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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

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.
        CogitoCogito 5y ago
        I lived in Berlin 2005-2006 and found learning German to be practically a necessity then. Since then the city seems to have changed significantly. In fact, in my experience I would even put most of the changes to be post 2012 or so (at least I remember it seeming fairly similar then). The city seems to be evolving at an incredible rate.
slibhb 5y ago
> 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. Is this fair framing? Doesn't it seem likely that English speaking countries are bad at learning languages precisely because there's no urgent reason to learn one? And is it really "making them speak English"? There's always going to be a lingua franca and it's English right now for complicated historical-political reasons. There's no reason to assume it will be English forever.
- lotu 5y ago
  I kinda think that the lingua Franca, is very sticky. Think base 10 or the Gregorian calendar or QWERTY . None of these are the only or even best solution but they are going to all stick around forever just because it will never make sense to change them.
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    Yep. Latin was the lingua franca (or at least one of the major ones) in Europe until 1800 or so, more than 1000 years after the fall of the western Roman Empire.
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      Was Latin really the lingua franca, or just the language of liturgy, over that period?
      - inawarminister 5y ago
        Latin was also the lingua franca of nobles and merchants. Lingua Franca Mediterrania itself, the language spoken by medieval sailors in Italy, Egypt, and nearly all the coastline of Mediterranean is a creole of Italian, Portuguese, and Arabic. To the point that Shakespearean Moors spoke it as "Arabic". Then, the language of science until the 1900s is Latin. Isaac Newton wrote in Latin. Nearly all scientific papers and books were published in "Neolatin".
RubyRidgeRandy 5y ago
The US military is actually very good at teaching people new languages. The issue when learning new languages is incentive and exposure. If you are stuck in a classroom for 8 hours a day and only exposed to a single foreign language, and you have no other job to do but learn that language, you pick it up pretty quick. It's easy to learn English. No matter where you are, you are probably constantly exposed to English media and are taught it in school.
ashtonkem 5y ago
> 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. Also, even when such media cultures exist, they’re competing against the incredible might of Hollywood, Netflix, Disney, etc. It is very difficult to compete with the budget and production quality that these companies can maintain if you’re a smaller economy. Disney’s revenue last year was 12% of Sweden’s GDP ($65B vs $541B). Sweden would have to sink a massive chunk of its GDP into movies in order to compete with just Disney, let alone all the other streaming services. My suspicion is that there needs to be not only a tradition to act as a bulwark, but also some national self identity that causes people to reject the homogenizing effect of foreign media. That can either be pride in extant local media (I understand that the Paris novel scene is rather hostile to non-native involvement, for example), or an explicit rejection of the foreign media for more explicitly political reasons.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  There must be more to this; places like Nigeria, India, China, Japan all make more feature films compared to the US. Countries like Spain, France, Germany, UK make about half as many. Mexico, Brazil are in the top 15.. But Anglo countries like Canada or Australia or New Zealand make many fewer. UK makes slightly less than the US. Population size probably matters more and gdp less but having some unique to say helps.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    > But Anglo countries like Canada or Australia or New Zealand make many fewer. UK makes slightly less than the US. No surprise there. Same language (no translation barrier) and a shared background as former British colonies (well, or being British) really seals the deal there. But also there's really no language aspect to analyze here; we can't say that America's media culture undermined the local non-English speaking of say, New Zealand, because most of the people there already spoke English already. Although the impact on accents is another matter, I am sure. > There must be more to this; places like Nigeria, India, China, Japan all make more feature films compared to the US. Countries like Spain, France, Germany, UK make about half as many. Mexico, Brazil are in the top 15.. Some of those other countries definitely fall under my criteria. Japan and India both have their own traditions to preserve (Bollywood is a thing), and my understanding is that the CCP has made resisting Hollywood's influence an explicit goal. The rest of it? Dunno. There's clearly just some other factor at play here that I don't have my thumb on. I can't explain why Brazil and Mexico produce that many movies, this is the first time I've heard that. > Population size probably matters more and gdp less I think that's really close, but not quite it. I think the real thing here is having the cultural and economic circumstances that allow people to go and produce media and art for consumption. For some forms of media (especially movies) this is going to largely be a factor of money and population, since that is expensive. But that might not be true for all types of national media. Manga in particular is a fairly small industry, with roughly 40,000 workers and a mere 4,000 artists. Hollywood alone is 10x bigger. My mind also jumps here to Russia, and how important its literature scene is to both the country and the language. Population is certainly a factor, producing great literature at the country level is often about giving a lot of people the chance to try and seeing what happens, but money really isn't as much a factor given that novels are cheap to produce. Funding great novels is pretty cheap once you've identified worthwhile novelists, since it involves paying maybe the living expenses of a few people. Perhaps my takeaway here is that Movies are the national media of America (and India too, to be fair), and what we're seeing in some countries is the competition between American movies providing pressure to move to English, and other forms of local media grounding the country in question in its native tongue. That idea might need more fleshing out. > but having some unique to say helps. Oh yes, that is certainly very important. 0 - Although for a short while the UK definitely punched above its weight, from the 60s until the 80s or so. The theory I've heard is that this was a side effect of having a really good welfare system; people were able to quit their jobs easily and create music and art, and some of it was really good.
throwaway89374 5y ago
> 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 India is different from the other countries that had been mentioned. India is a union of many larger states. The government of India is actually called as Union Government in the constitution. India has 23 officially recognized languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India .
inglor_cz 5y ago
The English probably have no good system for learning foreign languages for the same reason that (landlocked) Czechs do not have a good system for training sailors; absence of need. Even our own bodies will shrink unused muscles or organs, because the resources are needed elsewhere. As anyone who returned to a gym after a Covid pause found out.
adrianN 5y ago
Learning a new language to fluency takes hundreds of hours at least, some languages require thousands of hours. That's not the fault of educational practices. It just takes time to memorize thousands of unknown words and figure out in which context they are used.
- Delk 5y ago
  Fluency also requires learning the basic grammatical rules of the language by heart well enough that one can apply them without consciously thinking about them most of the time. Being able to communicate in a few everyday situations probably doesn't require so much of that especially if you focus on communication rather than getting things pedantically correct, but that's not the same as fluency or a professionally useful level of skill. Being able to read fiction or understand other cultural works is again a whole another thing. I'm not from the anglosphere and I consider learning languages hard and laborious. GP may be right about language education in the anglosphere -- I wouldn't know that -- and education could probably be improved just about everywhere, but there certainly is an intrinsic difficulty to learning languages as well.

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.
      - CogitoCogito 5y ago
        I lived in Berlin 2005-2006 and found learning German to be practically a necessity then. Since then the city seems to have changed significantly. In fact, in my experience I would even put most of the changes to be post 2012 or so (at least I remember it seeming fairly similar then). The city seems to be evolving at an incredible rate.

slibhb 5y ago

> 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. Is this fair framing? Doesn't it seem likely that English speaking countries are bad at learning languages precisely because there's no urgent reason to learn one? And is it really "making them speak English"? There's always going to be a lingua franca and it's English right now for complicated historical-political reasons. There's no reason to assume it will be English forever.

lotu 5y ago
I kinda think that the lingua Franca, is very sticky. Think base 10 or the Gregorian calendar or QWERTY . None of these are the only or even best solution but they are going to all stick around forever just because it will never make sense to change them.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  Yep. Latin was the lingua franca (or at least one of the major ones) in Europe until 1800 or so, more than 1000 years after the fall of the western Roman Empire.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    Was Latin really the lingua franca, or just the language of liturgy, over that period?
    - inawarminister 5y ago
      Latin was also the lingua franca of nobles and merchants. Lingua Franca Mediterrania itself, the language spoken by medieval sailors in Italy, Egypt, and nearly all the coastline of Mediterranean is a creole of Italian, Portuguese, and Arabic. To the point that Shakespearean Moors spoke it as "Arabic". Then, the language of science until the 1900s is Latin. Isaac Newton wrote in Latin. Nearly all scientific papers and books were published in "Neolatin".

RubyRidgeRandy 5y ago

The US military is actually very good at teaching people new languages. The issue when learning new languages is incentive and exposure. If you are stuck in a classroom for 8 hours a day and only exposed to a single foreign language, and you have no other job to do but learn that language, you pick it up pretty quick. It's easy to learn English. No matter where you are, you are probably constantly exposed to English media and are taught it in school.

ashtonkem 5y ago

> 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. Also, even when such media cultures exist, they’re competing against the incredible might of Hollywood, Netflix, Disney, etc. It is very difficult to compete with the budget and production quality that these companies can maintain if you’re a smaller economy. Disney’s revenue last year was 12% of Sweden’s GDP ($65B vs $541B). Sweden would have to sink a massive chunk of its GDP into movies in order to compete with just Disney, let alone all the other streaming services. My suspicion is that there needs to be not only a tradition to act as a bulwark, but also some national self identity that causes people to reject the homogenizing effect of foreign media. That can either be pride in extant local media (I understand that the Paris novel scene is rather hostile to non-native involvement, for example), or an explicit rejection of the foreign media for more explicitly political reasons.

ipaddr 5y ago
There must be more to this; places like Nigeria, India, China, Japan all make more feature films compared to the US. Countries like Spain, France, Germany, UK make about half as many. Mexico, Brazil are in the top 15.. But Anglo countries like Canada or Australia or New Zealand make many fewer. UK makes slightly less than the US. Population size probably matters more and gdp less but having some unique to say helps.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  > But Anglo countries like Canada or Australia or New Zealand make many fewer. UK makes slightly less than the US. No surprise there. Same language (no translation barrier) and a shared background as former British colonies (well, or being British) really seals the deal there. But also there's really no language aspect to analyze here; we can't say that America's media culture undermined the local non-English speaking of say, New Zealand, because most of the people there already spoke English already. Although the impact on accents is another matter, I am sure. > There must be more to this; places like Nigeria, India, China, Japan all make more feature films compared to the US. Countries like Spain, France, Germany, UK make about half as many. Mexico, Brazil are in the top 15.. Some of those other countries definitely fall under my criteria. Japan and India both have their own traditions to preserve (Bollywood is a thing), and my understanding is that the CCP has made resisting Hollywood's influence an explicit goal. The rest of it? Dunno. There's clearly just some other factor at play here that I don't have my thumb on. I can't explain why Brazil and Mexico produce that many movies, this is the first time I've heard that. > Population size probably matters more and gdp less I think that's really close, but not quite it. I think the real thing here is having the cultural and economic circumstances that allow people to go and produce media and art for consumption. For some forms of media (especially movies) this is going to largely be a factor of money and population, since that is expensive. But that might not be true for all types of national media. Manga in particular is a fairly small industry, with roughly 40,000 workers and a mere 4,000 artists. Hollywood alone is 10x bigger. My mind also jumps here to Russia, and how important its literature scene is to both the country and the language. Population is certainly a factor, producing great literature at the country level is often about giving a lot of people the chance to try and seeing what happens, but money really isn't as much a factor given that novels are cheap to produce. Funding great novels is pretty cheap once you've identified worthwhile novelists, since it involves paying maybe the living expenses of a few people. Perhaps my takeaway here is that Movies are the national media of America (and India too, to be fair), and what we're seeing in some countries is the competition between American movies providing pressure to move to English, and other forms of local media grounding the country in question in its native tongue. That idea might need more fleshing out. > but having some unique to say helps. Oh yes, that is certainly very important. 0 - Although for a short while the UK definitely punched above its weight, from the 60s until the 80s or so. The theory I've heard is that this was a side effect of having a really good welfare system; people were able to quit their jobs easily and create music and art, and some of it was really good.

throwaway89374 5y ago

> 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 India is different from the other countries that had been mentioned. India is a union of many larger states. The government of India is actually called as Union Government in the constitution. India has 23 officially recognized languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India .

inglor_cz 5y ago

The English probably have no good system for learning foreign languages for the same reason that (landlocked) Czechs do not have a good system for training sailors; absence of need. Even our own bodies will shrink unused muscles or organs, because the resources are needed elsewhere. As anyone who returned to a gym after a Covid pause found out.

adrianN 5y ago

Learning a new language to fluency takes hundreds of hours at least, some languages require thousands of hours. That's not the fault of educational practices. It just takes time to memorize thousands of unknown words and figure out in which context they are used.

Delk 5y ago
Fluency also requires learning the basic grammatical rules of the language by heart well enough that one can apply them without consciously thinking about them most of the time. Being able to communicate in a few everyday situations probably doesn't require so much of that especially if you focus on communication rather than getting things pedantically correct, but that's not the same as fluency or a professionally useful level of skill. Being able to read fiction or understand other cultural works is again a whole another thing. I'm not from the anglosphere and I consider learning languages hard and laborious. GP may be right about language education in the anglosphere -- I wouldn't know that -- and education could probably be improved just about everywhere, but there certainly is an intrinsic difficulty to learning languages as well.