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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 p

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.
  - dash2 5y ago
    I agree that some processes are top down. My point was just that the choice to learn a national or global language is often bottom up. I think saying "US culture is awful" weakens your point. US culture is extremely diverse, from The Rock to Jeff Koons. It's also central to the twentieth century. Dismissing it all as awful doesn't make much sense.
throwaway894345 5y ago
> I guess the commonality is the end result of homogenizing culture and suppressing cultural diversity for the purposes of political power. So the native population was obviously suppressed in a bid for political power, but were any other cultures oppressed into homogenizing for the purpose of solidifying someone’s political power? Did someone oppress the Germans to cause them to speak English, or did they assimilate for the obvious economic and social efficiencies? Homogenized culture is the result, but it’s not clear to me that it was nefarious in these cases.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  Short answer, it's "complicated" in that there are always multiple things going on at once, but... yes. And the ways it's "complicated" are weirder than you might think. Like that Germans were actually one of the least "assimilating" significant non-English European populations here in the 19th century. Actual histories often don't match our assumptions based on current ideologies. Fighting Everything German in Texas, 1917–1919 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24449071 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24449071 "…World War I not only intensified fears that the "melting pot" was failing, but also broadened this concern to include German Americans as a suspect ethnic group. Before the war, German Americans were one of the most respected immigrant groups in America, having achieved success in many spheres. Brewery magnate Adolf Busch, intellectual and U.S. Senator Carl Schulz, and financier John D. Rockefeller were among the German Americans who had risen to prominence in the United States. Significantly, German Americans acquired their favorable reputation despite being the ethnic group most resistant to assimilation…" "…Furthermore, Texans’ historic distrust of German Texans helped inspire anti-German activities. During the antebellum period, slaveholders had viewed German Texans with suspicion, especially after an 1854 convention of German Texans adopted an anti-slavery resolution. In fact, only a minority of German Texans supported this resolution, but most Texans did not understand that subtlety. They were preoccupied with German Texans’ common culture which prevented them from discerning political, religious, and social differences among Germans…" "…Claiming that German Texans’ ethnicity was equivalent to disloyalty, many council of defense members in Texas were determined to purge all traces of German culture from their state…" (DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6563.1994.tb00925.x for your sci-hub needs...) But my main point is that these are very different situations -- national projects in Europe unifying/homogenizing various long-existed local geographically-specific cultures (I'm not sure 'assimilation' is even the right word here). Vs America, where various European populations came, only in the last few hundred years, displaced local geographically-specific cultures, and then competed with each other for political power or cultural hegemony as they expanded to take land the previous occupants were displaced from, also sometimes forming communities together (in which they were all newcomers to the land). Just two very different situations; although i tried to say there were some commonalities in the way cultures are homogenized/unified, I am sympathetic to the idea that "why are you even looking for commonalities these are such different situations". I think we often over-simplify the diversity of historical paths with this stuff, assuming that the way we now look at "culture" or "nationality" or "race" has always been the way people did, and/or was inevitable. But these things were built, in the not too recent past, and didn't work the same way they work now even in recent history, and worked differently in different places.

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.
- dash2 5y ago
  I agree that some processes are top down. My point was just that the choice to learn a national or global language is often bottom up. I think saying "US culture is awful" weakens your point. US culture is extremely diverse, from The Rock to Jeff Koons. It's also central to the twentieth century. Dismissing it all as awful doesn't make much sense.

throwaway894345 5y ago

> I guess the commonality is the end result of homogenizing culture and suppressing cultural diversity for the purposes of political power. So the native population was obviously suppressed in a bid for political power, but were any other cultures oppressed into homogenizing for the purpose of solidifying someone’s political power? Did someone oppress the Germans to cause them to speak English, or did they assimilate for the obvious economic and social efficiencies? Homogenized culture is the result, but it’s not clear to me that it was nefarious in these cases.

jrochkind1 5y ago
Short answer, it's "complicated" in that there are always multiple things going on at once, but... yes. And the ways it's "complicated" are weirder than you might think. Like that Germans were actually one of the least "assimilating" significant non-English European populations here in the 19th century. Actual histories often don't match our assumptions based on current ideologies. Fighting Everything German in Texas, 1917–1919 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24449071 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24449071 "…World War I not only intensified fears that the "melting pot" was failing, but also broadened this concern to include German Americans as a suspect ethnic group. Before the war, German Americans were one of the most respected immigrant groups in America, having achieved success in many spheres. Brewery magnate Adolf Busch, intellectual and U.S. Senator Carl Schulz, and financier John D. Rockefeller were among the German Americans who had risen to prominence in the United States. Significantly, German Americans acquired their favorable reputation despite being the ethnic group most resistant to assimilation…" "…Furthermore, Texans’ historic distrust of German Texans helped inspire anti-German activities. During the antebellum period, slaveholders had viewed German Texans with suspicion, especially after an 1854 convention of German Texans adopted an anti-slavery resolution. In fact, only a minority of German Texans supported this resolution, but most Texans did not understand that subtlety. They were preoccupied with German Texans’ common culture which prevented them from discerning political, religious, and social differences among Germans…" "…Claiming that German Texans’ ethnicity was equivalent to disloyalty, many council of defense members in Texas were determined to purge all traces of German culture from their state…" (DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6563.1994.tb00925.x for your sci-hub needs...) But my main point is that these are very different situations -- national projects in Europe unifying/homogenizing various long-existed local geographically-specific cultures (I'm not sure 'assimilation' is even the right word here). Vs America, where various European populations came, only in the last few hundred years, displaced local geographically-specific cultures, and then competed with each other for political power or cultural hegemony as they expanded to take land the previous occupants were displaced from, also sometimes forming communities together (in which they were all newcomers to the land). Just two very different situations; although i tried to say there were some commonalities in the way cultures are homogenized/unified, I am sympathetic to the idea that "why are you even looking for commonalities these are such different situations". I think we often over-simplify the diversity of historical paths with this stuff, assuming that the way we now look at "culture" or "nationality" or "race" has always been the way people did, and/or was inevitable. But these things were built, in the not too recent past, and didn't work the same way they work now even in recent history, and worked differently in different places.