4 ms·

English language dominance is usually downplayed, and accepted as "normal" - because of convenience and also, because frankly, what would be the alternative? B

by kome 5y ago

English language dominance is usually downplayed, and accepted as "normal" - because of convenience and also, because frankly, what would be the alternative? But because of convenience and lack of alternatives, we tend to forget that English dominance is not without deep political, psychological and economic consequences for all the others. Those things are usually downplayed, and it's problematic. First of all, learning English is a cost, and not an insignificant one. Research has also shown that mastery of English follows class cleavages in many contexts. Another example is gatekeeping in publications: in academia, sometimes I see some political visions or takes are de facto marginalized or ignored because they don't quite fit the politics in the "Anglosphere", and the "Anglosphere" or Anglo trained people de facto control the publishing market. The Anglosphere is not the west, but quite a weird subset of the west. Also many quirks of the Anglo political debate or categories to analyze the world tend to get global - but they are ill fit in other contexts. I think about the whole idea of the "5 races", with so many weird categories such as "Asian" or, worse "Latino".

pjmlp 5y ago
There have been plenty of alternatives since there are multiple cultures able to speak and the need to talk with each other. English just happens to be the last variation of that, and not even all around the world, as there are places where other languages are more welcomed for cross culture communication and you will hardly find a soul able to talk your majesty's English.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
>what would be the alternative? Mandarin seems the most likely candidate. There might come a day when most Indo-European languages merge into a variant of English while Mandarin, being from a different language family, becomes the only other major human language, with both borrowing from each other to some degree but not merging. Given the large number of languages that exist now and their degree of connection to the cultures that spawned them, in some ways it's difficult to believe that most could fall to the side but the trend of English as a second language almost everywhere is pretty strong. At some point people might simply stop bothering to learn their culture's formerly primary language.
- dmurray 5y ago
  More or less what happens in Firefly, though it's not explored in detail.
  - bradknowles 5y ago
    That was the retcon. The real reason that they spoke a pretend version of Mandarin was so that they could say things that would otherwise get stopped by the censors. They used it as their cursing language, among other things.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > More or less what happens in Firefly, though it's not explored in detail. Though the process is hinted to be very much top-down political, in that the Union of Allied Planets flag is a very obvious direct blending of the USA and PRC flags.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  Oh no. As a non-native English speaker I'd rather forget and learn English all over again than touch Mandarin. My life is too short for that.
pndy 5y ago
> what would be the alternative? I'm pretty sure that before English become what it is nowadays - a tool that helps bridging the communication, it was French that people were using and way earlier, it was Latin. Russian language was the one used in USSR on a daily basis (even taught in schools as mandatory subject of Warsaw Pact countries back then) and still is being recognized in post-soviet countries as a language that you can communicate in. It's still being used in international organizations. The dominance of the particular language or languages doesn't come out of nowhere - it is indeed tied to geopolitical actions of the countries and their people.
- bradknowles 5y ago
  Before English became more common, yes — French was the main “Lingua Franca” in the western world. There have been attempts to create an alternative language that would not heavily favor or disfavor any speakers of any natural human language, but they haven’t gotten a lot of traction. Look up “Esperanto”. Prior to French, I think it probably was Latin. But that’s still the western world. But in the Eastern world? I don’t know what the primary language was before Mandarin, which itself was created only relatively recently because the ruling party didn’t like people using Cantonese and they wanted one unified language that they could force on everyone in the country.

by kome 5y ago

pjmlp 5y ago

There have been plenty of alternatives since there are multiple cultures able to speak and the need to talk with each other. English just happens to be the last variation of that, and not even all around the world, as there are places where other languages are more welcomed for cross culture communication and you will hardly find a soul able to talk your majesty's English.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

>what would be the alternative? Mandarin seems the most likely candidate. There might come a day when most Indo-European languages merge into a variant of English while Mandarin, being from a different language family, becomes the only other major human language, with both borrowing from each other to some degree but not merging. Given the large number of languages that exist now and their degree of connection to the cultures that spawned them, in some ways it's difficult to believe that most could fall to the side but the trend of English as a second language almost everywhere is pretty strong. At some point people might simply stop bothering to learn their culture's formerly primary language.

dmurray 5y ago
More or less what happens in Firefly, though it's not explored in detail.
- bradknowles 5y ago
  That was the retcon. The real reason that they spoke a pretend version of Mandarin was so that they could say things that would otherwise get stopped by the censors. They used it as their cursing language, among other things.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > More or less what happens in Firefly, though it's not explored in detail. Though the process is hinted to be very much top-down political, in that the Union of Allied Planets flag is a very obvious direct blending of the USA and PRC flags.
5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
Oh no. As a non-native English speaker I'd rather forget and learn English all over again than touch Mandarin. My life is too short for that.

pndy 5y ago

> what would be the alternative? I'm pretty sure that before English become what it is nowadays - a tool that helps bridging the communication, it was French that people were using and way earlier, it was Latin. Russian language was the one used in USSR on a daily basis (even taught in schools as mandatory subject of Warsaw Pact countries back then) and still is being recognized in post-soviet countries as a language that you can communicate in. It's still being used in international organizations. The dominance of the particular language or languages doesn't come out of nowhere - it is indeed tied to geopolitical actions of the countries and their people.

bradknowles 5y ago
Before English became more common, yes — French was the main “Lingua Franca” in the western world. There have been attempts to create an alternative language that would not heavily favor or disfavor any speakers of any natural human language, but they haven’t gotten a lot of traction. Look up “Esperanto”. Prior to French, I think it probably was Latin. But that’s still the western world. But in the Eastern world? I don’t know what the primary language was before Mandarin, which itself was created only relatively recently because the ruling party didn’t like people using Cantonese and they wanted one unified language that they could force on everyone in the country.