17 ms·

Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

68 points by brimnes 5y ago

zozbot234 5y ago
This is good news for Rust.
- nick_ 5y ago
  My HN bingo card is filling up.
- dustintrex 5y ago
  You misspelled "Bitcoin".
- fomine3 5y ago
  Bad news, isn't it? Because of C/C++ is dominant now.
kmeisthax 5y ago
What's already happening is that languages that aren't tied to their own unique literary cultures are slowly shrinking. The countries that don't have their own media import it, and will often learn other languages to access it rather than waiting for translations of varying quality. France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, and India all have enough unique, untranslated culture to get people to consider learning the languages that culture is written in. This isn't the case for, say, the Netherlands, or Sweden. And I'd specifically cite the need to import English-language cultural works as driving the use of English in those countries. There's plenty of other countries' whose languages never really had a literary culture to begin with, too - although usually at that point you can find some kind of forced cultural erasure rather than mere economic need to learn English. >Multilingualism (both in countries and individuals) lessens the zero-sum nature of language competition. But it is costly, in both time and money. Ultimately, some societies may have to put a price on a cultural inheritance that, once lost, is nigh-impossible to recover. That being said, this is peak anglobrain. The EU bloc is already a deeply multilingual society, and people are perfectly willing to dabble with multiple language proficiencies. Ironically, this is because much of the EU just falls back to English - like, to the point where the EU has it's own dialect of it[0]. French, German, and Spanish are also commonly learned and used as second languages, too. This "languages are hard to learn" meme is, more than anything, the product of bad educational practices, lack of student motivation, and difficulty in finding speaking partners. For some reason, the entire anglosphere[1] is just plain bad at language education[2]. That's not to say that learning a new language is easy, of course. It's just that we aren't even really trying. The anglosphere is perfectly willing to just sit and make the rest of the world speak our language. [0] This is known as Euro English. [1] And, arguably, Japan. [2] The UK is so bad at it that it was probably the deciding factor in Brexit. Nobody wants to immigrate to countries they can't speak the languages of. This meant that the UK had a uniquely lopsided ratio of immigrants to emigrants, and that much of the UK simply didn't get the benefits of being allowed to leave.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Most learning is neccesity driven learning. If you speak English, in most major cities around the globe you need nothing else. Canada has a kerfuffle about how the CEO of a major company here didn't speak any French after a decade of living in Quebec, but virtually nobody I know who has lived in Montreal has picked any French up at all (assuming they started out Anglophone). I know people in Germany who have picked up next to no German too.
  - pottertheotter 5y ago
    Your comment about people in Germany not picking up German surprised me. I don’t have a ton of first-hand experience, but my impression has been that it was more of necessity there than other European countries.
    - School-Cotton 5y ago
      I’ve visited Berlin three times and most people I interacted with spoke English perfectly. The English level was about as high as in Montreal. Perhaps it’s different if you live there and have to interact with more people; I’m not sure.
      - not2b 5y ago
        I did more than 20 trips to Germany for work in the 1990s and early 2000s (I'm American). Of course my work colleagues there spoke good English, as did the staff at the hotels I stayed at, museums and airports, but enough people did not (shop owners, some restaurants, agents at train stations) that it really helped me to learn at least enough German to order at restaurants and shops and struggle through basic conversations; I took classes and practiced when I could. Often a mixture of my bad, limited German and the person I was speaking to's bad, limited English got things handled.
        School-Cotton 5y ago
        Was that in Berlin? Maybe the English level has improved since then.
BossHogg 5y ago
The thesis that once you ignore all the force it took to make a "dominant language" dominant they spread without coercion is not especially compelling. It still remains the backdrop for things like wanting to "internationalise and attract overseas experts."
- hunglee2 5y ago
  great observation, exactly my sense of it.
AnAfrican 5y ago
It’s weird how the article does not give any example of languages that did spread and become dominant without any coercion. They do exist: Swahili and Lingala for instance. They mostly spread through trade and as « neutral » language used to communicate between ethnic groups (with their own language).
- rgergerge3 5y ago
  I am not sure about Lingala but Swahili absolutely spread through coercion in colonial times and post independence. In Tanzania the Germans and later the British heavily promoted Swahili as a lingua franca. Nowadays Swahili is the first language of most Tanzanians but in the past it was mainly limited to coastal areas formerly controlled by the Sultanate of Oman. The government of Tanzania promotes Swahili to this day, and many native languages in the interior of the country are declining.
  - AnAfrican 5y ago
    Yes but it did and does spread beyond Tanzania. Lingala probably did have some government help too in Mobutu’s era but still.
dimitar 5y ago
The spread of Russian in Ukraine fits this model (coercion to establish dominance, then continued spread without coercion) very well. Urban areas in the East and Center became Russian-speaking through Soviet measures like mixing nationalities at work/army to force them to use Russian. There were other coersive measures like the central planning not providing not enough Ukrainian media (only folk music programs on TV for example) and limiting the classes available in Ukrainian in some regions. Now the "language of inter-nationality communication" is so entrenched, that Ukrainian needs government support to incentivise media and businesses to use it. As everyone understands Russian nowadays, and few people know English, companies that serve the CIS market actually promote Russian better than the government promotes Ukrainian. To talk about the elephant in the room, note that the politics don't correlate perfectly with the language situation on the ground - on one hand there are quite a few Russian-speakers that don't want Russian as an official language and also plenty of pro-Western people want Russian to be co-official.
- akg_67 5y ago
  Similar changes happened in Japan (Ainu and Okinawan languages displaced by Japanese) and Taiwan (Taiwanese language displaced by Chinese). In this aspect, I credit India for not coercing a national language to displace regional languages. But then such unification of languages may be a contributing factor to keeping country together and alleviate regionalism.
  - bluishgreen 5y ago
    Regarding India, I am not exactly sure if any credits are in order. Oh they tried, they tried hard. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Hindi_agitations_of_Tamil_Nadu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Hindi_agitations_of_Tam...
    - akg_67 5y ago
      IMO, India has still done very well compared to other countries, for example Japan, China, US, when it comes to stamping out cultures, languages and ethnicities, the people with power don't want.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
The keyword here is incentive, not coercion. Most of the world uses English as a second language because the British used to run a fairly large part of it and most of their former colonies still have a lot of English speakers and quite a few even maintain it as an official language. And then after two world wars, their former colony the USA of course became a super power. So, for the past few centuries, understanding English meant access to a large market where English just was the main language to do business. There is an enormous economic incentive to do business in English as it gives you access to these huge markets with wealthy customers. Additionally, a lot of content is published by English speakers, which re-enforces the need to learn English. Finally because pretty much every country does at least some business in English, it's also the most common language for any two countries that wish to engage with each other. I'm actually Dutch but I live in Germany. While I speak a little bit of German, my English is far better. I don't actually need German to do business in Berlin; so I don't use it a lot I have no economic incentive to learn it. There's a critical mass of foreigners here that mostly speak English far better than they speak German. And while some Germans don't like that, a lot of them don't mind it and actually move to Berlin because they speak English and because is so international. You see this dynamic in a lot of economically important cities across the world. As soon as you get any concentration of foreigners living in them, English becomes an important language to the point where the locals start using English to be able to keep up.
- tinco 5y ago
  The Americans gave us Cartoon Network. If the Germans had better cartoons we probably would be speaking German a lot better. In my opinion there's actually great economic incentive to speak German fluently. For me personally I've had multiple meetings with friends and business relations where I sometimes felt left out because I can't understand German well when it's spoken at native speed. Besides that I know of multiple great universities where I would have liked to go, but can't really because I'm not fluent enough in German. Obviously as a software engineer it would be ridiculous to not at least read English, but I know for a fact there's great German language forums and learning resources out there. I imagine there exist programmers out there working in some deep and dark VW or Siemens lab that have been able to work for years without reading a full English sentence. I'm pretty sure Berlin is also the only city (or one of very few) in Germany where you can actually live and work happily and productively without learning German.
viztor 5y ago
Language is the classic case for network effect, the more people speaking one language, more information would be communicated in that language, more beneficial it will be for learning such language.
JaumeGreen 5y ago
All languages can spread without coercion. I knew people learning Catalan without even living anywhere nearby, and even not knowing Spanish, French or Italian. Maybe it was an elective in their university and they were bored, maybe they heard a song and loved it, ... plenty of different reasons. But dominant languages have plenty of advantages. First of all just by being spoken by lots of people make then a "de facto" common language, and sometimes people change to the dominant language in a conversation just because one person spoke in that, EVEN when all the people can talk and understand the same non-dominant language. I've seen it happen, and this may be a leftover from times when it was persecuted to speak the non-dominant one. Second there's lot of non-aggresive coercion. You may have less job opportunities if you don't use the dominant language, your works less promotion, not considered serious, ... . I'm sure that (except for the novelty) a punk-rock Navajo band singing in Navajo would have less media exposure that the same band using English. And third, there's lots of remanent coercion. People being agressive because you are using the "wrong" language, not being able to use the language in a trial (in the same country that contains the dominant and dominated languages), ... . If you add all three it's clear that without some organized help the dominated languages have a hard time. And when a language is lost some of the knowledge is lost, because a language is not only a means of communication, it's also a way to see the world. The expression the language holds gives us a unique view on different ways of thinking.
hunglee2 5y ago
Highly debatable premise. Eliminating linguistic diversity is one of the main pillars of nation building. English, French, Spanish - all prestige languages which inhabitants were forced to learn and speak. You only have to look at the marginalisation, and consequent decline of Celtic languages in these countries to see that coercion (soft or hard) was forcing factor

68 points by brimnes 5y ago

zozbot234 5y ago

This is good news for Rust.

nick_ 5y ago
My HN bingo card is filling up.
dustintrex 5y ago
You misspelled "Bitcoin".
fomine3 5y ago
Bad news, isn't it? Because of C/C++ is dominant now.

kmeisthax 5y ago

What's already happening is that languages that aren't tied to their own unique literary cultures are slowly shrinking. The countries that don't have their own media import it, and will often learn other languages to access it rather than waiting for translations of varying quality. France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, and India all have enough unique, untranslated culture to get people to consider learning the languages that culture is written in. This isn't the case for, say, the Netherlands, or Sweden. And I'd specifically cite the need to import English-language cultural works as driving the use of English in those countries. There's plenty of other countries' whose languages never really had a literary culture to begin with, too - although usually at that point you can find some kind of forced cultural erasure rather than mere economic need to learn English. >Multilingualism (both in countries and individuals) lessens the zero-sum nature of language competition. But it is costly, in both time and money. Ultimately, some societies may have to put a price on a cultural inheritance that, once lost, is nigh-impossible to recover. That being said, this is peak anglobrain. The EU bloc is already a deeply multilingual society, and people are perfectly willing to dabble with multiple language proficiencies. Ironically, this is because much of the EU just falls back to English - like, to the point where the EU has it's own dialect of it[0]. French, German, and Spanish are also commonly learned and used as second languages, too. This "languages are hard to learn" meme is, more than anything, the product of bad educational practices, lack of student motivation, and difficulty in finding speaking partners. For some reason, the entire anglosphere[1] is just plain bad at language education[2]. That's not to say that learning a new language is easy, of course. It's just that we aren't even really trying. The anglosphere is perfectly willing to just sit and make the rest of the world speak our language. [0] This is known as Euro English. [1] And, arguably, Japan. [2] The UK is so bad at it that it was probably the deciding factor in Brexit. Nobody wants to immigrate to countries they can't speak the languages of. This meant that the UK had a uniquely lopsided ratio of immigrants to emigrants, and that much of the UK simply didn't get the benefits of being allowed to leave.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Most learning is neccesity driven learning. If you speak English, in most major cities around the globe you need nothing else. Canada has a kerfuffle about how the CEO of a major company here didn't speak any French after a decade of living in Quebec, but virtually nobody I know who has lived in Montreal has picked any French up at all (assuming they started out Anglophone). I know people in Germany who have picked up next to no German too.
- pottertheotter 5y ago
  Your comment about people in Germany not picking up German surprised me. I don’t have a ton of first-hand experience, but my impression has been that it was more of necessity there than other European countries.
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    I’ve visited Berlin three times and most people I interacted with spoke English perfectly. The English level was about as high as in Montreal. Perhaps it’s different if you live there and have to interact with more people; I’m not sure.
    - not2b 5y ago
      I did more than 20 trips to Germany for work in the 1990s and early 2000s (I'm American). Of course my work colleagues there spoke good English, as did the staff at the hotels I stayed at, museums and airports, but enough people did not (shop owners, some restaurants, agents at train stations) that it really helped me to learn at least enough German to order at restaurants and shops and struggle through basic conversations; I took classes and practiced when I could. Often a mixture of my bad, limited German and the person I was speaking to's bad, limited English got things handled.
      - School-Cotton 5y ago
        Was that in Berlin? Maybe the English level has improved since then.

BossHogg 5y ago

The thesis that once you ignore all the force it took to make a "dominant language" dominant they spread without coercion is not especially compelling. It still remains the backdrop for things like wanting to "internationalise and attract overseas experts."

hunglee2 5y ago
great observation, exactly my sense of it.

AnAfrican 5y ago

It’s weird how the article does not give any example of languages that did spread and become dominant without any coercion. They do exist: Swahili and Lingala for instance. They mostly spread through trade and as « neutral » language used to communicate between ethnic groups (with their own language).

rgergerge3 5y ago
I am not sure about Lingala but Swahili absolutely spread through coercion in colonial times and post independence. In Tanzania the Germans and later the British heavily promoted Swahili as a lingua franca. Nowadays Swahili is the first language of most Tanzanians but in the past it was mainly limited to coastal areas formerly controlled by the Sultanate of Oman. The government of Tanzania promotes Swahili to this day, and many native languages in the interior of the country are declining.
- AnAfrican 5y ago
  Yes but it did and does spread beyond Tanzania. Lingala probably did have some government help too in Mobutu’s era but still.

dimitar 5y ago

The spread of Russian in Ukraine fits this model (coercion to establish dominance, then continued spread without coercion) very well. Urban areas in the East and Center became Russian-speaking through Soviet measures like mixing nationalities at work/army to force them to use Russian. There were other coersive measures like the central planning not providing not enough Ukrainian media (only folk music programs on TV for example) and limiting the classes available in Ukrainian in some regions. Now the "language of inter-nationality communication" is so entrenched, that Ukrainian needs government support to incentivise media and businesses to use it. As everyone understands Russian nowadays, and few people know English, companies that serve the CIS market actually promote Russian better than the government promotes Ukrainian. To talk about the elephant in the room, note that the politics don't correlate perfectly with the language situation on the ground - on one hand there are quite a few Russian-speakers that don't want Russian as an official language and also plenty of pro-Western people want Russian to be co-official.

akg_67 5y ago
Similar changes happened in Japan (Ainu and Okinawan languages displaced by Japanese) and Taiwan (Taiwanese language displaced by Chinese). In this aspect, I credit India for not coercing a national language to displace regional languages. But then such unification of languages may be a contributing factor to keeping country together and alleviate regionalism.
- bluishgreen 5y ago
  Regarding India, I am not exactly sure if any credits are in order. Oh they tried, they tried hard. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Hindi_agitations_of_Tamil_Nadu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Hindi_agitations_of_Tam...
  - akg_67 5y ago
    IMO, India has still done very well compared to other countries, for example Japan, China, US, when it comes to stamping out cultures, languages and ethnicities, the people with power don't want.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

The keyword here is incentive, not coercion. Most of the world uses English as a second language because the British used to run a fairly large part of it and most of their former colonies still have a lot of English speakers and quite a few even maintain it as an official language. And then after two world wars, their former colony the USA of course became a super power. So, for the past few centuries, understanding English meant access to a large market where English just was the main language to do business. There is an enormous economic incentive to do business in English as it gives you access to these huge markets with wealthy customers. Additionally, a lot of content is published by English speakers, which re-enforces the need to learn English. Finally because pretty much every country does at least some business in English, it's also the most common language for any two countries that wish to engage with each other. I'm actually Dutch but I live in Germany. While I speak a little bit of German, my English is far better. I don't actually need German to do business in Berlin; so I don't use it a lot I have no economic incentive to learn it. There's a critical mass of foreigners here that mostly speak English far better than they speak German. And while some Germans don't like that, a lot of them don't mind it and actually move to Berlin because they speak English and because is so international. You see this dynamic in a lot of economically important cities across the world. As soon as you get any concentration of foreigners living in them, English becomes an important language to the point where the locals start using English to be able to keep up.

tinco 5y ago
The Americans gave us Cartoon Network. If the Germans had better cartoons we probably would be speaking German a lot better. In my opinion there's actually great economic incentive to speak German fluently. For me personally I've had multiple meetings with friends and business relations where I sometimes felt left out because I can't understand German well when it's spoken at native speed. Besides that I know of multiple great universities where I would have liked to go, but can't really because I'm not fluent enough in German. Obviously as a software engineer it would be ridiculous to not at least read English, but I know for a fact there's great German language forums and learning resources out there. I imagine there exist programmers out there working in some deep and dark VW or Siemens lab that have been able to work for years without reading a full English sentence. I'm pretty sure Berlin is also the only city (or one of very few) in Germany where you can actually live and work happily and productively without learning German.

viztor 5y ago

Language is the classic case for network effect, the more people speaking one language, more information would be communicated in that language, more beneficial it will be for learning such language.

JaumeGreen 5y ago

All languages can spread without coercion. I knew people learning Catalan without even living anywhere nearby, and even not knowing Spanish, French or Italian. Maybe it was an elective in their university and they were bored, maybe they heard a song and loved it, ... plenty of different reasons. But dominant languages have plenty of advantages. First of all just by being spoken by lots of people make then a "de facto" common language, and sometimes people change to the dominant language in a conversation just because one person spoke in that, EVEN when all the people can talk and understand the same non-dominant language. I've seen it happen, and this may be a leftover from times when it was persecuted to speak the non-dominant one. Second there's lot of non-aggresive coercion. You may have less job opportunities if you don't use the dominant language, your works less promotion, not considered serious, ... . I'm sure that (except for the novelty) a punk-rock Navajo band singing in Navajo would have less media exposure that the same band using English. And third, there's lots of remanent coercion. People being agressive because you are using the "wrong" language, not being able to use the language in a trial (in the same country that contains the dominant and dominated languages), ... . If you add all three it's clear that without some organized help the dominated languages have a hard time. And when a language is lost some of the knowledge is lost, because a language is not only a means of communication, it's also a way to see the world. The expression the language holds gives us a unique view on different ways of thinking.

hunglee2 5y ago

Highly debatable premise. Eliminating linguistic diversity is one of the main pillars of nation building. English, French, Spanish - all prestige languages which inhabitants were forced to learn and speak. You only have to look at the marginalisation, and consequent decline of Celtic languages in these countries to see that coercion (soft or hard) was forcing factor