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Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'

theguardian.com

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Re: Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'

#41

Post by pacaro »

personlurking wrote: post #38
cal5k wrote: post #13

Just got back from Iceland! (I'm Canadian) Outside of the touristy parts of Reykjavik, everybody will assume you speak Icelandic until you respond in English. Then they'll switch to almost perfect English, with remarkably few exceptions. It was pretty amazing. In small towns like Akureryi, there's a lot of local pressure to keep signs mostly in Icelandic. I was actually surprised by this since there were a lot of Eng…

On the flip side, trying to learn the language of the country you’re in when everyone speaks fluent English kind of sucks exactly because everyone will just switch to English instead of let you practice. I suppose that’s the rub: to a local, when they notice you speaking (or, rather, trying to speak) a foreign language in a their country, are you struggling or trying to practice?

I’ve often heard this, it’s never been my practical experience. If after the other party switches to English you either persist in their language, or ask politely if you can continue in their language, everyone I’ve ever encountered has been happy to help me stumble on

Re: Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'

#42

Post by mbid »

sdhgaiojfsa wrote: post #31
sotojuan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toute l’expérience d’un individu est construit sur le plan de son langage. [An individual’s experience is built entirely in terms of his language.]

Perhaps, but y=x+1 and u=v+1 are the same, even if they use different terms. Likewise, y=x+1 !== y=x-1, even though they use the same terms. It's really unclear to me that much harm will be done if everyone speaks the same language, and it's clear to me that there will be great benefits. That's an easy position for me to take as a primary speaker of the world's dominant language. It's also no skin off my back if othe…

Not all knowledge is logic or maths.

Re: Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'

#43

Post by mbid »

oh_sigh wrote: post #30
sotojuan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toute l’expérience d’un individu est construit sur le plan de son langage. [An individual’s experience is built entirely in terms of his language.]

Is it?

Could your language affect your ability to save?

https://www.ted.com/talks/keith_chen_could_your_language_aff...

Re: Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'

#44

Post by irrational »

I visited Iceland for 2 weeks in April of 2016 (doing the ring road). Without exception, everyone we met spoke great English. One day we were eating dinner in a small cafe in the north part of the island. Our server's English was so perfect we were convinced he grew up somewhere in the US. He informed us that he had never left his village and had just picked it up from American TV, movies, etc. Amazing.

Re: Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'

#45

Post by Balero »

smitherfield wrote: post #15
marten-de-vries wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a middle road, you know: being bilingual. To run with the Icelandic example, you'll be hard pressed to find someone who speaks it but not English. Where I live, there's also a local language (Frisian) spoken beside the 'bigger' language (Dutch). And here too, lots of people speak English. Or if not, you might get lucky with German.

But is it a sustainable road? French-Canadians have been complaining for many years that Montreal's "bilingual" neighborhoods become English-speaking in a decade or so, and "French-speaking" neighborhoods become bilingual. And this is despite extensive government efforts to encourage or even enforce the use of French. You can see the same trends in Catalonia, Wales, Ireland, etc. Where the government intervenes in th…

In Wales the Welsh language has had a massive revival. It's taught in schools, and a basic understanding is very common amongst younger generations.

Re: Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'

#46

Post by spraak »

nickpeterson wrote: post #17
spraak wrote: post #2

Reverse example: I've only [1] let my child consume Swedish media (mostly the SVT app Barnkanalen, while we live in the US) and their accent is really good, and they often correct me and remind me of how something should be said. [1] Not 100%. They still watch e.g. Moana in English, or sometimes watch shows in German, French, some English ones, etc.

I think it would be especially difficult with children, since the English version tends to be the 'real' version. As such I would assume songs to just be more natural in english, and that tends to be the part children obsess over. I'm from the US, so I have the same problem from the other perspective, "Why learn a language when everyone speaks English." So you get a bunch of children who don't want to become bilingua…

I'm not sure that I understand what you're saying, but for my child they see the Swedish version as the real version, firstly because it's the only version they've seen, and that often most of the shows are actually only available in Swedish.

Re: Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'

#47

Post by ocschwar »

dalbasal wrote: post #11
marten-de-vries wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a middle road, you know: being bilingual. To run with the Icelandic example, you'll be hard pressed to find someone who speaks it but not English. Where I live, there's also a local language (Frisian) spoken beside the 'bigger' language (Dutch). And here too, lots of people speak English. Or if not, you might get lucky with German.

A generation ago, Dutch minority dialects & languages were really discouraged and some were nearly killed. Kids were disciplined in school for using them. A generation before that, British accents/dialects^ actively suppressed to give way to standard (King's) English. I think there were almost no advantages to this dialect killing. Small minority dialects are at a danger of dying out, not crowding out the bigger lang…

Jersey Dutch died out completely in the US, without any suppression by the government. Cajun French is on its last legs despite government support.

And it was purely the result of broadcast radio.

Re: Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'

#48

Post by tmountain »

johan_larson wrote: post #3

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, yes, it's a pity to see a cultural artifact like a language fade away. I get that. But on the other hand, having the world Balkanized into thousands of mutually incomprehensible linguistic ghettoes is a bad thing, because it makes it harder to get things done on large scales. Things would just be easier if we spoke a manageable handful of languages.

It'd also be easier if everyone painted all their houses the same color, ate the same foods all the time, and lived in a universally cookie cutter world, but that'd be terribly boring.

Culture is embedded into language, and suggesting that we should standardize on a handful of languages for the sake of convenience places very low (or maybe no) value on cultural preservation.

As someone who's been working very hard for the last two years to become bi-lingual, I had no idea how much I'd learn about my own native language from studying a different language, and incidentally, I've learned a ton about the underlying culture of the target language I'm learning. Every time a language dies, we lose a another piece of our global cultural tapestry, and I think that's a loss that's hard to quantify.

Re: Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'

#49

Post by Balero »

mbid wrote: post #18
krapp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because people share the same language, it doesn't mean they think the same, or share the same values. Many people around the world speak English, but they don't become culturally American or British because of it.

Yes they do. Look at popular music around the world. It's all slight variations of American popular music. I don't think this is only because of the dominance of English, but the two phenomena are definitely symptoms of the same disease.

Well yeah, looking at popular music will do that. There's a massive amount of advertising money to make it popular.

Look at the less forced genres of music. Rap in the USA, Grime in the UK, similar but different. The UK has a very different type of indie (named from coming from an independent label) music. And Country is only popular in the USA.

If you have a quick look on the surface it can be similar, but if you look deeper, where it matters, then the variation is there.

That said, I do think having more languages is better, a more diversified ecosystem is more likely to survive. And from my point of view, it's more interesting to live in.

Re: Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'

#50

Post by luxpir »

Learn Icelandic for free online, via the gov-supported course:

https://icelandiconline.com/

Goes up to advanced level. The appeal for me is the ability to understand one of the least changed old European languages, much akin to our Old English. One that is bizarrely and amazingly still spoken.

Admittedly I do speak a fair bit of Swedish, potentially making things easier, but even without that there are many cognates that make learning it easier for English-speakers. Or German-speakers, for that matter.

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