7 ms·

I'm quite pessimistic concerning the future of multilingualism. Small, isolated communities manage to preserve their language for century, but a community the

• sridca 10y ago
  That's obvious though, isn't it? People are going to gravitate towards adopting the language with highest economic and social capital (presumably why English took over French as an international language?).
  • guard-of-terra 10y ago
    English is also less weird than French, written English is pretty easy language. Spoken English not so much. Italian is perhaps much easier, but of course economic and social capital matters too.
    • Typhon 10y ago
      Weirdness of a language is completely subjective, and easyness too. Overall, the intrinsic qualities of a language matter little if at all in driving its adoption.
      • theoh 10y ago
        Inflected and irregular languages are more complex than uninflected and regular. That's one kind of weirdness that it's difficult to dismiss.
        • rvense 10y ago
          But in most cases you don't have a pick of which extra language to learn. People learn English because they want to speak with Americans (and earlier the British). Everything else is irrelevant.
          • wolfgke 10y ago
            I rather think most people learn a particular set of language because they have to pick it in school. For me it was English, Latin (hated it) and French (as third language I also could have chosen Russian (would also have interested me) or ancient Greek).
            • thaumasiotes 10y ago
              >> People learn English because they want to speak with Americans (and earlier the British). > I rather think most people learn a particular set of language because they have to pick it in school. You are using "learn" in a completely different sense than rvense is. Far and away the majority of people who have to take language classes in school don't learn anything. People who study a language because they want to communicate with people who speak that language, do learn.
              • wolfgke 10y ago
                > You are using "learn" in a completely different sense than rvense is. Far and away the majority of people who have to take language classes in school don't learn anything. I know few people who really try to learn a new language after school (which is IMHO a pity, since there exist free options in the internet), so for the typical person it is "one either learned the language in school and got to an at least medium level (on which one can, if one wants to (say, because one wants to communicate with others), build later on in life) or one will never learn the language".
            • rvense 10y ago
              You don't think the fact that English was more useful to you had anything do with your liking it more? There is also the way these things are taught. The most common third language to learn here is German, and instead of, you know, focusing on fluency and learning to actually use the language, or watching good German films or reading interesting German literature, what you get is rote memorization of inflections.
      • seeing 10y ago
        Weirdness of a language is completely subjective This isn't true.
    • fatihpense 10y ago
      English grammar is also easier or you can use simple subset of English. However that can not be said for Italian, German, French or Russian. They have gender rules that confuse foreign learners in the beginning. The hardest subject for English is "tenses" and you can also use small subset of them. I also agree with the economic and social capital argument.
      • wolfgke 10y ago
        > They have gender rules that confuse foreign learners in the beginning. I learn Spanish and Portuguese and I'm not the slightest confused by the gender rules - it's rather what I'm used to, since I speak German as native language. TLDR: YMMV, but I don't think this holds if you come from a non-English background.
        • aninhumer 10y ago
          The problem isn't the extra grammar rules, the problem is having to learn the gender of every single word in order to use the language correctly.
          • wolfgke 10y ago
            Usually you get a pretty good feeling for the rules that determine the gender for many nouns (at least for me in Spanish, French and Portuguese), so that for many nouns this will only be a problem at the beginning. For example (I will use examples from German, since this is my native language) typical rules (probably you will find exceptions) are that nouns that end in "-chen" or "-lein" (endings for diminutive, though this is not always obvious (for example "das Mädchen" is a diminutive of "die Maid")) are neuter. Or nouns that end in "-e" are feminine. Or nouns that end in "-er" are masculine (at least if they mean "a person/object doing something" (counterexample: "das Wunder" (the wonder) - but this is not a person/object doing something) - the same holds for verbs ending in "-erin" being female. Or if you turn a verb into a noun ("das Wandern" from "wandern" - to wander) it will be neuter. Of course there will be enough nouns for which you simply will have to learn the gender, but I don't believe it is that amount of effort (and most other languages have a much more regular pronounciation than English).
    • acjohnson55 10y ago
      English isn't very complex, but it is highly irregular and it has an absolutely massive vocabulary. It's easy to learn enough to be able to scrape by, but difficult to learn to speak fluently.
    • pmontra 10y ago
      Italian is easier to pronounce (only 7 vowel sounds) and almost 1 to 1 to the written word (but 3 different signs for the k sound, still easy to read). However its words have genders to remember to make plurals and match adjectives and possessives. Verbs have desinences for each tense and person. English can be irregular, but Italian has more details to memorize. Still, as you wrote, people don't use the easiest language but the language that gives the most benefits. Latin is so much more difficult than Italian but it had its (very long) heyday, right?
  • backtoyoujim 10y ago
    When has rational choice theory worked for anything other than a thesis defense?
• Jugurtha 10y ago
  Well, I sort of disagree. As my handle implies, I'm named after a Numidian King (160-104 BC). I'm one of the "Kabyle people", a Berber ethnicity from Algeria, North Africa. Although I was born in Algiers, we spoke Kabyle at home and most Kabyle people I know who were born elsewhere did, too. If you go to cities like Tizi-Ouzou (one hour or less away) and Bejaïa, Kabyle is the lingua franca. That's the language people use to talk to each other. But you'd be understood if you spoke another Algerian language (Algerian dialects are a mish-mash of mostly Arabic, Kabyle, French, Turkish, Italian, and Spanish), or French. So for me, I just go there and I can just speak Kabyle in a small zone containing a little more than 2 million people (there are many more in neighboring cities, and many, many more in other cities, but that's the "HQ" with the highest capita/km² speaking the language daily). I use five languages daily living in Algiers (5 million people). Though I think you're partly right for the "retaining the language" part since Algiers didn't retain the "original" language: it mixed a bunch of them and then retained that.