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If all there was to language death was the speakers deciding to no longer speak their language, then there would be nothing much people could do about it. But m

• cat_plus_plus 5y ago
  But that's not how assimilation happens these days right? People are begging to come to wealthy countries. In this scenario everyone speaking English or whatever is the dominant language in two generation is a good thing for economic equality and cultural cohesion. Take Sillicon Valley is a positive example of good integration.
  • mannerheim 5y ago
    Sure, there is nothing wrong with people immigrating somewhere and assimilating to the local culture. But one needs to draw a distinction between that and a nationalist government privileging the national language over regional languages. This is not so common today, although we live with the consequences of past nationalist movements which have sent many minority languages on an inexorable route to oblivion. And then there's China...
    • hzay 5y ago
      > This is not so common today... It's happening in india today. It's very sad.
  • jrochkind1 5y ago
    Immigration to the USA and nation-building in France do seem like very different things, yes. In France, the project of creating a French nation and a French people required taking a diversity of cultures and languages that already existed in the territory, and trying to standardize and unify them. This is what modern nationalism did in many parts of Europe. The USA is a different kind of project, wherein people from Europe came to take over the continent from it's previous inhabitants, stamping out the various cultures and languages that were on this continent by displacing whole peoples, not by assimilating them. Initially there were different European groups that were also kind of fighting each other for power. Obviously the ones from England were the dominant power in creating the United States of America, but other European cultures existed on the continent for a while too, the Lone Star State in Texas actually had three official state langauges -- English, Spanish, and German (yup). So, yeah, these were very different things. I'd start from the actual history in comparing them. I guess the commonality is the end result of homogenizing culture and suppressing cultural diversity for the purposes of political power.
    • Y_Y 5y ago
      I was pretty surprised when I went to parts of Texas where people still using German (alongside English of course). It's a pity that Gresham's Law ended up making English almost ubiquitous, to the detriment of the many languages from all around the world. (I don't think I need to mention the many advantages that counterbalance this.)
    • dash2 5y ago
      I suspect it's oversimplified to think of homogenization as being a topdown process driven by the quest for power. A lot of it can be bottom-up - as the article describes, parents deliberately chose to teach their children Swedish. The advantages of speaking the "bigger" language are obvious: it'll open a wider set of opportunities. That's why people all over Europe teach their children English. If anything, their states probably have an incentive to push French, German etc., but English opens doors.
      • pessimizer 5y ago
  • Kye 5y ago
    The last residential school in Canada closed in 1996. People in their middle ages today remember being forced to assimilate across the globe. It's not some long-ago thing. The people who supported these systems are still alive, still influencing policy.
    • dragonwriter 5y ago
      And the US federal government was funding church run boarding schools of similar character in the US into the 1960s under the “Indian Civilization Act”, so only about a generation more distant.
      • bestulo 5y ago
        wonder how many are still alive who would support this
  • lostlogin 5y ago
    > In this scenario everyone speaking English or whatever is the dominant language in two generation is a good thing for economic equality and cultural cohesion. If this is the pathway we choose/are forced down, will the term ‘culture’ be needed? We will all be the same.
    • ARandomerDude 5y ago
      California, Oklahoma, and Ireland all speak English but have very different cultures. Most large cities have different cultures within 10 miles of each other. I bring up these counterpoints only to say that while language is a major factor in culture, there are still many other factors.
      • toxik 5y ago
        How ironic to pick Ireland as an example of English speaking.
        • vinay427 5y ago
          The irony here generally applies to Oklahoma and perhaps California as well, and these three regions are perhaps much more culturally similar due to the imposition of language on a region with such effectiveness. I'm not sure if that's the point they were trying to make.
          • lostlogin 5y ago
            I think it does make the same point. The cultural similarities were achieved but it wasn’t without loss or consequence. There may have been less bloodshed though?
      • vinay427 5y ago
        While I wouldn't say they have "very" different cultures relative to almost anywhere in the non-English speaking realm, I would definitely agree that language isn't the only factor. However, more language unification would at least theoretically continue to increase cultural cohesion.
  • acituan 5y ago
    > But that's not how assimilation happens these days right? What about cultural imperialism? A language shapes your identity because it literally gives the grammar to your thoughts. But other cultural goods like music, netflix, youtube, tv, you name it, do shape our cultural grammar just as much. This is a point I don't expect anyone already embedded in the dominant culture to find salient, because the culture we are in is as transparent as sea is to fish. > People are begging to come to wealthy countries If people had comparable prospects at home, so few would actually leave. If you look at the non-asylum-seeking immigration reasons (i.e. the "beggars" in your words), it is primarily about economic hardship, with persecution, violence, war, human rights added on top. Guess what, in an interconnected international arena, wealthy countries have more culpability about those conditions than we care to admit.
    • cat_plus_plus 5y ago
      > Guess what, in an interconnected international arena, wealthy countries have more culpability about those conditions than we care to admit. That has been talked about ad nauseam for the past 10 years. Maybe it's time to remember that non-wealthy countries have more culpability for their own conditions than anyone dares to mention?
      • acituan 5y ago
        > That has been talked about ad nauseam for the past 10 years. Imperialism goes way more back than 10 years. It probably has been nauseating for some for at least a century. > Maybe it's time to remember that non-wealthy countries have more culpability for their own conditions than anyone dares to mention? Sounds like you've made the exact calculus to rank order culpability. I'm very interested to hear how we all can objectively arrive at this conclusion. Alternatively, you could tell us a state that haven't been at the receiving end of a war, coup, resource exploitation, economic warfare etc. and still managed to screw up their quest for self-determination.
        • yossarian1408 5y ago
          Zimbabwe, Argentina, off the top of my head
  • enriquto 5y ago
    > But that's not how assimilation happens these days right? That is exactly how it happens today. The process your parent describes is a currently ongoing one in France.
  • tvanantwerp 5y ago
    It's certainly happening in China. Regional dialects like Cantonese—which you would still hear routinely in American Chinatowns—are slowly being replaced with Mandarin via the school system. These dialects are not yet lost, but within a few generations they may rarely be spoken. Why would they be when everyone learns Mandarin in school?
    • truth_ 5y ago
      1. It is happening in China. The gov is forcing Mandarin on people. 2. It is happening in India with all central government since the independence having tried to impose Hindi as the National Language, and sole official language. Hindi has already devoured many close languages, but faces strong resistance from South Indians. 3. It has happened in Pakistan. The dominant language is Urdu, and to some extent Punjabi. Sindhi, a very rich language has almost been wiped out from official usage. Same goes for Baluchi. Nations tend to be very disrespectful to cultures not belonging to the majority. It's a sad fact.
  • eyko 5y ago
    Learning a language for economic or practical reasons doesn't mean you forget your own language. The silicon valley example is more likely to make English evolve than to make a hundred other languages extinct. In the case of Sweden, which is already a small population, it must be difficult to keep having used for a very minority language in a modern world. In order for a language to survive, nowadays, you need the language to also be very present on the internet. That means having a big community of native speakers and creators, media, literature, art, cinema, education, work... That's expensive and makes little sense for populations that are quite small I would reckon.
• the_gipsy 5y ago
  “Destroy”, “assimilate” and “identity” sound very alarming. But beware, the opposite of synthetic or forced language preservation also results in the exact same brutality, or worse.
  • psychometry 5y ago
    Because the "brutality" of cultural preservation doesn't sound alarming at all...
• alberth 5y ago
  While I absolutely agree history and culture should be preserved - it’s not so simple. Take your comment as an example. HN has people worldwide interacting with each other in this forum BECAUSE we are all speaking a known common language (English). If worldwide schools didn’t commonly teach English (or whatever the next dominant language might be) we wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other in this thread if we all spoke 100+ different languages.
  • AndrewDucker 5y ago
    There's a big difference between "you should take a course in English, it's really useful" and "we will punish you for speaking your own language" (as happened numerous times and is what the comment you replied to is talking about).
• Bayart 5y ago
  As someone personally close to the matter, I've come to think the action of the French school system has been overblown for ideological reasons, and that's the organic mechanics of acculturation that were very much in play in France have been completely forgotten, in particular as it pertains to urban migration, economic mobility and the growth of tertiary sector. Even if the French State did nothing, Occitan wouldn't be much better now if you look at the data from neighboring countries. It's my personal opinion, but the reason the educational program of the French Republic was successful is because it gave an outlet to a need people had. They wanted to move up, they wanted to speak French. Don't deny them agency.
  • pessimizer 5y ago
    > They wanted to move up, they wanted to speak French. Don't deny them agency. This is a manipulation. What you are saying is that in order to move up in French society, they are required to speak French, and therefore they learned French in order not to be suppressed. But you're disguising it in weird wokeness language. You could use the same phrasing about skin-bleaching to make it sound like people who were against it were the actual oppressors, denying brown people their agency, speaking for brown people, saying that brown people are making bad decisions for themselves, and actively trying to keep brown people from enjoying the success that skin-bleaching would bring them. It's pretty reprehensible framing, but common. It's even used against brown people themselves, like in this case it's being used against Occitan speakers. I want to note that this framing is reprehensible, regardless of the facts on the ground, or the particular subject. You could just as well be arguing for women to get breast implants, or for orthodox Jews to make themselves available on Saturdays.
  • blacktriangle 5y ago
    "Don't deny them agency" Dear god this is such a great statement. So many people working in international development fetishize life out in the village. Its like they want people to live in some kind of frozen time bubble as museum Fremen.
  • enriquto 5y ago
    > They wanted to move up, they wanted to speak French. As a native speaker of one of the languages that France is successfully removing, I find your words deeply offensive. The suppression of languages of France has not been a peaceful or voluntary process, but a very violent one. Shit; school kids were ridiculed and reprimanded by speaking other non-french languages at the recreation yards! How evil is that? We have agency. Problem is that we are overwhelmed by a much powerful opponent that is actively trying to eliminate us. Now I'm living in Paris, and I'm sad and dismayed at the incomprehension of most native french speakers to the plight of the people of their own country.
• cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  Yep, and it blows my mind that in France especially this process of language loss is still accepted and ongoing and essentially encouraged. Breton, Basque, Alsatian German, etc. will be extinct within a generation on French territory, and that will be on purpose and this is happening inside a contemporary postmodern nation inside the European Union. There are all sorts of reasons to keep minority language communities thriving, I won't get into them here. But hell, tourism alone is a good one. It's part of the local flavour of a place.
  • mannerheim 5y ago
    It is a bit of delicious irony that the French are so indignant about English supplanting their language in so many institutions. I guess the shoe being on the other foot doesn't feel so great.
• cannabis_sam 5y ago
  >Public schooling, nationalism, and the decline of regional languages all coincided for a reason. Slightly tangential, but Sweden has decided to call the Westrobothnian dialect of Swedish “Bondska” the direct translation of which is basically “Farmerish”. Now I don’t support the stigmatization of farmers, but it’s hard to deny that “bondig”/“farmerish” has been used as a derogative to separate them from “city people” or whatever they’re trying to suggest. As I understand it, Elfdalian is further removed from Swedish, but has been similarly classified as a rural dialect instead of its own language. Further complicated by the fact that the are other dialects in the area called Dalmål (direct translation “valleyspeak” maybe?), and as far as I can tell are related to both Swedish and Elfdalian.. (I just an interested amateur, so I’m absolutely open to corrections from people with first hand experience of speaking Elfdalian or Westrobothnian)
  • hashmush 5y ago
    Dalmål (Dalecarlian) is from my understanding (and simplified) a bit of a continuum from Swedish to Elfdalian. The closer you get to Älvdalen the less intelligible it is for Swedish speakers. I can, after spending some time there, understand some "moramål" (the variation spoken in and around Mora) but I have a much harder time understanding "orsamål" (same but around Orsa). Elfdalian is much less intelligible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalecarlian_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalecarlian_language