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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

#51

Post by JetSetWilly »

ashtonkem wrote: post #16
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…

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 c…

It doesn't really matter about the UK's status. Nobody is saying "well I live in a hegemon, I won't bother learning another language". For the most part, people learn languages because they are useful.

I live in the UK and only speak English. I'm happy enough with that because speaking another language well represents thousands of hours of effort that I was happy to spend elsewhere - it is a huge opportunity cost. However, if I had to learn French in order to gain access to learning materials in my field and become qualified, then I would have done so.

But I didn't. The only reason for me to learn a foreign language would be curiosity - learning French or German or Spanish has almost no actual utility whatsoever for most in the UK. So few bother.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#52

Post by knuthsat »

tinco wrote: post #35
jillesvangurp wrote: post #27

The keyword here is incentive, not coercion. Most of the world uses English as a second language because the British used to run a fairly large part of it and most of their former colonies still have a lot of English speakers and quite a few even maintain it as an official language. And then after two world wars, their former colony the USA of course became a super power. So, for the past few centuries, understanding…

The Americans gave us Cartoon Network. If the Germans had better cartoons we probably would be speaking German a lot better. In my opinion there's actually great economic incentive to speak German fluently. For me personally I've had multiple meetings with friends and business relations where I sometimes felt left out because I can't understand German well when it's spoken at native speed. Besides that I know of mult…

I remember that a bunch of my classmates in elementary school knew German through watching Pokemon on a German cartoon channel that was broadcasted in Croatia (required no paid subscription, unlike Cartoon Network).

It was incredible, the accent was impeccable.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#53

Post by hunglee2 »

BossHogg wrote: post #13

The thesis that once you ignore all the force it took to make a "dominant language" dominant they spread without coercion is not especially compelling. It still remains the backdrop for things like wanting to "internationalise and attract overseas experts."

great observation, exactly my sense of it.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#54

Post by hunglee2 »

Highly debatable premise. Eliminating linguistic diversity is one of the main pillars of nation building. English, French, Spanish - all prestige languages which inhabitants were forced to learn and speak. You only have to look at the marginalisation, and consequent decline of Celtic languages in these countries to see that coercion (soft or hard) was forcing factor

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#55

Post by thematrixturtle »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #43
tinco wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Americans gave us Cartoon Network. If the Germans had better cartoons we probably would be speaking German a lot better. In my opinion there's actually great economic incentive to speak German fluently. For me personally I've had multiple meetings with friends and business relations where I sometimes felt left out because I can't understand German well when it's spoken at native speed. Besides that I know of mult…

I don't think the dominance of English has much to do with the quality of English or American cartoons or their wider culture. Even ignoring the British Empire, the USA has been one of the largest ever continental empires for 200 years and is now a quasi hegemonic global empire with around 600 overseas military bases and the ability and willingness to launch military strikes and enforce it's will across large swathes…

Japan, being an island nation, shows many strata of imported words in its vocabulary. Chinese was the original source as the language of the intelligentsia for centuries. When first the Portuguese and later the Dutch came along and were granted a trade monopoly, Japanese picked up words from both, and when the Meiji reformation opened up the countries, huge slabs of medical and technical German were imported. Now, of course, English is the predominant source of loanwords.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#56

Post by akg_67 »

qart wrote: post #34
akg_67 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hard coercion did not work in India. They are doing pretty serious strong-arming now. Want a job in the central government? Gotta know Hindi. A lot of money is getting poured into Hindi promotion schemes. Hindi is definitely a dominant language now. Native speakers just assume everyone else in India will just play along. There was a minor scandal last year when a customer in Tamil Nadu was mocked by the customer serv…

In central government, there need to be a common language for communication. Which one would you prefer? Two primary choices seems to be either English or Hindi.

I recall talking to an Indian woman, who was doing PhD Engineering in Japan, on this topic couple of years ago. Her take was very interesting when I mentioned that more and more decent jobs in India require command of English and if this trend continues, the Indian languages will go extinct. Her response was it is just part of evolution, cultures, languages are just part of that evolution.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#57

Post by akg_67 »

bluishgreen wrote: post #23
akg_67 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Regarding India, I am not exactly sure if any credits are in order. Oh they tried, they tried hard. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Hindi_agitations_of_Tam...

IMO, India has still done very well compared to other countries, for example Japan, China, US, when it comes to stamping out cultures, languages and ethnicities, the people with power don't want.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#58

Post by School-Cotton »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #24
School-Cotton wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Was Latin really the lingua franca, or just the language of liturgy, over that period?

Both. (Less and less towards the end, of course).

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#59

Post by School-Cotton »

not2b wrote: post #28
School-Cotton wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did more than 20 trips to Germany for work in the 1990s and early 2000s (I'm American). Of course my work colleagues there spoke good English, as did the staff at the hotels I stayed at, museums and airports, but enough people did not (shop owners, some restaurants, agents at train stations) that it really helped me to learn at least enough German to order at restaurants and shops and struggle through basic convers…

Was that in Berlin? Maybe the English level has improved since then.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#60

Post by qart »

akg_67 wrote: post #56
qart wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard coercion did not work in India. They are doing pretty serious strong-arming now. Want a job in the central government? Gotta know Hindi. A lot of money is getting poured into Hindi promotion schemes. Hindi is definitely a dominant language now. Native speakers just assume everyone else in India will just play along. There was a minor scandal last year when a customer in Tamil Nadu was mocked by the customer serv…

In central government, there need to be a common language for communication. Which one would you prefer? Two primary choices seems to be either English or Hindi. I recall talking to an Indian woman, who was doing PhD Engineering in Japan, on this topic couple of years ago. Her take was very interesting when I mentioned that more and more decent jobs in India require command of English and if this trend continues, the…

English. Easy choice. I prefer a simple two-language formula for all official communications in India. Local+English. There are plenty of languages that English is swallowing up. They are mostly in UK itself. Like Gaelic, Welsh, etc. Not any Indian language.

Hindi is swallowing up languages too. All those languages are in the so-called "Hindi belt". I am not all that concerned about either English or Hindi replacing other local languages. My bigger concerns are legal and economic hurdles placed by Hindi imposers. I'm OK with teaching and requiring English though. Because whether they like it or not, English has become the world's language of knowledge. Especially in computer science. Ruby was developed by a Japanese person, Lua by Brazilians, Python by a Dutch, the Linux kernel by an ethnic Swede. And yet, the best documentation for these is in English.

I'm not an English fanatic. If I were around a few centuries ago, I would have advocated Latin. A couple of millennia ago, I might have advocated Sanskrit in India.

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