Dominant languages can spread even without coercion
economist.com
economist.com
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.
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.
It wasn’t until you said this that I considered my motivation to learn Japanese as part of this conversation. My whole reason for doing so was for better appreciation of anime.
Having said that, between roughly 1850 and the end of the second World War it was considered necessary for engineers and scientists in the UK and USA at least to know German because of the German's achievements in science and technology (especially chemistry) and the political and economic power of the various central European states and empires controlled by German speaking elites. Gaining a competitive advantage over your peers and expanding your knowledge has always been a good incentive to learn another language independent of wanting to learn what your occupiers are saying.
Most people really learn English because of economics. American companies are big trade partners, customers and of course, employers.
Many of the others learn it for cultural reasons, as said. Cartoons, movies, TV series, songs, etc.
German kids watched TV with dubs because their network execs deemed it worth it, I don't think that was very political either.
...and MTV, and the Brits the music to go with it! That's how I learned English as a teenager anyway.
It was incredible, the accent was impeccable.
This summarizes. In India the union government is trying to push Hindi as the national language while the state governments are pushing back. This has been going for 70 years.
The interesting change is the due to jobs in south India north Indian state migrant workers moved to southern states. Their kids who go public school score higher in the native language classes than the native kids. This applies only for the low income migrant workers. The white collar job workers send their kids to private school and still learn Hindi.
In South India at least English is given more importance than the regional language.
PS: To those who are unaware of India, India has 23 officially recognized languages
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.
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.
Perhaps it’s different if you live there and have to interact with more people; I’m not sure.
I tend to agree with "Lazy Anglo Brain".
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.
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".
French maybe came close to being a Lingua Franca in the 18-19th century when almost all aristocracy could speak, read and write it but then again the people did not. The Real Lingua Franca was a mix of Italian, French, Spanish and Greek that was used by the merchants of the Mediterranean. Only English has the People Mass to be considered a Lingua Franca for all intents and purposes.
The cultural switch brought about by the Spanish conquest succeeded fully on the coast, but not so much in the mountains.
America is also huge in the way that few countries are. This means that you can trivially go your entire life enjoying vacations without leaving the country. Nobody in the EU has that luxury.
The UK though is not the local hegemon. They’re peers and close trading partners with several non English speaking countries, many of which are extremely close physically too. The UK is not politically and economically powerful enough to expect all the other European countries to learn English in order to do business with them.
I live in the UK and only speak English. I'm happy enough with that because speaking another language well represents thousands of hours of effort that I was happy to spend elsewhere - it is a huge opportunity cost. However, if I had to learn French in order to gain access to learning materials in my field and become qualified, then I would have done so.
But I didn't. The only reason for me to learn a foreign language would be curiosity - learning French or German or Spanish has almost no actual utility whatsoever for most in the UK. So few bother.
That's a straw man.
> For the most part, people learn languages because they are useful.
Duh. But how useful learning a new language is to you is mediated by where you're living and it's local influence. As an American, I would have to go way out of my way in order to use a new language, let alone find it useful. This is largely due to the cultural and economic weight that America exerts on the region. Literally everyone I've done business with who isn't a native English speaker taught themselves English specifically to move to or do business with Americans. The UK is not in this position.
Also, again, size. I have to travel a very long way before I hit anywhere where English is not the overwhelming majority language. This also is a factor. If I want to learn French and use it, it's a $600 and 14hr flight for me to actually make it to Paris and use it, while a Eurostar ticket from London is $60 and 2hrs. This absolutely affects how useful a new language might be, even for pleasure, and is exactly why my attempts to learn French petered out.
> I'm happy enough with that because speaking another language well represents thousands of hours of effort that I was happy to spend elsewhere - it is a huge opportunity cost.
YMMV.
In fact, although the UK is near other countries in Europe where speaking non-English languages is common, anybody who travels anywhere in Europe will find that everybody speaks English. If you are in the UK and want to do business with anybody across the EU - they're going to speak English. If you want to learn any materials for any speciality - it will be available in English.
The majority of people in the UK go through their whole life without ever having to communicate with people who don't speak English. That includes the odd week they might spend on holiday in France or Spain.
So people in the UK are in much the same position as those in the US. There is no economic incentive to learn a foreign language. That's 95% of the motivation to do so, completely gone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The best way to compete with Disney is to offer something they aren't (and, ideally, couldn't).
In the case of streaming services, many of the countries I mentioned before actually condition local market access on having a certain percentage of original works produced in that country. This is why Netflix has a lot of foreign-language originals; they need to meet that national production quota and the easiest way to do that is to just fund a lot of lower-budget productions.[0] Of course, these kinds of laws also put Hacker News into apoplectic fits, and it's also the same bullshit China pulls to get cultural influence in Hollywood; so I'm not going to try and sing their virtues too much.
Thing is, Sweden (or any of the other countries that regularly import most of their culture from America) doesn't need their own Disney. Nor do they need cultural protection laws or a bunch of anglohostile novelists[1]. They just need novelists, in general. Lots of them, and writing works exclusively in Swedish. Cultivating your own literary culture makes it more likely that some of those works will find international success[2], because the kinds of people who read lots of books or watch lots of movies are suckers for novelty.
[0] My current impression, which may be wrong, is that this is how we got Squid Game.
[1] Related note: France acts like the Red Sox of the former brutal colonists club sometimes, and I really find it irksome.
[2] ex. Nobody in the Anglosphere cared or even knew about Polish literature or game development until The Witcher.
I'd say that it depends. I think some cultures seem to have their own creative thing going on that resists the homogenizing effect of American movies and TV[0]. Those cultures don't need to compete with Hollywood. Others might, and that's probably not a winning strategy.
> If you think about production that way, then it just becomes a budget measuring game, and everyone in the industry winds up producing largely similar mass-market works.
This is a pretty common complaint about current media in the US though. So maybe that's already happening?
> The best way to compete with Disney is to offer something they aren't (and, ideally, couldn't).
Oh yes, this was entirely my point. Bollywood, Russian literature, and Manga were three examples I picked out at random. It seems like some cultures produce identifiable examples of this, and others do not. But that might also be more a consequence of which ones I've observed, rather than the cultures themselves.
> Thing is, Sweden (or any of the other countries that regularly import most of their culture from America) doesn't need their own Disney. Nor do they need cultural protection laws or a bunch of anglohostile novelists[1]. They just need novelists, in general. Lots of them, and writing works exclusively in Swedish.
Agreed! Although I suspect that anglohostility is probably a helpful trait if your goal is to resist the encroachment of English. Although that's probably not strictly necessary; my understanding is that anglohostility is characteristic of the French literary scene and not say, Manga. But I could be wrong. I don't think cultural purity laws work.
But the question is, does Sweden have a lot of novels writing only in Swedish in order to preserve and foster Swedish culture and language? Or are they getting swamped with external stuff? I genuinely don't know.
> France acts like the Red Sox of the former brutal colonists club sometimes, and I really find it irksome.
That seems to be the near universal assessment of the France, which is entertaining to me.
> Nobody in the Anglosphere cared or even knew about Polish literature or game development until The Witcher.
Much to the Poles annoyance, I'm sure. The relatively low rate of breakthroughs of non-English works into American culture is interesting though. I'm not sure if that speaks more to Polish literature (in this case) or American media culture.
0 - The funny thing is that the Soviets regularly accused America of being a cultural desert compared to the USSR. It's kind of hard to square the argument that capitalism doesn't produce a lot of (or good) culture with the complaint that Hollywood is part of US soft power doctrine.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
I recall talking to an Indian woman, who was doing PhD Engineering in Japan, on this topic couple of years ago. Her take was very interesting when I mentioned that more and more decent jobs in India require command of English and if this trend continues, the Indian languages will go extinct. Her response was it is just part of evolution, cultures, languages are just part of that evolution.
Hindi is swallowing up languages too. All those languages are in the so-called "Hindi belt". I am not all that concerned about either English or Hindi replacing other local languages. My bigger concerns are legal and economic hurdles placed by Hindi imposers. I'm OK with teaching and requiring English though. Because whether they like it or not, English has become the world's language of knowledge. Especially in computer science. Ruby was developed by a Japanese person, Lua by Brazilians, Python by a Dutch, the Linux kernel by an ethnic Swede. And yet, the best documentation for these is in English.
I'm not an English fanatic. If I were around a few centuries ago, I would have advocated Latin. A couple of millennia ago, I might have advocated Sanskrit in India.
Until the 1920s Ukraine was a mostly rural country and in the countryside Ukrainian was alive and well. After the wars and insurgency the Soviet government felt compelled to create a Ukrainian SSR and allow widespread use of Ukrainian. Most towns and cities spoke Russian (and also German, Yiddish and Polish), but then as industrialisation forced many peasants into urban areas, they quickly became Ukrainian-speaking. In this context a new wave of language repression began, which became really intense only in the 1960s and 1970s. Of course there other forms of repression besides language
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.
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.