Warning: this post may contain spoilers for Dune and Dune Messiah.
I have been reading the Dune novels by Frank Herbert, and I recently finished the second installation of the series. It is a worthy sequel to Dune, and I can't wait to see the film adaptation when it is released next year.
One thing I appreciate is how language is used by individuals in the book. Although there appears to be a common language, there are also languages optimised for particular tasks. There are hunting languages, battle languages and a language designed for diplomacy and conveying emotion. The closest real-world examples of this I can know are the vernaculars of air-traffic controllers and lawyers. While these can both be recognised as English, they sit on the far edge of the distribution of average conversation.
Whether conciously or not, Frank Herbert is pointing to something about languages here. Although natural languages like English are "general" (they can express ideas of arbitrary complexity given sufficient words), they are organically optimised to the paroachial situations in which they are used. Syllables are mapped to meanings with preferential treatment to the most common concepts. In computing these are Hamming codes, and I think the same process is carried out in nature.
I often find that my native language does not always map well to the ideas I try to convey. This makes me wonder whether we could contruct languages for specific purposes (like Lojban for logic). Language diversity appears to be decreasing over time rather than increasing; perhaps this is something we should actively address.