chat

Assimilation of the Roman variety (i.e., the main language isn't forced on anyone, but all the popular media and good-paying jobs require it) go brrrrrrrrr.

Economic penetration and entwinement with Anglo empire has sociocultural ramifications (homogenization of social and economic structures to resemble Yankland).

Similar process shrunk a lotta the native languages in the east/north of the USSR, despite state efforts to prevent that.

Class society, capitalism, empire all lead to such homogenization, historically with a large state or market comes homogeneity.

Given enough time I imagine the global north nations would fully anglofy, with the english language turning into a language family (similar to latin turning into the romance languages)

Thankfully I don’t see that. Mostly indigenous languages and Spanish on my end. Go to the capitol city and you’ll hear English phrases more.

I’d feel more sympathetic towards Europeans getting culturally colonized if they didn’t have a history of forcefully doing that to others.

Ive only been there a couple of times and not very recently but I did ask about that and the explanation I got was that there are a lot of russian people there and the finns refuse to learn russian and the russians refuse to learn finnish so everyone just speaks english to each other. not sure how true that is or why finland in particular would go out of its way to switch to english when so many other european countries dont.

Is it really such a bad thing for so many working-class peoples' second language to be a common one? Surely it's a good thing for the working class of many countries to be able to speak directly with each other, rather than through intermediary translators working for media outlets who themselves work just for capitalism. And despite its country of origin, English is a highly adaptable language that lends itself well to a lingua-franca purpose.

Now I'm from a part of the world () where repression of indigenous languages was public policy for centuries, with an explicit end-goal of destroying indigenous culture. I'm very aware of that history. I'm speaking strictly about second languages here, I'm not at all advocating for forcing English as a common first language.

I am genuinely worried about the future of languages. As you may know, parallel to the mass exctinction of species, we are living in a mass extinction of languages. The reasons of this are varied, and have a lot to do with indigenous rights.

But I think people here lean too hard on "people have always been worried about change". It's true that Plato was also complaining about the kids, but he was doing so in writing, a new technology.

Writing has only existed for what, 6000 years? And now we have a global empire and mass communication across the world. Sure, after the Roman Empire retreated Latin developed into the many Romance languages. But the vast majority of people were illiterate, and the Roman Empire only really included the Mediterranean!

Writing, and especially the proliferation of video and audio, could stabilize aspects of language across generations. And English is now a high priority business skill across the world. Worldwide pop culture increasingly favors English more and more. Although Japan and Korea are doing serious work right now.

I don't know what will happen to language. I don't know whether it's good or bad. But things are going to change a lot. I wouldn't predict a single worldwide language with all others being relegated to historical studies...but it's not impossible. Or we could end up with several standardized world languages and few speakers of anything else.

The Great Replacement but it’s anti American

The existence of a lingua franca is neat. The fact that it’s American English, less so.

anything that causes boomers enormous existential anxiety of the Great Replacement variety is good

I don't think that's cool at all. Learning about northern European countries genociding their own language is incredibly sad even if in some cases there's an element of karma (the Dutch, French).

in the rare circumstance I find a friends/acquaintances IRL that speaks Russian, I avoid talking in English. I was worried my Russian was going to get rusty because I only use it for the rare stranger or my overseas family members, but my mom just moved in with me so we're going to be doing it 24/7. She says she's had too much English practice lol.

i've gotten anecdotal reports that some rich white kids are learning Chinese so we might be in for some interesting times in the next century

so these are second generation immigrants who also speak finnish but prefer English? Could it be they feel alienated from Finnish society on the basis of their race they don't even want to speak the language and they like English more because they see at least some representation of people who look like them in that context?

Idk just a hunch lol

This is awful. Fuck. This isn't how this was supposed to be. The world should be speaking lidepla, not *nglish!

This is why I support mandating bilingualism, if not multi-lingualism (at least one native language, then one lingua franca like English, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish).

I just don't care what your other languages are, we just need to communicate in a standard one... even if I have to learn a different global language et re-adjust my brain to it...

It's not like great replacement anxiety. Great replacement is a fear of people who have been subjugated for centuries. Whereas anglophones have been dominant.

Totally different dynamics. Blurring them together is like talking about reverse racism. The content and context matters.

So much for that famous Finnish sisu