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Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

economist.com

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Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#11

Post by School-Cotton »

lotu wrote: post #9
slibhb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For some reason, the entire anglosphere[1] is just plain bad at language education[2]. That's not to say that learning a new language is easy, of course. It's just that we aren't even really trying. The anglosphere is perfectly willing to just sit and make the rest of the world speak our language. Is this fair framing? Doesn't it seem likely that English speaking countries are bad at learning languages precisely be…

I kinda think that the lingua Franca, is very sticky. Think base 10 or the Gregorian calendar or QWERTY . None of these are the only or even best solution but they are going to all stick around forever just because it will never make sense to change them.

Yep. Latin was the lingua franca (or at least one of the major ones) in Europe until 1800 or so, more than 1000 years after the fall of the western Roman Empire.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#12

Post by School-Cotton »

pottertheotter wrote: post #8
MattGaiser wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most learning is neccesity driven learning. If you speak English, in most major cities around the globe you need nothing else. Canada has a kerfuffle about how the CEO of a major company here didn't speak any French after a decade of living in Quebec, but virtually nobody I know who has lived in Montreal has picked any French up at all (assuming they started out Anglophone). I know people in Germany who have picked u…

Your comment about people in Germany not picking up German surprised me. I don’t have a ton of first-hand experience, but my impression has been that it was more of necessity there than other European countries.

I’ve visited Berlin three times and most people I interacted with spoke English perfectly. The English level was about as high as in Montreal.

Perhaps it’s different if you live there and have to interact with more people; I’m not sure.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#14

Post by AnAfrican »

It’s weird how the article does not give any example of languages that did spread and become dominant without any coercion. They do exist: Swahili and Lingala for instance. They mostly spread through trade and as « neutral » language used to communicate between ethnic groups (with their own language).

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#15

Post by ashtonkem »

kmeisthax wrote: post #5

What's already happening is that languages that aren't tied to their own unique literary cultures are slowly shrinking. The countries that don't have their own media import it, and will often learn other languages to access it rather than waiting for translations of varying quality. France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, and India all have enough unique, untranslated culture to get people to consider learning the langu…

> The countries that don't have their own media import it, and will often learn other languages to access it rather than waiting for translations of varying quality.

Also, even when such media cultures exist, they’re competing against the incredible might of Hollywood, Netflix, Disney, etc. It is very difficult to compete with the budget and production quality that these companies can maintain if you’re a smaller economy. Disney’s revenue last year was 12% of Sweden’s GDP ($65B vs $541B). Sweden would have to sink a massive chunk of its GDP into movies in order to compete with just Disney, let alone all the other streaming services.

My suspicion is that there needs to be not only a tradition to act as a bulwark, but also some national self identity that causes people to reject the homogenizing effect of foreign media. That can either be pride in extant local media (I understand that the Paris novel scene is rather hostile to non-native involvement, for example), or an explicit rejection of the foreign media for more explicitly political reasons.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#16

Post by ashtonkem »

slibhb wrote: post #7
kmeisthax wrote: post #5

What's already happening is that languages that aren't tied to their own unique literary cultures are slowly shrinking. The countries that don't have their own media import it, and will often learn other languages to access it rather than waiting for translations of varying quality. France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, and India all have enough unique, untranslated culture to get people to consider learning the langu…

> For some reason, the entire anglosphere[1] is just plain bad at language education[2]. That's not to say that learning a new language is easy, of course. It's just that we aren't even really trying. The anglosphere is perfectly willing to just sit and make the rest of the world speak our language. Is this fair framing? Doesn't it seem likely that English speaking countries are bad at learning languages precisely be…

That’s fair for America, as it’s both the local hegemon and a long way away from any near peer power that’s not English speaking. Our weight means that everyone in the neighborhood bends to us, for better or for worse. If someone from Mexico wants to come to America or do business with Americans, chances are they’ll learn English rather than expecting the converse to happen.

America is also huge in the way that few countries are. This means that you can trivially go your entire life enjoying vacations without leaving the country. Nobody in the EU has that luxury.

The UK though is not the local hegemon. They’re peers and close trading partners with several non English speaking countries, many of which are extremely close physically too. The UK is not politically and economically powerful enough to expect all the other European countries to learn English in order to do business with them.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#17

Post by raverbashing »

MattGaiser wrote: post #6
kmeisthax wrote: post #5

What's already happening is that languages that aren't tied to their own unique literary cultures are slowly shrinking. The countries that don't have their own media import it, and will often learn other languages to access it rather than waiting for translations of varying quality. France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, and India all have enough unique, untranslated culture to get people to consider learning the langu…

Most learning is neccesity driven learning. If you speak English, in most major cities around the globe you need nothing else. Canada has a kerfuffle about how the CEO of a major company here didn't speak any French after a decade of living in Quebec, but virtually nobody I know who has lived in Montreal has picked any French up at all (assuming they started out Anglophone). I know people in Germany who have picked u…

I can understand not learning it too much, but not picking any of it just sounds lazy and privileged

I tend to agree with "Lazy Anglo Brain".

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#18

Post by dimitar »

The spread of Russian in Ukraine fits this model (coercion to establish dominance, then continued spread without coercion) very well. Urban areas in the East and Center became Russian-speaking through Soviet measures like mixing nationalities at work/army to force them to use Russian. There were other coersive measures like the central planning not providing not enough Ukrainian media (only folk music programs on TV for example) and limiting the classes available in Ukrainian in some regions.

Now the "language of inter-nationality communication" is so entrenched, that Ukrainian needs government support to incentivise media and businesses to use it. As everyone understands Russian nowadays, and few people know English, companies that serve the CIS market actually promote Russian better than the government promotes Ukrainian.

To talk about the elephant in the room, note that the politics don't correlate perfectly with the language situation on the ground - on one hand there are quite a few Russian-speakers that don't want Russian as an official language and also plenty of pro-Western people want Russian to be co-official.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#19

Post by ipaddr »

ashtonkem wrote: post #15
kmeisthax wrote: post #5

What's already happening is that languages that aren't tied to their own unique literary cultures are slowly shrinking. The countries that don't have their own media import it, and will often learn other languages to access it rather than waiting for translations of varying quality. France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, and India all have enough unique, untranslated culture to get people to consider learning the langu…

> The countries that don't have their own media import it, and will often learn other languages to access it rather than waiting for translations of varying quality. Also, even when such media cultures exist, they’re competing against the incredible might of Hollywood, Netflix, Disney, etc. It is very difficult to compete with the budget and production quality that these companies can maintain if you’re a smaller eco…

There must be more to this; places like Nigeria, India, China, Japan all make more feature films compared to the US. Countries like Spain, France, Germany, UK make about half as many. Mexico, Brazil are in the top 15..

But Anglo countries like Canada or Australia or New Zealand make many fewer. UK makes slightly less than the US.

Population size probably matters more and gdp less but having some unique to say helps.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#20

Post by akg_67 »

dimitar wrote: post #18

The spread of Russian in Ukraine fits this model (coercion to establish dominance, then continued spread without coercion) very well. Urban areas in the East and Center became Russian-speaking through Soviet measures like mixing nationalities at work/army to force them to use Russian. There were other coersive measures like the central planning not providing not enough Ukrainian media (only folk music programs on TV…

Similar changes happened in Japan (Ainu and Okinawan languages displaced by Japanese) and Taiwan (Taiwanese language displaced by Chinese). In this aspect, I credit India for not coercing a national language to displace regional languages. But then such unification of languages may be a contributing factor to keeping country together and alleviate regionalism.
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