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Across the world, the trend seems to be for people to speak a local language, and a lingua franca. The former carries their cultural heritage and identity, the
by jl6 5y ago
Across the world, the trend seems to be for people to speak a local language, and a lingua franca. The former carries their cultural heritage and identity, the latter opens economic opportunities.
For a lot of people, investing in their local language is a luxury, if it comes at the expense of deeper engagement with the lingua franca. We see this decision being made across the world, as the population urbanizes and leaves their local culture behind. Few can afford not to.
In this case, it sounds like Elfdalian is up against both Swedish and English.
If people are capable of and willing to learn three or more languages to native fluency, then that is of course their prerogative. But at some point, I believe it becomes unethical to promote investment in a hyper-local language if the effect is to detract from the economic opportunities of lingua francas.
- phaemon 5y agoThat isn't what "lingua franca" means, which is a poor start to your "it's better to only know one language" argument.
- jl6 5y ago“a language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different.” What do you think it means?
- phaemon 5y agoIt means a secondary language, not a primary one.
- dash2 5y agoMerriam-Webster disagrees: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lingua%20franca https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lingua%20franca
- kzrdude 5y agoWikipedia explains the "auxiliary language" meaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca
- timkam 5y agoI think that in some highly developed societies, and in particular in Scandinavia, this trend is actually good for endangered languages. The lingua franca of Scandinavia is English. The region, which is comparable in population size to a large German federal state or a medium-ish US state, has four different majority languages (Danish, Swedish, Bokmål, Nynorsk, all mutually intelligible, which increases the acceptance of imperfect language) and dialects play an important role for local identity. Of course, as a Scandinavian one has to learn one of these four languages to some extent, but the growing importance of English -- as a consequence of almost universal English proficiency and an influx of skilled foreigners not only to the capitals but also to the periphery -- narrows the gap between these languages and minority languages like Elfdalian and Sámi. As a consequence, the appreciation of the general population of language as a form of local identity also grows.
- samus 5y agoFinnish adds an interesting twist to this. That language is completely different from the ones you listed, so casual mutual intelligibility flies right out the window. My guess is that Finnish and other Scandinavians mostly use English or Swedish to talk to each other.
- juki 5y ago> The region, which is comparable in population size to a large German federal state or a medium-ish US state Scandinavia (counting only Sweden, Norway and Denmark) has a population of about 21 million, so it's actually bigger than any German state, and about the same size as Florida (3rd largest US state). If you count Finland too, it's about the size of Texas, so California is the only US state that's meaningfully bigger.
- tored 5y agoSummarizing an entire language, and thus everyone ever spoke it, with economics is a good metaphor of the current shallow consumer culture we live in. If it is not on Netflix it doesn’t exist.