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Comment by mannerheim | Hacker News Reader

If all there was to language death was the speakers deciding to no longer speak their language, then there would be nothing much people could do about it. But many languages have been forcibly suppressed for generations. Public schooling, nationalism, and the decline of regional languages all coincided for a reason.

For instance, in France, 39% of the population spoke Occitan in 1860. In 1993 the Occitan-speaking population was 7%, and that number is surely fewer now. This was the result of a concerted effort to create a French nation, enforced through the public education system by abusing schoolchildren until they hated their native tongue.[0]

Language is a crucial aspect of identity (but by no means the only one), and 19th century nationalists understood this. The first generation become ashamed to speak their language, the second generation never learn it, and the third become full-fledged assimilated members of the nation. If there is a different group of people in your country who resemble you but have a different identity, destroy their language and their religion, and now you are the same.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha

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As someone personally close to the matter, I've come to think the action of the French school system has been overblown for ideological reasons, and that's the organic mechanics of acculturation that were very much in play in France have been completely forgotten, in particular as it pertains to urban migration, economic mobility and the growth of tertiary sector. Even if the French State did nothing, Occitan wouldn't be much better now if you look at the data from neighboring countries.

It's my personal opinion, but the reason the educational program of the French Republic was successful is because it gave an outlet to a need people had. They wanted to move up, they wanted to speak French. Don't deny them agency.

> They wanted to move up, they wanted to speak French. Don't deny them agency.

This is a manipulation. What you are saying is that in order to move up in French society, they are required to speak French, and therefore they learned French in order not to be suppressed. But you're disguising it in weird wokeness language.

You could use the same phrasing about skin-bleaching to make it sound like people who were against it were the actual oppressors, denying brown people their agency, speaking for brown people, saying that brown people are making bad decisions for themselves, and actively trying to keep brown people from enjoying the success that skin-bleaching would bring them. It's pretty reprehensible framing, but common. It's even used against brown people themselves, like in this case it's being used against Occitan speakers.

I want to note that this framing is reprehensible, regardless of the facts on the ground, or the particular subject. You could just as well be arguing for women to get breast implants, or for orthodox Jews to make themselves available on Saturdays.

> They wanted to move up, they wanted to speak French.

As a native speaker of one of the languages that France is successfully removing, I find your words deeply offensive. The suppression of languages of France has not been a peaceful or voluntary process, but a very violent one. Shit; school kids were ridiculed and reprimanded by speaking other non-french languages at the recreation yards! How evil is that?

We have agency. Problem is that we are overwhelmed by a much powerful opponent that is actively trying to eliminate us. Now I'm living in Paris, and I'm sad and dismayed at the incomprehension of most native french speakers to the plight of the people of their own country.

I have directly observed and interacted with quite a few people who went through that process. Those who stayed in the village, or kept a social network there despite moving to the city, more or less all speak it still despite having learned French in school and being told the patois was best forgotten. Those who despise it the most and don't speak it anymore are those who moved out, climbed the social ladder and became mid or upper class in a city. Schooling certainly favoured that outcome, but it was ultimately determined by economics. If France had followed a less radical path, Occitan, Breton and others would be declining instead of dying, but they'd still end dead soon enough.

On a side note, I find the whole victim mentality attached to that subject deplorable, in particular coming from young people who've never been through any sort of actual oppression. People have all the tools nowadays to perpetuate their language, but there's a lot more whining than actually putting the work into teaching it to their kids and actively speaking it.

If France had followed a less radical path, Occitania might be a separate nation today. There's no denying the efficacy of the French nationalist movement.

>Occitania might be a separate nation today

There might have been a State across the lines of Old Gascony, and one across the lines of the lands of the Counts of Barcelona and Provence. But an "Occitan nation" is pure fantasy. There's never been much of a unifying cultural force (even at the peek of the Troubadour age), even less of a political one (save for France itself). That word "occitania" wasn't even used before the 70s and it's still far from widespread use outside of Languedoc, and for some reason Italy.

People have way too many daydreams about that stuff. But having one major Gallo-Romance nation is a natural outcome, even if the way the French State was re-factored around the turn of the 19th c. looks forced.

There had never been a Finnish state prior to the 20th century, either.

The audacity of French nationalists; I love France but I really cannot stand that!

They speak of "the village", but it's in fact many major cities in the country (Marselha, Tolosa, Perpinyà, Strossburi, Brest, Naoned) that were not French-speaking less than a couple of centuries ago. For some people, anything out of Paris is a tiny country village without importance.

"Naoned", that is to say Nantes, has never been Breton speaking. Same for Rennes. They were part of the March of Brittany set up to specifically defend against the Bretons, but they successfully annexed it in the commotion left by the Norsemen. The court of Brittany became French-speaking when it moved there.

Also, nobody in Marseille writes "Marselha", If you want to do some out of place indigenous rights dog whistling, the proper orthography in Provencal is Marsiho. Normalized Occitan is of ill repute in Provence, and so is the associated Occitanism.

Of all places, HN was probably the last one where I would have expected to read such a disgusting defence of linguistic genocide.

I'm at a loss. Honestly cannot reply to such bullshit without strong words.

I hope some day you will understand that what you are saying is not alright, but I won't be able to help you in that. Have a good day.

> if you look at the data from neighboring countries.

Which neighboring countries, exactly? Minority languages in Spain were suppressed for decades under the Franco government, and intermittently under assorted Spanish monarchies and republics before that. Germany had a diglossia between Hochdeutsch and assorted local tongues, and some of those local tongues still exist because the state saw them as legitimate regional dialects of the standard language. Italy never put nearly as much of a premium on suppressing the regional languages whose literature had contributed to Standard Italian, and those dialects have survived much better than e.g. Sardinian or Franco-Provencal.

There are numerous counterexamples of minority languages that have prospered despite the presence of a majority language that granted economic opportunity. Why didn't the Finns and Estonians just abandon their languages for Russian, the Hungarians theirs for German, or the Yugoslavians Serbian? If the Occitans had had their own country, e.g., if France had been carved up like Russia or Austria-Hungary had been, I see no reason why their language wouldn't still be commonly spoken.

"Don't deny them agency"

Dear god this is such a great statement. So many people working in international development fetishize life out in the village. Its like they want people to live in some kind of frozen time bubble as museum Fremen.

But that's not how assimilation happens these days right? People are begging to come to wealthy countries. In this scenario everyone speaking English or whatever is the dominant language in two generation is a good thing for economic equality and cultural cohesion. Take Sillicon Valley is a positive example of good integration.

Immigration to the USA and nation-building in France do seem like very different things, yes.

In France, the project of creating a French nation and a French people required taking a diversity of cultures and languages that already existed in the territory, and trying to standardize and unify them. This is what modern nationalism did in many parts of Europe.

The USA is a different kind of project, wherein people from Europe came to take over the continent from it's previous inhabitants, stamping out the various cultures and languages that were on this continent by displacing whole peoples, not by assimilating them. Initially there were different European groups that were also kind of fighting each other for power. Obviously the ones from England were the dominant power in creating the United States of America, but other European cultures existed on the continent for a while too, the Lone Star State in Texas actually had three official state langauges -- English, Spanish, and German (yup).

So, yeah, these were very different things. I'd start from the actual history in comparing them.

I guess the commonality is the end result of homogenizing culture and suppressing cultural diversity for the purposes of political power.

I suspect it's oversimplified to think of homogenization as being a topdown process driven by the quest for power. A lot of it can be bottom-up - as the article describes, parents deliberately chose to teach their children Swedish. The advantages of speaking the "bigger" language are obvious: it'll open a wider set of opportunities. That's why people all over Europe teach their children English. If anything, their states probably have an incentive to push French, German etc., but English opens doors.

> it'll open a wider set of opportunities.

Which in almost all cases are the result of top-down processes. You're arguing that individual adjustments to change are the agents of change.

English gives opportunity because of the colonial foundation created by English invasion being transferred to the US, due to their long-term Western military hegemony resulting from their distance from a destructive pair of European wars.

Of course, a lingua franca is good, but the cultural and professional domination is too much in my opinion. US culture is awful, but is heavily marketed and sold (and ironically is almost all of foreign manufacture due to the continuing trade deficit/strong dollar policy. US professional dominance is due to its corruption, lack of regulation and labor rights, military aggression providing and preserving new markets, and diplomatic aggression making it the gatekeeper to those markets.

The dominance of English is a result of that, just like the domination of Latin, Spanish, and French (or Arabic for that matter) were. It's something that's happening, not something to be supported.

edit:

> But the national government of Sweden is a different story. They currently consider Elfdalian a dialect of Swedish, not its own language.

> Speaking in Elfdalian, Swedish MP Peter Helander recently asked Parliament why that’s the case. But before Culture Minister Amanda Lind could answer the question, the parliamentary speaker interrupted them both to say that only Swedish may be spoken in the chamber. Helander said the "only Swedish" remark proves his point, that Elfdalian should be considered its own language.

I don't know how much more official a condemnation of a minority language can be.

I agree that some processes are top down. My point was just that the choice to learn a national or global language is often bottom up.

I think saying "US culture is awful" weakens your point. US culture is extremely diverse, from The Rock to Jeff Koons. It's also central to the twentieth century. Dismissing it all as awful doesn't make much sense.

I was pretty surprised when I went to parts of Texas where people still using German (alongside English of course).

It's a pity that Gresham's Law ended up making English almost ubiquitous, to the detriment of the many languages from all around the world. (I don't think I need to mention the many advantages that counterbalance this.)

> I guess the commonality is the end result of homogenizing culture and suppressing cultural diversity for the purposes of political power.

So the native population was obviously suppressed in a bid for political power, but were any other cultures oppressed into homogenizing for the purpose of solidifying someone’s political power? Did someone oppress the Germans to cause them to speak English, or did they assimilate for the obvious economic and social efficiencies? Homogenized culture is the result, but it’s not clear to me that it was nefarious in these cases.

For Texas Germans, some of A, some of B. Churches in central Texas towns with significant German-speaking populations commonly worshiped in German, and those towns had German-language newspapers up through the 1920s and 30s. The drop-off appears to have started around World War 1, and was pretty much complete by WW2. Some of my high school classmates (born ca. 1980) had German and/or Czech-speaking grandparents who grew up in the 20s and 30s, but tried raising their children as English speakers. Result: my classmates' parents could always understand Oma and Opa, but their grandchildren couldn’t, which was part of why German was an unusually popular foreign language option at my high school (the excellence of the long-time German teacher was the rest).

But (1) that’s just a regional phenomenon and (2) it doesn’t indicate any top-down pressure to convert to boost someone’s political power.

Short answer, it's "complicated" in that there are always multiple things going on at once, but... yes. And the ways it's "complicated" are weirder than you might think. Like that Germans were actually one of the least "assimilating" significant non-English European populations here in the 19th century. Actual histories often don't match our assumptions based on current ideologies.

Fighting Everything German in Texas, 1917–1919 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24449071

"…World War I not only intensified fears that the "melting pot" was failing, but also broadened this concern to include German Americans as a suspect ethnic group. Before the war, German Americans were one of the most respected immigrant groups in America, having achieved success in many spheres. Brewery magnate Adolf Busch, intellectual and U.S. Senator Carl Schulz, and financier John D. Rockefeller were among the German Americans who had risen to prominence in the United States. Significantly, German Americans acquired their favorable reputation despite being the ethnic group most resistant to assimilation…"

"…Furthermore, Texans’ historic distrust of German Texans helped inspire anti-German activities. During the antebellum period, slaveholders had viewed German Texans with suspicion, especially after an 1854 convention of German Texans adopted an anti-slavery resolution. In fact, only a minority of German Texans supported this resolution, but most Texans did not understand that subtlety. They were preoccupied with German Texans’ common culture which prevented them from discerning political, religious, and social differences among Germans…"

"…Claiming that German Texans’ ethnicity was equivalent to disloyalty, many council of defense members in Texas were determined to purge all traces of German culture from their state…"

(DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6563.1994.tb00925.x for your sci-hub needs...)

But my main point is that these are very different situations -- national projects in Europe unifying/homogenizing various long-existed local geographically-specific cultures (I'm not sure 'assimilation' is even the right word here). Vs America, where various European populations came, only in the last few hundred years, displaced local geographically-specific cultures, and then competed with each other for political power or cultural hegemony as they expanded to take land the previous occupants were displaced from, also sometimes forming communities together (in which they were all newcomers to the land). Just two very different situations; although i tried to say there were some commonalities in the way cultures are homogenized/unified, I am sympathetic to the idea that "why are you even looking for commonalities these are such different situations".

I think we often over-simplify the diversity of historical paths with this stuff, assuming that the way we now look at "culture" or "nationality" or "race" has always been the way people did, and/or was inevitable. But these things were built, in the not too recent past, and didn't work the same way they work now even in recent history, and worked differently in different places.

WRT Germans in Texas, that’s highly regional—I don’t know that it generalizes broadly to America. It also doesn’t demonstrate a top-down pressure to assimilate in order to build up another group’s political power, but rather an overblown fear that German-Americans (I am German-American, for the record) had conflicting interests.

I’m not trying to “gotcha” you, but “pressure to assimilate in order to grow someone’s political power” doesn’t sound like an accurate characterization of American history as I understand it.

We were talking about Texas, I brought up Germans in Texas and you responded to that -- so I found an article about the history in Texas. I can find other articles from other parts of the U.S., but at this point I feel like you've shown whatever I find, I think you have your mind made up about, as you say, "American history as you understand it", and are uninterested in historical evidence that might complicate that.

As I understand it, the history is more diverse and complicated than you understand it. I shared one source to that end, you dismissed it because it didn't match your preferred narrative.

But again, my main point was not that one sentance.

My issue is that your example doesn’t actually support the thesis (see my previous post). So if you can’t produce an example that supports your thesis then it’s going to be hard to persuade just about anyone.

There was certainly a great amount of pressure against German during and following WWI. As an example of the sort of public sentiment at that time, the artist Grant Wood (famous for American Gothic) even had a spat with the Daughters of the American Revolution a decade after the war:

> In 1927, Wood was commissioned to create a stained glass window in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Unhappy with the quality of domestic glass sources, he used glass made in Germany. The local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) complained about the use of a German source for a World War I memorial, as Germany had been an enemy of the US in that war. They expressed a lingering anti-German sentiment in society, and other people in Cedar Rapids also protested the German source. As a result, the window was not dedicated until 1955.[2]

> Wood was said to have described the DAR as "those Tory gals" and "people who are trying to set up an aristocracy of birth in a Republic."[3] Five years later Wood painted Daughters of Revolution, which he described as his only satire. He emphasized the contrast of three aged women in faded dresses framed against the heroic painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware, which, ironically, was painted in Germany by the German-American artist Emanuel Leutze.[1] Wood depicted his mother's clothing on the models, including a lace collar and amber pin he bought for her in Germany.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughters_of_Revolution

German names became anglicised, German newspapers disappeared, and German stopped being taught in schools.

Whether German would have survived without this sort of persecution is not really knowable, but it did happen.

Sure there was anti-German sentiment, but it doesn’t appear to be for the alleged purpose of improving another group’s political power. It’s also not clear to me how widespread this anti-German sentiment was (was it limited to nationalist instituions)? I hail from ~45 minutes away from Cedar Rapids from German stock on both sides (immigrated around the 1850s) in an area that is very German (lots of Weber’s, Becker’s, Youngblut’s, Vogel’s, etc) and I’ve never heard anything about people feeling compelled to forget their native language. Rather the sentiment I’ve heard was always that they just wanted to integrate into their new society. Obviously we’re both dealing in anecdotes, and I’m not trying to disprove yours, but rather understand how both fit in the larger historical narrative.

A useful comparison may be to Spanish in the United States today.

As for how widespread this was, some examples at the time included a lynching of a German seeking naturalisation:

> One such death of note was that of Robert Prager, a German seeking naturalization in St. Louis, Missouri who was accused on the night of April 14, 1914, of being a German spy by a mob of 300 "men and boys" after he had allegedly shared words at a socialist meeting earlier that evening. The jail where he had taken refuge from the crowds was quickly overrun and being stripped of his clothes, he was led down Main Street with a rope tied around his neck, and was forced to walk the route, and with shattered glass bottles being thrown down in his walking path, he was forced to sing patriotic songs. He was forced during this walk to kiss an American flag which had been wrapped around him. He was walked to a hanging tree at the edge of town where he was lynched. In an article from The St. Louis Global-Democrat, it was reported that there had been multiple incidences of mobs tarring and feathering individuals.

Note that this was prior to US entry into World War I.

Language bans:

> Language use had also been the primary focus of legislation at state and local levels. Some of these regulations included the publication of charters banning speaking German within city limits. A total ban on the teaching of German in both public and private education could be found in at minimum 14 states including ome states would extend this to ban the teaching of all languages except for english, although the majority who would ban non-english languages typically only banned German. A total ban on teaching German in both public and private schools was imposed for a time in at least 14 states, including California, Indiana,[11] Wisconsin,[12] Ohio, Iowa and Nebraska. California's ban lasted into the mid-1920s. The Supreme Court case in Meyer v. Nebraska ruled in 1923 that these laws were unconstitutional.[13]In October 1918, a bill intended to restrict federal funds towards states that enforced English-only education was created. On April 9, 1919, Nebraska enacted a statute called "An act relating to the teaching of foreign languages in the state of Nebraska," commonly known as the Siman Act. It provided that "No person, individually or as a teacher, shall, in any private, denominational, parochial or public school, teach any subject to any person in any language other than the English language." It forbade foreign instruction to children who had not completed the eighth grade.I n Montana, speaking German was banned in public for two years during World War I.[14] Pennsylvania's legislature passed a German-language ban, but it was vetoed by the governor. Churches during this period such as the Lutheran Church became internally divided over services and religious instruction in German and English.[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language_in_the_United_...

In Iowa in particular:

> Harding's proclamation codified four rules for the state. First, Iowa schools - public, parochial and private - could only teach in English. Second, public conversations, including on trains and over the telephone, must be in English. Third, speeches or public addresses could only be given in English. Fourth, churches cannot conduct public worship services in any language other than English. We know this proclamation today as the Babel Proclamation.

https://www.thegazette.com/guest-columnists/a-century-ago-io...

> But that's not how assimilation happens these days right?

What about cultural imperialism? A language shapes your identity because it literally gives the grammar to your thoughts. But other cultural goods like music, netflix, youtube, tv, you name it, do shape our cultural grammar just as much. This is a point I don't expect anyone already embedded in the dominant culture to find salient, because the culture we are in is as transparent as sea is to fish.

> People are begging to come to wealthy countries

If people had comparable prospects at home, so few would actually leave. If you look at the non-asylum-seeking immigration reasons (i.e. the "beggars" in your words), it is primarily about economic hardship, with persecution, violence, war, human rights added on top. Guess what, in an interconnected international arena, wealthy countries have more culpability about those conditions than we care to admit.

> Guess what, in an interconnected international arena, wealthy countries have more culpability about those conditions than we care to admit.

That has been talked about ad nauseam for the past 10 years. Maybe it's time to remember that non-wealthy countries have more culpability for their own conditions than anyone dares to mention?

> That has been talked about ad nauseam for the past 10 years.

Imperialism goes way more back than 10 years. It probably has been nauseating for some for at least a century.

> Maybe it's time to remember that non-wealthy countries have more culpability for their own conditions than anyone dares to mention?

Sounds like you've made the exact calculus to rank order culpability. I'm very interested to hear how we all can objectively arrive at this conclusion.

Alternatively, you could tell us a state that haven't been at the receiving end of a war, coup, resource exploitation, economic warfare etc. and still managed to screw up their quest for self-determination.

Zimbabwe, Argentina, off the top of my head

I'm not an expert in histories of those countries, but could you be forgetting a massively bloody military coup in 70s in the name of anticommunism in Argentina, or a history of complete international isolation and 15 years of civil war between Rhodesia and Zimbabwe thanks to British colonialism?

A decade of destabilisation in both countries could have been the straw that broke the camel's back, sure.

Argentina was already out of the rich-countries-club by the time the 70's had come around, and the bloody military coup you reference is likely the inevitable political instability that comes surely after sustained economic instability.

And as for Zimbabwe, the "civil-war" was hardly a destabilising event for the country, and the international isolation was easily evaded, this is well documented. I think Zimbabwe, once the bread basket of Africa as Rhodesia, is a great example of how self-determination might undermine an improperly equipped nation.

> A language shapes your identity because it literally gives the grammar to your thoughts.

So what happens when you learn a second, or third, or fourth language fluently? [Like, say me?]

Do you suddenly have multiple-personalities?

Complete bollocks.

Knowing four languages isn't the same as thinking in them. It took me quite a while after becoming fluent in English to having errant thoughts in English. Both languages can influence my thinking - sometimes I'll think of half of a concept in English and finish off the thought in my native language. This is most common when I'm dealing with math or numbers.

> A language shapes your identity because it literally gives the grammar to your thoughts.

So does your 'identity' (whatever that is) change half way through the sentence. In you head?

Are you literally a different person at either end of your sentence?

SMH.

What? No. The change happens when you learn the language and start thinking in those concepts. It's like learning mathematics or programming: once you learn them, you notice the patterns elsewhere in life too. I don't think the difference in natural languages is as big as with learning programming or mathematics, but I imagine that there's some difference.

> Complete bollocks.

Thanks for your sophisticated analysis.[1]

Psycho-activeness of language has an incredible depth of account from philosophy to semiotics. But a simple enough paper I found for you that exemplifies (not exhaustively proves) my claim is Holtgraves & Kashima, 2008. It is freely accessible.

Additionally equivocating personality, identity and pathologies like dissociative personality is going to mislead us, because they are strawman arguments.

Think of yourself growing up. Turning to an adult was a change in identity. Do you remember the day you switched from being a child to being an adult? Was it a psychopathology to become an adult? Are you completely dissociated from childhood memories, and seemingly, your childhood ego-states?

Finally I will pull another comment of yours in this thread;

> No here is the thing: none of this has affected my identify at all, not even in the slightest.

The thing with identity is that it is not entirely transparent to us. You don't know who you are as much as you think you do. Not only that, if language is the ground on which our identities form, by definition you wouldn't realize a change in identity due to change in grounding. By these accounts you wouldn't be the most reliable witness to assess your identity change.

[1] I know sarcasm is frowned up in this forum but I wanted to give an example of how we use language to emotionally regulate ourselves. We can sublimate our anger by creating a contradictory perspective to salience the unfairness of the opposing perspective. It gives us a strategy out of merely attacking back in kind. Collect thousands of tools like this together and you bet it significantly contributes to your identity.

> by definition you wouldn't realize a change in identity due to change in grounding.

Neither then would anyone else, including the OP.

I mean we are digging a tangential hypothetical but still that’s not true. The other people are not changing, the grounding through which they are perceiving you is not changing. Whereas due to the recursive nature of self-reflection, your own change of the way through which you observe change itself is liable to be in your blind spot. This is how self deception works.

No, not complete bollocks.

Learning new languages does add different layers to your personality.

I am native-level fluent in three languages, and have some level of fluency in three more.

Learning a new language opens a complete new door to a new culture, and way of thoughts through books, movies, songs, and so much more.

Even if you don't spend time to learn a culture well, i.e. don't listen to music or read literature, learning a new grammar, and very importantly, new words, do reshape you, and gives you new perspectives and ways of thoughts.

I too speak three(four) language at absolute native level and three (two) at conversational level. And one at a beginner level.

Some of these a polysynthetic languages, others are agglutinative. Two are tonal, and one doesn't have an alphabet.

No here is the thing: none of this has affected my identify at all, not even in the slightest. Same person: just different sounds for things.

Presumably my testimony counts as well.

The last residential school in Canada closed in 1996. People in their middle ages today remember being forced to assimilate across the globe. It's not some long-ago thing. The people who supported these systems are still alive, still influencing policy.

And the US federal government was funding church run boarding schools of similar character in the US into the 1960s under the “Indian Civilization Act”, so only about a generation more distant.

wonder how many are still alive who would support this

It's certainly happening in China. Regional dialects like Cantonese—which you would still hear routinely in American Chinatowns—are slowly being replaced with Mandarin via the school system. These dialects are not yet lost, but within a few generations they may rarely be spoken. Why would they be when everyone learns Mandarin in school?

Sure, there is nothing wrong with people immigrating somewhere and assimilating to the local culture. But one needs to draw a distinction between that and a nationalist government privileging the national language over regional languages. This is not so common today, although we live with the consequences of past nationalist movements which have sent many minority languages on an inexorable route to oblivion. And then there's China...

> This is not so common today...

It's happening in india today. It's very sad.

> But that's not how assimilation happens these days right?

That is exactly how it happens today. The process your parent describes is a currently ongoing one in France.

Learning a language for economic or practical reasons doesn't mean you forget your own language. The silicon valley example is more likely to make English evolve than to make a hundred other languages extinct.

In the case of Sweden, which is already a small population, it must be difficult to keep having used for a very minority language in a modern world. In order for a language to survive, nowadays, you need the language to also be very present on the internet. That means having a big community of native speakers and creators, media, literature, art, cinema, education, work... That's expensive and makes little sense for populations that are quite small I would reckon.

> In this scenario everyone speaking English or whatever is the dominant language in two generation is a good thing for economic equality and cultural cohesion.

If this is the pathway we choose/are forced down, will the term ‘culture’ be needed? We will all be the same.

California, Oklahoma, and Ireland all speak English but have very different cultures. Most large cities have different cultures within 10 miles of each other.

I bring up these counterpoints only to say that while language is a major factor in culture, there are still many other factors.

How ironic to pick Ireland as an example of English speaking.

The irony here generally applies to Oklahoma and perhaps California as well, and these three regions are perhaps much more culturally similar due to the imposition of language on a region with such effectiveness. I'm not sure if that's the point they were trying to make.

I think it does make the same point. The cultural similarities were achieved but it wasn’t without loss or consequence. There may have been less bloodshed though?

While I wouldn't say they have "very" different cultures relative to almost anywhere in the non-English speaking realm, I would definitely agree that language isn't the only factor. However, more language unification would at least theoretically continue to increase cultural cohesion.

Not really, I would say France is closer to Ireland culturally than Oklahoma.

For example, Catholics are the largest religious group in Ireland and France. Oklahoma is only 4.9% Catholics with Baptist being it’s largest religious group.

While I absolutely agree history and culture should be preserved - it’s not so simple.

Take your comment as an example. HN has people worldwide interacting with each other in this forum BECAUSE we are all speaking a known common language (English).

If worldwide schools didn’t commonly teach English (or whatever the next dominant language might be) we wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other in this thread if we all spoke 100+ different languages.

There's a big difference between "you should take a course in English, it's really useful" and "we will punish you for speaking your own language" (as happened numerous times and is what the comment you replied to is talking about).

>Public schooling, nationalism, and the decline of regional languages all coincided for a reason.

Slightly tangential, but Sweden has decided to call the Westrobothnian dialect of Swedish “Bondska” the direct translation of which is basically “Farmerish”.

Now I don’t support the stigmatization of farmers, but it’s hard to deny that “bondig”/“farmerish” has been used as a derogative to separate them from “city people” or whatever they’re trying to suggest.

As I understand it, Elfdalian is further removed from Swedish, but has been similarly classified as a rural dialect instead of its own language. Further complicated by the fact that the are other dialects in the area called Dalmål (direct translation “valleyspeak” maybe?), and as far as I can tell are related to both Swedish and Elfdalian..

(I just an interested amateur, so I’m absolutely open to corrections from people with first hand experience of speaking Elfdalian or Westrobothnian)

Dalmål (Dalecarlian) is from my understanding (and simplified) a bit of a continuum from Swedish to Elfdalian. The closer you get to Älvdalen the less intelligible it is for Swedish speakers.

I can, after spending some time there, understand some "moramål" (the variation spoken in and around Mora) but I have a much harder time understanding "orsamål" (same but around Orsa). Elfdalian is much less intelligible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalecarlian_language

Yep, and it blows my mind that in France especially this process of language loss is still accepted and ongoing and essentially encouraged. Breton, Basque, Alsatian German, etc. will be extinct within a generation on French territory, and that will be on purpose and this is happening inside a contemporary postmodern nation inside the European Union.

There are all sorts of reasons to keep minority language communities thriving, I won't get into them here. But hell, tourism alone is a good one. It's part of the local flavour of a place.

It is a bit of delicious irony that the French are so indignant about English supplanting their language in so many institutions. I guess the shoe being on the other foot doesn't feel so great.

“Destroy”, “assimilate” and “identity” sound very alarming. But beware, the opposite of synthetic or forced language preservation also results in the exact same brutality, or worse.

Because the "brutality" of cultural preservation doesn't sound alarming at all...

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