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The dark side of language dominance | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 105 of 176 31 May 2014 at 8:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Really? What got me started was your very own comments about how scientific research is done nowadays in English only whereas in the past other languages were in the mix. At the end of your latest response to me you seemed to be trying to back-track. Sneaky.
From my standpoint I see two problems: 1) Your argumentation shows the fallacy of arguing from authority. This is especially problematic given your own admission that you don't get much first-hand exposure to research papers and the issues surrounding publication languages. You don't need to be academically inclined let alone a researcher to think critically about the content and implications from your sources' authors.
2) The second problem for me is that language and culture are related but they are not as tightly bound as I'm being led to believe. In this I see parallels with your stance and that of field linguists (never mind demagogues and politicians) who conflate language death or language policy with cultural suppression/ethnic discrimination or even more perversely cultural/ethnic genocide (*ugh* way to cheapen the discourse and analysis). Cultures (and humans) encompass more than just language, and fundamentally all that they require linguistically is at least one language. These are not restricted to a particular language. In other words, culture transcends linguistic boundaries, be it based on artistic or scientific endeavors, sexual orientation, religion/spirituality, ethnic association or even just ways of life. Northern Saami is taken as a clear marker of the distinctiveness of a subset of Saamic people. Yet after going to Lapland, and studying the language on my own for a while, I'm convinced that the hypothetical death of the language wouldn't mean that the associated culture must cease to exist (to do that we'd have to exterminate the people, and eliminate all outsiders with cultural knowledge, as well as cultural artifacts so that no one else can learn about it or pass on the knowledge). There is still folklore, music, historical consciousness, spirituality, and cuisine associated with these people. The content or meaning of these elements wouldn't be diminished if they weren't expressed in Northern Saami. On a very banal level, would having a plate of sauteed reindeer be somehow less meaningful if the cook couldn't speak Northern Saami because the language was extinct? Must a joik be shut away or considered irrelevant if the Saamic languages go into oblivion? As I stated earlier the best way to maintain language diversity is to learn, use and/or document what's out there as you see fit. The opportunity cost of bemoaning the presence of linguae francae or official languages and conflating their roles with cultural or political judgements/preferences is less time spent on learning the other languages which increases the chances of their continuing to be vibrant. Prof. Arguelles' thread was about related idea of which languages an intellectual should know. It started to touch on language and culture, and indirectly got to the point that each person learns languages for their own reasons (or not). When people learn fewer languages (or no languages other than their first one) this weakens language diversity although it's hard to denigrate these people uniformally for their choices. Diversity in any area is something that happens rather than a cherished goal. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4081 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 106 of 176 31 May 2014 at 10:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
White Guilt. So this is what this is about. We have the following two cases. A. All races/cultures equal. In that case someone else (Chinese/Arabs) would have taken the same imperialistic (and maybe even more destructive) path as Caucasians. B. Something special about the white culture (say due to which they were able to invade other cultures). If you claim this difference, then you also have to consider the possibility that this difference might have made it likely that other cultures would not have developed science and technology and medicine and farming to the same extent in the same time-frame. Without modern medicine and farming, the world population would be several billions less (billions would not have died, rather millions would have died due to disease, plagues and famine, cutting off their (billions populated) progeny lines). Now, you may argue that these billions *should not* have existed, and their ancestors should have perished due to ill health and food scarcity, and for this I dont have a response. The white legacy does not just mean slavery, colonization, Spanish Inquisition, Hitler; it also includes penicillin, vaccines, modern farming, Maxwell's equations, Newtonian dynamics and semiconductors which have literally changed the world. It is a tragedy that the West views STEM with disdain. Edited by Gemuse on 01 June 2014 at 12:06am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5959 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 107 of 176 01 June 2014 at 2:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I agree that language suppression/death should not be described as genocide of any sort. But are you really denying that language policy can be a form of cultural suppression/ethnic discrimination? What about the policies against the natives of North America which sought to discourage them from using their heritage languages?
I'm going to assume that the Northern Saami have songs with vocals and oral tales. These would most certainly be affected over time if Northern Saami fell out of use. I'm not saying it's so important that we should save Northern Saami for that reason, but let's acknowledge that a rhyming poem in Northern Saami isn't going to rhyme in any other language and will therefore disappear. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 108 of 176 01 June 2014 at 3:15am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
That was part of the age-old problem whereby one group of people tries to eliminate another that's merely different. Humans are funny that way. Although because of the fuzzy but acknowledged link between language and culture, a policy of denigrating minority languages can often be (but not always) associated with cultural suppression or ethnic discrimination. What I had in mind is that cultural suppression or ethnic discrimination can happen within a group that speaks one language (e.g. Northern Ireland, Jim Crow laws)
There is liturgical music in Latin and Old Church Slavonic and such music need not lose its significance or be cast aside as museum pieces because the associated languages are stone-dead. I think of Northern Saami vocal music in the same way ranging from a joik of minimal words to rock. The cultural loss here would be the successful suppression and elimination of such music (or even more heinously the wholesale murder of the Saami and any outsiders with knowledge of their culture, and destruction of their cultural artifacts, not just the books, dictionaries and language courses). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5390 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 109 of 176 01 June 2014 at 4:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
You make it sound like in order to have the good, it was inevitable for the bad to have happened. Could Europe and the Americas (and the whole world) have built flourishing economies without resorting to forced labor? Could we still have semiconductors today had the American government not taken Native American children from their families and beat their mother tongues out of out of them? And it's not as if only the best came from this cultural dominance - there are many problems with modern farming and diets that we still need to resolve and many people are turning back to old world food traditions to address the issues that modern diets/SAD have created.
Even within the same language discrimination can take a linguistic turn with people who aren't born speaking the prestige dialect and who don't have the means to be well-educated in it can suffer a lifetime of ridicule and be economically disadvantaged. Language plays a huge role in fitting into the socio-economic hierarchy. This sort of discussion is always horribly lacking when we don't have the point of view of someone who is a member of a language community that's dying out or from a minority one that was discriminated against. It's easy to argue that everything's fine when you were born into the "winning" side or when accepting the lingua franca is relatively easy (from a country that gives you resources and education in the language that give your own efforts a healthy head start) and involves little sacrifice of your own language and culture (languages/cultures that are under no threat, usually because they're protected by a strong nation-state). Many of the languages that are dying out now are doing so because of the direct effects of colonial policies and the aftermath (once independent or once a minority group has been given legitimacy, years of association of the colonizer's language with progress and the indigenous language with backwardness being internalized doesn't just wear off). The global balance of power still reflects this dominance in many cases. This can't just all be swept away by just saying we should ignore all the bad stuff and just look at the good. Especially when many of the victims of these policies are still living with the consequences and never reaped the economic/social rewards of forced assimilation: Andrew Windyboy and his experience in Indian boarding schools Not having personally experienced being colonized or living with the legacy of being on the "wrong" end of colonization myself I can't really know what it feels like to have your language and your culture killed and then to have your descendants look down on you for being "provincial" by insisting on practicing the old culture. But this passage in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski really speaks to me about what it's like to live with the fear of being conquered and then forgotten:
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| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 110 of 176 01 June 2014 at 11:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
It is not about the pros which no one denies. Assimilation is a question of autonomy, and when someone wilfully impinges on our, illusory or not, autonomy, this engenders resistance. The fact that having modern medicine is objectively better (is it? well I would agree it is) doesn't mean it can be forced on a population who doesn't want it. In communication and culture, autonomy is a necessary component. Edited by tarvos on 01 June 2014 at 11:08pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5475 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1 | Message 111 of 176 01 June 2014 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I never stated that scientific research is only done in English nowadays. See below my post regarding that topic. You see a statistic quoted from the source that states 95% not 100% (of research in that particular search done by the author). I also say at the end of this quote that English is dominating like no other language. This is not stating that English is the only language being published with. Look I don't want to get into a dogfight here but I never had sneaky intentions or purposely made any corrections or back-steps. If you can clearly find where I misled you and said otherwise without quoting me out of context I will be all to happy to admit fault. I'm providing evidence here if you have evidence that clearly states otherwise I will certainly acknowledge that. Hence why I have in many of my comments done exactly that acknowledged the other side of the argument and stated that when members make a good point even if it's in contradiction to my stance.
I think it's something more like 90-100 million. Hence the strength of the German publishing industry which I never denied either. I simply see it potentially changing in the future.
I already clarified this. How can I possibly from my own experience make a judgement on the number/percentage of articles published in English or other languages? I can't. Nor can anyone else for that matter simply by reading research papers. You'll never get through enough in a lifetime to make a judgement that's not outdated or two one dimensional. I don't deny this. That is exactly why I quoted a source which (see it again above) has not read all the research papers but conducted a poll of sorts on the languages of publication of science journals- here is the quote again Already in 1997, 95% of the articles indexed in the Science Citation Index's Web of Science were written in English. This is research done by an author who DOES have access to statistics from a index Are you going to tell me again that I'm flawed? That I can't read enough research and that my argument is flawed. Again look at the quote. Edited by PeterMollenburg on 01 June 2014 at 1:20pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5475 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1 | Message 112 of 176 01 June 2014 at 3:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
There's 2 sides to every story and your above response is no less valid than an opposing point of view. I read only yesterday or the day before that it is true that if 95% of the worlds languages disappeared tomorrow us that are not in a minority language groups which make up that 95% (i'm going off memory, correct me if wrong) would barely notice it. That makes sense, and perhaps we do cling to language death a little too much and label it a little too shocking as you've pointed out. Just to make it clear I'm not going along with your points here to balance out my last post in which I felt at odds with you. You have a definite valid point here. Like many things in human existence we can certainly take the blame for being a little too protective of. However although this point you make is not specifically about linguistic diversity I do want to reiterate that I do prefer linguistic diversity myself.
Yes I agree culture transcends linguistic boundaries. However not all culture. The larger languages like English and French have many peoples from many different parts of the world and many different cultures speaking their language. However each language generally speaking (and particularly the smaller languages) have particular unique sets of language which encompass the culture they represent. Like the languages of Australian aboriginals represents their cultural belief systems- it's unlikely to be spoken of much outside their own languages as many of these languages are not well known and have died off- so with the death of such languages does disappear culture and knowledge and beliefs. English is different as it is spoken by many more people from many different backgrounds. I do agree that culture can be preserved after a language dies out, but depending on how much it's been documented only a certain percentage can be preserved, and a culture is always better represented from the language that largely represented it.
Ah, now I see what you're getting at- a language dies but the ppl live on with their traditions. Interesting, but I disagree. It would only take a matter of generations for MOST cultures to assimilate. Some are more resilient and may never fully or even largely assimilate or take a lot longer, so perhaps it is possible some would live on without their language, but I would believe the tide would be against them. You only need to look at the the way the world is becoming more and more Americanized/modernized for that evidence. Traditional costumes in most European countries are no longer worn for that reason. People have more contact with a larger more modern culture and tend to assimilate. Btw sounds like an excellent experience you had!
Yes very true, but just to throw another counter-argument in. If the Québecois never bothered about the pressures of English and went about learning/documenting etc languages without instigating language protection laws regarding their own language, how anglicized would Québec French be today?
Interesting. I guess that's what I was getting at to some degree. The more people learn the one global language the less language diversity there will be. Diversity you're right is something that happens it seems, and it cannot be forced, but perhaps it can be protected. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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