical extension, technique, technology, communication, policies and standards go hand in hand to establish a more or less established global agreement, with the limits of inertia and the fight between two standards, the traditional one (Imperial) and the scientifico-technical one (Metric).

Nevertheless, the universal I want to focus on for aviation is another, its language for communication, where a natural language (although highly technified) took over. Only one spoken and written language is used in the sector, that language is known by everybody in aviation. That is a global spoken language.

My father once told me that English was in the past a planetary language because all in aviation used English. The moment that English was adopted in aviation might be the first time that a language is truly universal among one specific sector: traffic controllers and all pilots who fly internationally. In the aviation case we have the bases of a natural language becoming a global phenomenon, although circumscribed to a really technical sector. In this case, though, for the first time there were no local variations or the connivance of two or more standards. One language to rule them all.

In the same way that the Imperial system is the dominant (but not exclusive) measurement system in aviation, English became the dominant and exclusive language in aviation, despite what the ICAO logo at the beginning of this entry shows.

Nevertheless, the language, despite being a natural language, was limited to professional usage. I do not see the air traffic controllers writing poetry based on the level of English that they need for their work. In fact it is a kind of technical language: adverse yaw, downwash, squawk… are mostly obscure for anybody using English but not working in the aeronautic sector.

In the case of aviation, like the signage for cars, the need for a common universal language arises from the rapid growth and usage of a new technology, and administrations doing what administrations do best: administer.

The process of embracing a unified rule code has had slightly more success than the Vienna Convention for road signs. Aviation has achieved not only the existence of ICAO with virtually universal participation, but also the language of communication in the aeronautic sector, that is, the spoken and written language is only one and has to be known by anybody working in the sector. Now, at a planetary scale a single language is uniquely present in the sector.

Like we have seen before, the aviation system presents the process of universalisation through technical development, administrative interaction and imperialism. Again, aviation is a technology linked with a global connectivity which forces the policymaking institutions and a highly technical sector to agree to a common understanding. Here geographical extension, technique, technology, communication, policies and standards go hand in hand to establish a global agreement. Impressively though, in the aviation case tradition is the one that has kept the two technical standards (Imperial and Metric), but has, for the first time, erased natural language diversity. Aviation = English globally.

We have the emergence of a natural language becoming a global phenomenon. We will see the limits of natural languages becoming the vehicular communication of technical or niche sectors, but for now we have seen that aviation was the first, or one of the first, sectors to break the crystal ceiling of a unique global language taking over one piece of the world. Aviation has increased the connectivity of the planet and has made accessible and affordable rapid travelling times for a huge chunk of the world’s population. However, it has not yet reached the vast majority of the population.

For now, I leave you with the fact that, for as long as humanity has existed, English now constitutes the first truly, and unique, global language that has relatively easy access for learning and use, from technical to everything else. If the metric is used for something so tender as the weight of a newborn baby, imagine what a whole language is doing, and will do, to us.

Previous

Roads: rules and signs

Next

Programming languages

Roads: rules and signs

Posted on by wanderer

Let’s leave bureaus, sports, aid and law for a bit, and focus on one more scientifico-technical standard that emerged on the back of technological development at the beginning of the XXc.

The world had not finished with mathematics, music and signs as technical or symbolic languages. A much more passionate topic rolls on: road signage!

As with clocks (timekeeping), religion and administration (the calendar), accounting (mathematical signs), the printing press (punctuation), musical instruments (music sheets), geodesics and administration (the metric), statistics (significance and error conventions), the telegraph (the Morse code), the World Fairs (places for technonerds to meet), the railways (time zones), bicycles (standardised parts) and typewriting (QWERTY keyboards), the motorised vehicles that were taking over the planet at the beginning of the XXc were poised to push some convention upon us.

We might be familiar with the signs that emerge on the side of roads. They might be circular, squares, triangles, octagons, or sideways squares (diamonds), shields and house-like shapes (pentagons). Their colours would be red, white, blue, yellow, green, with the occasional brown, pink, or orange. There are also luminescent ones, with colours that change, usually from green to orange and to red. These signs have a combination of standardised pictures, messages and numbers to convey an almost global meaning. These signs are expected to be understood by the people who go about on the roads with their motor vehicles.

The signs and traffic lights did not exist before the clogging of the pre-existing roads with these fast vehicles, though bicycle clubs were the first ones to experiment with road signage, especially indicating slopes. The new road conditions called for easily identifiable signs to be read quickly by any driver, no matter their origin. So, with the fast, and numerous, vehicles the signs went up. Soon enough people in Europe were aware that the signs had to be shared across national borders, otherwise vehicles crossing from one country to another could be confused by different meanings. Speed of reaction was, and still is, crucial.

Following the international conventions that we have seen emerging from the end of the XIXc. on the back of technical inventions and imperial powers, they organised what probably is one of the most boring conferences in history. In 1909 the European vehicle associations met in Paris to decide on a small set of common traffic signs. They did a similar thing in 1931 and 1949 in Geneva to unify a larger set of signs on a European scale. By 1968 security triumphed over boredom, they met in Vienna and created the “Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals”, aiming to make traffic signalling universal for the whole planet.

They failed.

Map of "danger" sing shapes on by country. Red, blues, green denote triangles use ad warning or danger. Yellow and orange indicate diamonds use. Purple has both.
Map of “danger” sing shapes on by country. Red, blues, green denote triangles use ad warning or danger. Yellow and orange indicate diamonds use. Purple has both.

Currently, there are two main road sign standards on the planet, plus a lot of other stuff in between. One of them is the European one, which gave the world the “Vienna Convention”, adopted by 68 countries (roughly red on the map), and the North American one, boringly called the “Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways” (MUTCDSH), and used, with many variants, in the yellow countries on the map. But not all is well and standard in the US for the MUTCDSH, as some states engaged in Typefacewars, maybe the most bland wars in history. In southern Africa, ten countries use the also engaging name of the Southern African Development Community – Road Traffic Signs Manual (SADC-RTSM).

Road traffic sign from South Africa, as encoded in the Southern African Development Community – Road Traffic Signs Manual

But even in MUTCDSH- and SADC-RTSM-derived countries, The Convention forms the basis of much of the traffic signage, or is similar enough. If a non-Irish European drives through the US, most of the signs would be immediately familiar. The biggest differences between The Convention and Non-Convention countries are that speed limits and obligatory signs are rectangular, and yellow diamonds with black signs are used as warnings. Instead, The Convention uses round signs for speed limits and obligatory signs and an upward-pointing red and white triangle for warnings — also shared by SADC-RTSM, but one might find different animals. Even that difference between Convention and Non-Convention danger signs is not much, as an upward-pointing triangle is just the upper half of a diamond, therefore it is not much of a stretch of the imagination to understand the other.

The story of road signage does not stop in the 20th century! In 2025, the Global Forum for Road Traffic Safety (another global boring organism that rules your life but you probably never heard about) passed a resolution to replace the entire text of the Convention! The exciting road-signage path rolls ahead!

We then took this little traffic diversion to show three ingredients that we will see from now on shaping many of the global questions of the planet. First, an agglomeration of big and middle-sized countries that are in close proximity to each other and need to share a convention for the benefit of them all find terms to agree with each other. Second, when new technology standards — especially related to communication — emerge and extend, the consolidation into commonly agreed rules tends to take shape relatively fast. Third, colonial powers force the conventions into colonised territories without the input of the societies under dominion.

Roads, moreover, are the paramount example of infrastructure. It is needed, inherited, maintained over generations and represents connectivity like nothing else. For much of the modern world, the combination of technology and infrastructure drives the need for a — virtually — universal language. Coordination forces create the political motivation for neighbouring, independent administrations to sit down at a table and try to agree on a common set of conventions. Once a standard achieves enough maturity through this process of regional standardisation, technological development and colonial imposition, the parts of the planet that are still not part of this dynamic are more likely simply to adopt that standard. New players, then, either adopt it or at least have it in consideration.

With these three characteristics, it is easy to see how Europe is the place in the World that has the most influence in shaping much of the standards and internationalisation, as we have seen in the Western Dominions entry.

Similarly, exceptions to these three general trends are easy to see, with densely populated islands that have not been colonised recently, like the Japanese archipelago and Great Britain, and big countries like China and the US. The US and the UK in part explain the survival of two Western standard flavours, as they were big enough, isolated enough and innovative enough to consolidate and protect their own conventions, but still share much with the rest of international protocols.

This kind of mindset and framework would be important for our question of what humanity wants.

Previous

International organisations

Next

Aviation, One language to rule them all