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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

#61

Post by cowl »

School-Cotton wrote: post #11
lotu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe you are confusing what lingua franca means. Yes the literature used Latin but at that period only a tiny fraction of people could read or write. There where many more languages that we even have today spoken by the general populace.

French maybe came close to being a Lingua Franca in the 18-19th century when almost all aristocracy could speak, read and write it but then again the people did not. The Real Lingua Franca was a mix of Italian, French, Spanish and Greek that was used by the merchants of the Mediterranean. Only English has the People Mass to be considered a Lingua Franca for all intents and purposes.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#62

Post by Delk »

adrianN wrote: post #44
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…

Learning a new language to fluency takes hundreds of hours at least, some languages require thousands of hours. That's not the fault of educational practices. It just takes time to memorize thousands of unknown words and figure out in which context they are used.

Fluency also requires learning the basic grammatical rules of the language by heart well enough that one can apply them without consciously thinking about them most of the time. Being able to communicate in a few everyday situations probably doesn't require so much of that especially if you focus on communication rather than getting things pedantically correct, but that's not the same as fluency or a professionally useful level of skill. Being able to read fiction or understand other cultural works is again a whole another thing.

I'm not from the anglosphere and I consider learning languages hard and laborious.

GP may be right about language education in the anglosphere -- I wouldn't know that -- and education could probably be improved just about everywhere, but there certainly is an intrinsic difficulty to learning languages as well.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#63

Post by [deleted] »

School-Cotton wrote: post #12
pottertheotter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#64

Post by CogitoCogito »

School-Cotton wrote: post #59
not2b wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I lived in Berlin 2005-2006 and found learning German to be practically a necessity then. Since then the city seems to have changed significantly. In fact, in my experience I would even put most of the changes to be post 2012 or so (at least I remember it seeming fairly similar then). The city seems to be evolving at an incredible rate.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#65

Post by CogitoCogito »

raverbashing wrote: post #17
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…

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".

I would find it odd to live in Quebec without learning French, but I find languages and language-learning very interesting. I guess there are many people out there who don't share my interests, yet are able to live and succeed in Quebec despite of this. Language romanticism aside, I'd expect this to become an increasingly common phenomenon.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#66

Post by ashtonkem »

JetSetWilly wrote: post #51
ashtonkem wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ho…

> 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".

That's a straw man.

> For the most part, people learn languages because they are useful.

Duh. But how useful learning a new language is to you is mediated by where you're living and it's local influence. As an American, I would have to go way out of my way in order to use a new language, let alone find it useful. This is largely due to the cultural and economic weight that America exerts on the region. Literally everyone I've done business with who isn't a native English speaker taught themselves English specifically to move to or do business with Americans. The UK is not in this position.

Also, again, size. I have to travel a very long way before I hit anywhere where English is not the overwhelming majority language. This also is a factor. If I want to learn French and use it, it's a $600 and 14hr flight for me to actually make it to Paris and use it, while a Eurostar ticket from London is $60 and 2hrs. This absolutely affects how useful a new language might be, even for pleasure, and is exactly why my attempts to learn French petered out.

> 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.

YMMV.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#67

Post by AnAfrican »

rgergerge3 wrote: post #21
AnAfrican wrote: post #14

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).

I am not sure about Lingala but Swahili absolutely spread through coercion in colonial times and post independence. In Tanzania the Germans and later the British heavily promoted Swahili as a lingua franca. Nowadays Swahili is the first language of most Tanzanians but in the past it was mainly limited to coastal areas formerly controlled by the Sultanate of Oman. The government of Tanzania promotes Swahili to this da…

Yes but it did and does spread beyond Tanzania. Lingala probably did have some government help too in Mobutu’s era but still.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#68

Post by kmeisthax »

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…

You don't need to "compete with Disney"; and quite honestly I consider that to be a bad way to think about the production of creative works. If you think about production that way, then it just becomes a budget measuring game, and everyone in the industry winds up producing largely similar mass-market works. Producers like doing this because it boils down the complex process of actually making a movie, book, or game down into whoever is the best capitalist. The problem is that the people who are here for just Disney are just going to buy Disney, and ignore whatever competing product you churn out.

The best way to compete with Disney is to offer something they aren't (and, ideally, couldn't).

In the case of streaming services, many of the countries I mentioned before actually condition local market access on having a certain percentage of original works produced in that country. This is why Netflix has a lot of foreign-language originals; they need to meet that national production quota and the easiest way to do that is to just fund a lot of lower-budget productions.[0] Of course, these kinds of laws also put Hacker News into apoplectic fits, and it's also the same bullshit China pulls to get cultural influence in Hollywood; so I'm not going to try and sing their virtues too much.

Thing is, Sweden (or any of the other countries that regularly import most of their culture from America) doesn't need their own Disney. Nor do they need cultural protection laws or a bunch of anglohostile novelists[1]. They just need novelists, in general. Lots of them, and writing works exclusively in Swedish. Cultivating your own literary culture makes it more likely that some of those works will find international success[2], because the kinds of people who read lots of books or watch lots of movies are suckers for novelty.

[0] My current impression, which may be wrong, is that this is how we got Squid Game.

[1] Related note: France acts like the Red Sox of the former brutal colonists club sometimes, and I really find it irksome.

[2] ex. Nobody in the Anglosphere cared or even knew about Polish literature or game development until The Witcher.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#69

Post by known »

throwaway89374 wrote: post #36
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 keyword here is incentive, not coercion. This summarizes. In India the union government is trying to push Hindi as the national language while the state governments are pushing back. This has been going for 70 years. The interesting change is the due to jobs in south India north Indian state migrant workers moved to southern states. Their kids who go public school score higher in the native language classes tha…

No post body was provided.

Re: Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

#70

Post by pipodeclown »

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…

It has everything to do co Cartoons. It is all about cultural dominance. Many tv shows i watched in my youth were in English, as were many of the videogames I played. That is the only reason I learned English. I you put a kid in front of a TV with mostly English language but subtitled movies and series, he's speaking English in no time.
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