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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 whateve

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
    > it'll open a wider set of opportunities. Which in almost all cases are the result of top-down processes. You're arguing that individual adjustments to change are the agents of change. English gives opportunity because of the colonial foundation created by English invasion being transferred to the US, due to their long-term Western military hegemony resulting from their distance from a destructive pair of European wars. Of course, a lingua franca is good, but the cultural and professional domination is too much in my opinion. US culture is awful, but is heavily marketed and sold (and ironically is almost all of foreign manufacture due to the continuing trade deficit/strong dollar policy. US professional dominance is due to its corruption, lack of regulation and labor rights, military aggression providing and preserving new markets, and diplomatic aggression making it the gatekeeper to those markets. The dominance of English is a result of that, just like the domination of Latin, Spanish, and French (or Arabic for that matter) were. It's something that's happening, not something to be supported. edit: > But the national government of Sweden is a different story. They currently consider Elfdalian a dialect of Swedish, not its own language. > Speaking in Elfdalian, Swedish MP Peter Helander recently asked Parliament why that’s the case. But before Culture Minister Amanda Lind could answer the question, the parliamentary speaker interrupted them both to say that only Swedish may be spoken in the chamber. Helander said the "only Swedish" remark proves his point, that Elfdalian should be considered its own language. I don't know how much more official a condemnation of a minority language can be.
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.

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
  > it'll open a wider set of opportunities. Which in almost all cases are the result of top-down processes. You're arguing that individual adjustments to change are the agents of change. English gives opportunity because of the colonial foundation created by English invasion being transferred to the US, due to their long-term Western military hegemony resulting from their distance from a destructive pair of European wars. Of course, a lingua franca is good, but the cultural and professional domination is too much in my opinion. US culture is awful, but is heavily marketed and sold (and ironically is almost all of foreign manufacture due to the continuing trade deficit/strong dollar policy. US professional dominance is due to its corruption, lack of regulation and labor rights, military aggression providing and preserving new markets, and diplomatic aggression making it the gatekeeper to those markets. The dominance of English is a result of that, just like the domination of Latin, Spanish, and French (or Arabic for that matter) were. It's something that's happening, not something to be supported. edit: > But the national government of Sweden is a different story. They currently consider Elfdalian a dialect of Swedish, not its own language. > Speaking in Elfdalian, Swedish MP Peter Helander recently asked Parliament why that’s the case. But before Culture Minister Amanda Lind could answer the question, the parliamentary speaker interrupted them both to say that only Swedish may be spoken in the chamber. Helander said the "only Swedish" remark proves his point, that Elfdalian should be considered its own language. I don't know how much more official a condemnation of a minority language can be.

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.