The dark side of language dominance (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

The dark side of language dominance
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Serpent
Octoglot
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Russian Federation
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Message 129 of 176

02 June 2014 at 4:54pm | IP Logged

Both with languages and for example vaccines you're ignoring the fact that it's a system, not a collection of isolated cases. Sure, for a specific individual the perceived lack of benefits outweighs the side effects of vaccination, but how about the society as a whole, the people who have to rely on others not to infect them? Is there anyone who doesn't get insurance for their car just because they know someone who's never been in an accident in 30 years of driving?

Or back to languages, an individual can make a choice to learn English, or Saami, or Welsh, but we know which of these millions of people "choose". It's the same industry as how you characterize pharmaceutics or the food industry. We keep hearing that fluency in English is a must for anyone, and that you won't get fluent unless you attend a language school, preferably abroad (at least in Malta). Many of us are constantly told that other languages are useless, or that we should "finish" English before starting them. And don't tell me the English native speaking community gains nothing from that. Sure, there are downsides, but to the community as a whole they aren't significant enough, even if language geeks like you are definitely affected by them.

Edited by Serpent on 02 June 2014 at 4:58pm
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James29
Diglot
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United States
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Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: French

Message 130 of 176

02 June 2014 at 10:29pm | IP Logged

Languages are like credit cards, social network sites and language learning forums. They are all positive feedback networks. The users get the benefits of being a part of the network.

Visa is the largest credit card network because more people choose Visa. They choose Visa because more other people choose Visa and more stores take Visa. The size and strength of the network is positively reinforcing. It does not cost the consumer, the bank or the store any more money to have a Visa than a MasterCard.

Facebook works the same way. It is the biggest because people choose it in order to be a part of the biggest/broadest network. What good is a social network if your friends are not on it? The bigger it gets the more obvious a choice it is to use it.

We saw some threads here about Benny's language forum. Forums work the same way. People choose them, in large part, due to the size of the network. HTLAL is successful because of the network, not because of all the fancy bells and whistles of the forum.

English works the same way. As English got more dominant it became the more logical choice for people to choose. As more people choose to learn it, it became even more valuable. What's wrong with that?

People make their own individual decisions. They do what is best for them, not best for "the community as a whole"... not best for the MasterCard or myspace users. It would be silly to suggest "the community as a whole" would be better off if people were forced to trade in their Visas for MasterCards or Facebook for myspace or HTLAL for Benny's site.

Other languages will always be around for the same reasons competitors of Visa, Facebook and HTLAL will always be around. People will choose to use the less dominant languages for various good reasons. English will never be all things to all people.

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Darklight1216
Diglot
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Message 131 of 176

03 June 2014 at 2:10am | IP Logged

James29 wrote:

There are plenty of people who survive just fine in the US knowing
only Spanish, or Chinese, or various African languages.

I hate to nitpick, but I suspect that the veracity of that statement owes much to one's
definitions of "plenty" and "just fine." Except for Spanish. I don't disagree with you
on that one. Although only knowing Spanish might be limiting it isn't debilitating so
to speak.

I recently spoke to a Hungarian person (here in America) who does not speak English
well at all and she is doing well from what I can see. However, that appears to be
because her husband can communicate in English much more easily and he owns a business.
I don't know if you were primarly thinking about stay-at-homes wives in your post, but
I'd agree if that was the case.

Now if you were meaning primary income earners then that would be... an interesting
point of view.

PeterMollenburg wrote:

Edit: I'm not going to respond to comments on this topic as I have ranted and it's not
really the place for it, I should've held my tongue but I couldn't help it, I feel like
people should not accept things for what they appear to be and that's really my
message, I don't want to debate any of it as I know there already is strong opposition
to what I have to say, so there's really no point but just to accept 99 out of 100
people will not agree with any of this.

You're right that was quite off topic, but I have to admit that you made a good
argument that things which seem so obviously beneficial aren't necesssarily.

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PeterMollenburg
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Message 132 of 176

03 June 2014 at 1:48pm | IP Logged

James29 wrote:

Maybe I live under a rock, but it seems obvious to me that the reason English is so
overwhelmingly dominant is that people WANT to learn/use it (although, it certainly is possible that there are
a few exceptions).

I agree people want to learn English and I don't dispute that, but I do want to mention that there is
decent evidence coming out of the EU that if you don't speak English you will be financially disadvantaged
as pay rates of those ppl who don't speak it are significantly lower between 10 & 20% if I recall correctly.

I'd like to counter my own argument here though and suggest that those who don't learn English are more
likely to be from lower socio-economic backgrounds and less likely to have a good level of education on the
whole which in turn means lower paying employment opportunities, yet this is only an assumption.

Edited by PeterMollenburg on 03 June 2014 at 2:12pm
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PeterMollenburg
Senior Member
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Message 133 of 176

03 June 2014 at 3:09pm | IP Logged

Solfrid Cristin wrote:

]

PeterMollenburg wrote:

In my opinion I feel a possible English
language future could go like this (more
based
on Europe than anywhere else):

1)More and more European companies will use English as their working language (this has
started already).

2) More and more universities offer courses in English to attract international
students in an ever more global world (already happening- recent debates in France over
this very thing)

3) In a strive to remain more competitive schools in some European countries begin to
teach more and more via the medium of English (as opposed to actually having English
classes per sé altho they will prob still exist). This has already been suggested in
Germany.

4) Eventually almost all busines, science, commerce, education is done in English due
the the globalized competitive nature of capitalism demanding the same common market
approach to doing business.

5) More and more music, books, newspapers, websites, etc are dominated by English due
to people wanting to learn, wanting to reach the global audience, and simply because
many avenues of life now cater to English (business, science etc).

6) Students and children begin speaking more and more English with each other at home,
outside their work place and school, as do work collegues in European countries.

7) More countries consider adopting English as an additional official language after
the teaching of it spreads- French Africa may become Anglicised depending on the
affordability to swap over and the possible gains, benefits include now doing business
with a ridiculous number of chinese businessmen who now speak English. Some countries
have shown evidence of this change already. Egypt, Lebanon, Rwanda for ex (not
necessarily francophone countries but have dropped the importance of French in place of
English because they want to be competitive and children like it because of music and
Hollywood). Rwanda actually changed their official language, and this was not
necessarily a business decision but to snub France- however that's a whole different
story in its own right.

7) People across Europe feel ever more comfortable using English everyday and their own
national languages languish as they are no longer used in business, IT, marketing,
eductation and so on. They may not die out quickly if at all, but they will certainly
languish if not very thoroughly protected along the lines of Québec. ie Being more lax
and allowing anglicisms into the language will eventually simply result in hybrid
versions of national languages as ppl use English in most walks of life then use some
of their language in other areas which is borrowing English words rapidly. People will
see it as rediculous to try to stem the tide of English loan words entering their
language.

8) A global official English language is introduced and standardized.

9) We run out of oil- voilà welcome back to a language renaissance period ;)

Okay okay throw your spears at me, throw your petrol bombs, hate on me. I gots no lover
for player haters, word, for realz, know what i'm sayin? Peace out

I am highly skeptical to number 4, I have no idea why number 9 is on the list (I do not know your time frame
here - is it 10 years, 30 years , 100 years?) and number 7 also sounds fishy to me, but other than that I think
you make a lot of valid points.
[/QUOTE]

I purposely didn't want to put in a time frame as there are too many variables. Why number 9? Well being a
fanciful list with my own personal flare of believing what the future 'could' entail, running out of oil is very
probable since some experts say we've already passed peak oil production. If this is true we are on a slow
downward slide to a collapse of modern society. Without oil we can't even have nuclear or renewable energy
(how are we going to produce these things with all our solar powered machinery?). In turn the population
decreases, people become very reliant on small close-knit communities or even tribes and as many things
diminish new dialects and languages will appear eventually and flourish. No more FSI or Assimil recordings ;)

Solfrid Cristin wrote:

What we need to keep in mind, though, is that a lot of the phenomena you are describing concern only a
fraction of the population. Scandinavia is along with the Netherlands possibly the countries in the world with
the highest amount of non English native yet English proficient speakers, but even here only a few are truly
proficient. Almost everyone can muster some kind of English, ranging from a few sentences to full fluency,
but you will find lots of people in remote valleys, or even in the big cities who cannot or will not speak English.
And I suspect that even in a time frame of a 50 years, few countries will go beyond that level.

Even if we can speak English, it will still be easier to speak our own language. I have had an American
staying in my home over the last couple of weeks, and everyone speaks English to him, but the rest of the
conversation in the room still goes on in Norwegian, even if we can all speak English. And inevitably, at some
point everyone will revert into Norwegian, before we catch ourselves, and remember to go into English again
to include him.

In terms of NL & Scandanavia having a high proportion of ppl speaking English from the selfish standpoint of
a person learning their national language(s) it can be quite frustrating trying to immerse yourself if not very
advanced as they keep switching to English- of course it's logical they want the flow of communication to not
be slowed too much and/or want to practise English. You're right tho they are good examples of English
alongside their own language(s), but will it remain this way?

Reverting to Norwegian (or other national languages) might become less and less common as the world
becomes increasingly globalized and we become 'natural' at using the global English at work, socialising, in
education and so on. Think of how much minority European languages are used. You are prob right national
languages may not disappear but they may take a back seat in a very long car. I must say someone else
pointed out on here basing future predictions on the past is flawed, part of me tends to agree and all my talk
about the dominance of English is likely to be way off the mark :)

Solfrid Cristin wrote:

Again, I would need to know which time frame you are thinking of, to know the accuracy of your predictions,
but given how resistant languages are I am nowhere near as concerned as you are. English will become
even more important, and it will provide a number of languages with loan words, but unlike you, I do not see
that as a bad thing. In my ideal world, the Scandinavian situation would become the norm. Most people speak
English, but they keep their own language.

Could you imagine how many interesting users we could have on HTLAL from all over the world if that were
the case ?

I prefer thinking of more romantic times when Europeans knew far less English, let's say in the 70s or
thereabouts. Sure it helps for such sites as this one tho. Am I allowed to imagine a niche of dedicated
language learners from Europe that do know English blogging but they are the exception? Or is that having
my cake and eating it too? ;)
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James29
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5374 days ago
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Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: French

Message 134 of 176

03 June 2014 at 3:24pm | IP Logged

Peter, I don't understand what your point is. Are you suggesting that the poor people you reference who have an opportunity to make more money and lift themselves out of poverty by learning/speaking English should not do so? The whole point is that the people you are referencing WANT to learn English in order to get out of the lower socio-economic sphere. English does not somehow magically make them poor.

If there is a young, motivated, smart EU member who does not know any English and that has disadvantaged him and his parents throughout his life and he tells you he wants to learn English so he can have more opportunities and take care of his parents in their old age, what do you tell him?

I respect your opinions and your willingness to put them out in front of the world in a professional way. I think it is always helpful to see different perspectives.

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daegga
Tetraglot
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Austria
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Message 135 of 176

03 June 2014 at 4:28pm | IP Logged

James29 wrote:

The whole point is that the people you are referencing WANT to
learn English in order to get out of the lower socio-economic sphere. English does not
somehow magically make them poor.

But isn't the main critical point that you NEED to learn English in order to get a
high-paid job? If there was no single dominant language in the first place, would these
people want to learn English? English would certainly be an important language because
of the huge amount of native speakers and the economic power of their countries, but
other languages might be equally important, eg. Spanish, Russian, Chinese, or from a
European viewpoint French and German. Not every citizen of every country needs to
speak the same global language in order to make global business. How many employees of
an average company do have professional contact with native speakers of a foreign
language? Usually only a select few, except if you work in a global firm with
distributed teams working together over the internet.

Edited by daegga on 03 June 2014 at 6:30pm
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James29
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5374 days ago
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Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: French

Message 136 of 176

03 June 2014 at 5:48pm | IP Logged

No, you certainly do not need to learn English in order to better your chances of getting a high paying job. You could, instead, easily spend the same amount of time getting an advanced degree or a pilot's license or studying investments or being an apprentice to a retiring small business owner or any number of other things without English.

People make their own decisions. Some people are going to decide that they would rather spend their time and precious money living for the here and now, others will decide they want to spend their time and precious money getting an advanced degree (engineering, medicine, etc) in a non-English language, others will feel that knowing Chinese is the key to their future success, others will decide they want to spend their time and precious money learning English as a way to satisfy their wants and needs. I'm learning Spanish in part because I think it will make me better off financially.

I'd guess that more non-English speakers have decided they prefer doing something other than learn English with their time and money. If they want to do something else with their time and resources how can you tell them they are wrong or ignorant?

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