Can Multilingualism Survive?: How cities preserve and abandon languages
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
EDIT : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IBfgUNpRsY Note that the title is kinda stupid, it's obviously not their native language if they can barely speak it, and that's kind of the point. Note also that their parents come from a huge language community which is in no danger of disappearing anytime soon and nevertheless, it's not enough.
Although I was born in Algiers, we spoke Kabyle at home and most Kabyle people I know who were born elsewhere did, too.
If you go to cities like Tizi-Ouzou (one hour or less away) and Bejaïa, Kabyle is the lingua franca. That's the language people use to talk to each other. But you'd be understood if you spoke another Algerian language (Algerian dialects are a mish-mash of mostly Arabic, Kabyle, French, Turkish, Italian, and Spanish), or French.
So for me, I just go there and I can just speak Kabyle in a small zone containing a little more than 2 million people (there are many more in neighboring cities, and many, many more in other cities, but that's the "HQ" with the highest capita/km² speaking the language daily).
I use five languages daily living in Algiers (5 million people). Though I think you're partly right for the "retaining the language" part since Algiers didn't retain the "original" language: it mixed a bunch of them and then retained that.
I also agree with the economic and social capital argument.
I learn Spanish and Portuguese and I'm not the slightest confused by the gender rules - it's rather what I'm used to, since I speak German as native language.
TLDR: YMMV, but I don't think this holds if you come from a non-English background.
Gender and tense questions make a lot of things really complicated! There are only two tenses in english, really. Compare to Spanish/French conjugations, or German declination questions.
(Because this is HN) in a way, English ends up being very LISP-y (more CL than Scheme though). There are very few base constructs, and some special vocabulary, but most "grammar" is really just vocabulary. Future tense isn't a tense, it's using 'will'.
There's hardness because of all the dialects, and particles. Though I don't really know of a language where particle use isn't of a similar difficulty.
For example (I will use examples from German, since this is my native language) typical rules (probably you will find exceptions) are that nouns that end in "-chen" or "-lein" (endings for diminutive, though this is not always obvious (for example "das Mädchen" is a diminutive of "die Maid")) are neuter. Or nouns that end in "-e" are feminine. Or nouns that end in "-er" are masculine (at least if they mean "a person/object doing something" (counterexample: "das Wunder" (the wonder) - but this is not a person/object doing something) - the same holds for verbs ending in "-erin" being female. Or if you turn a verb into a noun ("das Wandern" from "wandern" - to wander) it will be neuter.
Of course there will be enough nouns for which you simply will have to learn the gender, but I don't believe it is that amount of effort (and most other languages have a much more regular pronounciation than English).
Overall, the intrinsic qualities of a language matter little if at all in driving its adoption.
People learn English because they want to speak with Americans (and earlier the British). Everything else is irrelevant.
This leads to most English being spoken in the country having no native participant. Having too idiomatic English will probably lead to harder communication.
> I rather think most people learn a particular set of language because they have to pick it in school.
You are using "learn" in a completely different sense than rvense is. Far and away the majority of people who have to take language classes in school don't learn anything. People who study a language because they want to communicate with people who speak that language, do learn.
I know few people who really try to learn a new language after school (which is IMHO a pity, since there exist free options in the internet), so for the typical person it is "one either learned the language in school and got to an at least medium level (on which one can, if one wants to (say, because one wants to communicate with others), build later on in life) or one will never learn the language".
There is also the way these things are taught. The most common third language to learn here is German, and instead of, you know, focusing on fluency and learning to actually use the language, or watching good German films or reading interesting German literature, what you get is rote memorization of inflections.
Depends on what you consider as free.
For example German (more inflected than English) has a rather free order of clauses (where the order tells about the emphasis the speaker wants to express) opposed to English.
On the other hand, in English words are often used in a more flexible way than in German (even if you use a similar construction in both languages), because the stricter grammar makes this less comfortable in German than in English. For example: "iron" (en) is "Bügeleisen" (de). In English one can use the verb "to iron" for using the iron while in German there is an own verb "bügeln" for this. Just using the same word for an object and something you do with it is already interfered by the German grammar, in which verbs have to end in "en" or at least "n".
We humans all have the same hardware processing language. If some spoken languages were _actually_ more complex or too complex for that hardware to process, they wouldn't be spoken.
Now, I personaly think that if French actually reached a point where it would be shared as common language by billions of people it would have been broken down to a more efficient form. Creoles and other dialects derived from french all seem to get rid of the redundant bits.
"Irregular" means that a perticular word does not obey the usual rules for inflection (an example of such a rule verb (without to) + "ed" -> simple past, e.g. "jump" -> "jumped"). For example "go" -> "went", "sing" -> "sang". You will usually simply have to learn those.
This isn't true.
However its words have genders to remember to make plurals and match adjectives and possessives. Verbs have desinences for each tense and person. English can be irregular, but Italian has more details to memorize. Still, as you wrote, people don't use the easiest language but the language that gives the most benefits. Latin is so much more difficult than Italian but it had its (very long) heyday, right?
All of that being said, the study of language is very important, and the differences that exist should be recorded for scientific study. Maybe it even makes sense to preserve the real outlying communities (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386...) by forcibly cutting them off from the global economy.
But major languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese) are redundant standards that should be consolidated ASAP.
Reality is often much more complicated. Take the simple example of A talking to B with listener C. There's the scenario where a A wants to talk to B but without being understood by C. Or the reverse where A wants C to understand something but not B, whilst talking to B. And we can go on like this - see for example, this[0] RSA Animate by Steve Pinker about why we don't just say things explicitly most of the time.
As a result of all this we get stuff like jargon, coded slang, read-between-the-lines expressions, and yes: foreign languages. Because if you apply that insight to human groups, it becomes obvious that with human "tribes", the use of language is as much a way of excluding outsiders as it is about clear communication. In this light, stuff like youth slang always evolving into something unintelligible to adults makes perfect sense.
As long as there is a desire for selecting who doesn't understand you (which I think will always be the case), language diversification will be a thing. If you have access to New Scientist articles, this one[1] sums it up nicely
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628941-700-war-of-w...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11704216
(replying to myself because I cannot edit my comment anymore)
Your point is still valid, but Spanish isn't going to be the 'one' - if you were going to push the world to learn Spanish (because, say, it's easier in general than English or Chinese), then you may as well go the whole hog and get everyone to learn a synthetic language like Esperanto, which is easier again.
For critics of Esperanto see
No. It does not. I do some translation work and a lot of multilingual interaction. There is no decent translation technology even for written communication outside technical documents. Even that is only barely decent between European languages. A serious attempt at usable translation of even the simplest texts between Asian languages and others does not yet exist.
Real time translation would multiply the speech recognition problem onto that still-imaginary translation technology.
I will admit there is a lot of hype but there is no substitute for human translators nor for simply learning a new language anywhere on the horizon.
I can see computer-based real-time translation getting to the point where it's putting translators out of jobs in the next few decades. I can't ever imagine humanity transitioning to a single language, or even a limited scope single language for business. It just won't happen.
"There's Jim's dog. Look, he's so happy to see me."
"Actually, it's she."
Or even better,
"There's Jim's brother."
All of that being said, the study of language is very important, and the differences that exist should be recorded for scientific study. Maybe it even makes sense to preserve the real outlying communities (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/) by forcibly cutting them off from the more general online communities.
But major languages (Java, Javascript, C#) are redundant standards that should be consolidated ASAP.
1. The formal communications dialect 2. The bedroom + dinner table dialect
People who live in a european contry may notice that the formal dialect of their native langauge is dissapearing, and even, that many new concepts cannot be expressed in their native toung. But that doesn't mean that the bedroom + dinner table aspect of their langauge is going away. Germans don't have tummy aches, neither do Czechs. But both, "compile" their software and both preform a "git commit".
Furthermore, there is no such thing as a "concept that cannot be expressed" in a language. More often than not when people say a language has "no word for X", they turn out to be wrong, and even when they're right, the concept can be expressed through paraphrase.
That's why we have loanwords.
Why else would a bouquet not be called "a bunch of flowers". Because a bunch of flowers is something different than a bouquet.
The response to the parent comment was more to debate that there are a lot of words, concepts, and idioms that may carry an actual translation or similar concept in another, but the translations fail to capture the immediacy of the idea conveyed by the original word or phrase. It's not to say that there is no way to understand or interpret these bits of language unless you're a native speaker, it's that in many cases you lose a lot of the meaning without the cultural context surrounding it.
Culture and language are pretty inseparable; it's why transliteration is often frowned upon when doing translation works, and localization is considered important to helping the audience understand without imparting too high of a burden of knowledge of their part. Sometimes this burden of knowledge is simply unavoidable. But the ability of a word or phrase to evoke a specific idea/image/feeling in one language and to not do so in another is not impossible. If you know anyone for whom English is a second language (and has not spent extended time in the US), try to explain why "cut the cheese" is funny in English. They may understand conceptually that there is a rude meaning to the phrase, but I'm willing to bet they'd be more than happy to tell you that they'll cut the cheese in the kitchen.
The same way most languages have singular and plural, Slovenian also has dual. It's much handier than always specifying "two somethings". Very few languages still have this feature. English for instance only has residual traces left.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number)
You can translate it, of course, but it's going to look and feel awkward.
Have you made a serious effort to translate jokes, poetry, or advertising slogans between unrelated languages before you made that assertion? Were your clients unequivocally satisfied with your work?
We use those as stems, over which we add our own orthography, morphology and syntax.
I always hate all the talk about multilingualism as a good thing, when the consequence of language diversity is, one, people are wasting time in their youths learning languages for other peoples benefit, ie, those that want to "preserve" it, when the marginal utility of having excess languages is at best questionable. And two, if you do not know the primary language used for, you know, communicating with other human beings, especially English, your potential economic mobility is catastrophically crippled on a global scale.
That is why English is so important now, since about half the world knows it, and the difference between knowing it or not could be the difference between perpetual poverty and improving standards of living.
In the same way, the cultural aspect cannot be considered relevant as much as the grammar cannot be, because the importance of having a language to communicate is overwhelming. There will always be people that like languages and learn them, language diversity will never die, but I also would wonder how you could ever hope to replace English with something better. It is the kind of thing that logically should seem obvious - a university department of smart people, or a global consortium, could come together and try to architect a language optimized for everyone, that has firm grammar rules and uses all the auditory notes of the human voice range, and prioritizes making common words short and such. But once you make that language, how do you teach it to the world? And in between, are you proposing people learn English and Earthish at the same time?
J'aime bien aussi ta deuxième phrase qui sous-entend qu'on ne peut communiquer avec les autres qu'en anglais. Je me demande comment je faisais pour discuter avec mes parents quand j'étais petit. C'est sans doute de là que vient la tragique incommunicabilité qui a marqué mon enfance.
Je ne saisis pas que le majorité des jeunes en France apprennent et utilisent Anglais tout les temps. Donc à le début, c'était très difficile d'avoir un conversation sans les changent à anglais.
Maintenant je peux parler juste un peu le Français, mais l'expression quand un francophones réalise que je peux le comprendre est absolument fantastique :)
Bravo pour apprendre Anglais. Je souhaite que plus gens ont apprécié la lutte que les locuteurs non natifs ont quand ils apprennent un nouveau langue.
One example is literature - literature often does not translate well at all. Another is psychology and brain functionality, as I say above. For example, there are languages out there that don't have 'left' and 'right' as concepts. Instead people use 'east' and 'west' or 'north' and 'south'. Speakers of these languages tend to have a very good grasp of their geospatial bearing as a result. Without these unusual languages, we would be very unlikely to think of experimenting with such a concept, much less be able to test it.
I did hear of one language about to go extinct (in central america, I think). There are apparently only two speakers of it, both elderly, that live a couple of streets apart... and they don't speak to each other because of some feud :)
They don't have their own word for "commit". Instead they use the English one as a loan word. However, it follows all the regular grammar rules ("Ich habe das gestern committet"). Loan words are nothing new. They are adopted and merged into languages and often they reach a point where people don't notice anymore that they are foreign to the language.
Nowadays English is the major source of loan words. Before that it was French, and before that Latin. English is not taking over any more than the other two did.
It's unclear if "Europe" wants anything of the sort at this point, and you seem to assume that English would be the common language, which is not unreasonable since it's the one currently being used, but it's not politically acceptable, and it'll be worse if the UK finally decides to leave.
Note also that Europe is probably the part of the world where minority languages are in better shape. E.g Catalan is spoken by 4 million native speakers, which is more than all of the native american language speakers combined.
Even if there are more minority languages in SE Asia and South America, I'm not sure they're treated better there than in Europe.
By the way, I know it's HN and people here are more internationalized and pro-globalisation than the average but the actual reality on the ground is that the far right and nationalism is growing in most EU countries and the current trend is to limit the EU, not expand it even further.
And that is not to say English is in any way a good language. It is dreadful. But language is not valuable for how well it pleases a gramaticist, but for its ability to facilitate communication, and right now English is so far and away #1 globally in that regard doing anything but trying to press every civilization to teach their citizens it is almost condemning them to poverty for some upper crust and downright selfish ideals of cultural diversity.
Europe may want to achieve some things in common but not at the expense of not achieving other things not in common.
Per the article: step outside the European worldview to see how cultural viewpoints elsewhere understand and express the value of multilingualism
Globalism may be weakening some languages in the near term as it may make sense for people around the world to learn English or even Chinese, and maybe a few other languages. However, imagine if translation technology became advanced enough to conduct a normal conversation with each party speaking a different language. We might even hold on to that mysterious 4th official language in Switzerland (Romansh) after that. There are plenty of people who would love to go back to their hometown and speak nothing other than the language their parents taught them.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...