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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5769 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 9 of 28 09 January 2015 at 3:12pm | IP Logged | ||
Dieter Bohlen, for example, is not of actual global significance. He will be forgotten within a few decades after (or even before) his death. Yet, he has over 40 wikipedia sites. Or take Conchita Wurst with 70 sites. About 50 of which are European languages, local languages and dialects. Simply because his/her persona manages to shock people. That's why this wikipedia method is not a tool to measure global significance in this respect, it's a tool to measure whether a trending person or topic has entered a certain sphere of interconnected media outlets that span across languages whose users a) have access to the internet b) use the internet in their native language c) contribute to wikipedia d) are interested in topics that trend in a different language and will translate the trend to their own language I know, for example, non-native Catalan speakers who contribute to wikipedia in Catalan, and native Tamil speakers who don't contribute in their native language, even though both groups have equal access to the internet and the same kind of information here in Europe. Edited by Bao on 09 January 2015 at 3:16pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rodrigoau Triglot Newbie Australia Joined 3637 days ago 19 posts - 52 votes Speaks: Macedonian*, English, Spanish Studies: Italian, Turkish | Message 10 of 28 10 January 2015 at 9:16am | IP Logged | ||
You are making a VERY good point. But then again, don't forget that we are talking here about interconnectedness here (a vital part of globalization). So, the fact that German is so well interconnected with a number of European languages linguistically, culturally, geo-politically etc. speaks in its favour as a global language. My point is, the study is not discussing how important Chinese is. It is only asserting that as a global language, it is not significant, but rather peripheral. Also, the famous people in Wikipedia segment is only a small part of the overall research they did in the study. As flawed as it is, I think it's interesting because it helps dispel the myth that Chinese is becoming (or has become) a global language. I don't believe it and there is no evidence for it. And if you ask me, I don't think Mandarin will ever become a global language, and I can talk about the reasons as to why not for several hours. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4536 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 11 of 28 10 January 2015 at 10:34am | IP Logged | ||
But of course the tension is in what "global" means here. Imagine if China was significantly bigger, and encompassed all the old USSR, Africa, and South America. It would still potentially be seen as non-global, so long as personalities within China did not directly affect the outside World. On the other hand, it's not surprising that a Eurostar winner (or anyone else broadly interested to Europe) will get Wikipedia entries in most of the EU languages - that doesn't mean that they are of global importance, just of importance to Europeans. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rodrigoau Triglot Newbie Australia Joined 3637 days ago 19 posts - 52 votes Speaks: Macedonian*, English, Spanish Studies: Italian, Turkish | Message 12 of 28 11 January 2015 at 5:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, it depends what you mean by global. I can see your point, but I do think you are
confusing globalization with oppression. I guess China's central government succeeded in making its ideas global over that population of 1.something billion, which would have nurtured diverse cultures and languages if that hadn't been the case (it's enough to think of Tibet to get the picture): ideas like one language, same given values across the board, conformity, censorship, belief that oppression of individual freedoms and human rights is the way to go because it benefits the social cohesion etc. Which is probably not difficult to do when you hold the central power including the military and the judicial system. That's not globalization, that's oppression. For me, evidence of China or the Chinese language being or becoming global would be if China's ideas, values etc. were to be adopted freely by other cultures across the border where the Chinese government can't exercise power. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5062 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 13 of 28 11 January 2015 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Literary Chinese was the language of education in China for thousands of years, spanning multiple periods of
political unification and fragmentation. It might have involved some oppression at times during that history, but it certainly has little to do with China's current authoritarian central government and its human rights record! European languages were spread mainly through conquest and colonization, but targeted policies to discourage the use of minority languages have been common in much of Europe and the Americas. The point is, the processes that in history have allowed a language to become widespread have always involved conquest or oppression of some kind. There's no way to replace languages on multiple continents with yours that respects the local cultures. That's not a condemnation of past or present governments of the UK, USA, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, or China, but history is history. Chinese ideas and values were adopted to a large degree by the cultures of East and Southeast Asia, especially Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. (It happened centuries ago; these countries currently have bad blood with the PRC Nevertheless, their languages and cultures are permeated with Chinese ideas). So while it's true that Chinese has less influence outside China than you would predict given its number of native speakers, that shouldn't be suggested to mean things it doesn't. We shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking other global languages were spread by peaceful agreement. As the economic power of China increases while the Chinese diaspora continues to grow in size, I think we'll see more Chinese language being used outside the borders of China. Of course, not enough to pass English in the foreseeable future, but enough to be considered "global." Responding to the comments about the Wikipedia measure, I don't think that linguistic fragmentation is the full story. India is far more linguistically fragmented than China, rivaling Europe. But it doesn't support dozens of Wikipedias with good coverage of famous people. A language in Europe that's spoken by three or four million people with the economic conditions and motivation to write a Wikipedia will boost European scores, while an Indian language with thirty or forty million speakers fails to generate a Wikipedia of note because those people are poor/don't use the Internet/their language doesn't have a strong writing tradition/they don't care about Wikipedia/they don't have their own independent country. Edited by robarb on 11 January 2015 at 11:40pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6585 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 14 of 28 12 January 2015 at 8:03am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know how we got into discussions of politics here and I don't want to derail too much, but I want to note that while the opression and suppression of local languages are mostly historical in the case of European languages, it is very much a current policy of the PRC to try to eliminate all non-Mandarin languages within its borders, except a few small, non-threatening ethnic languages. I'm not saying the current Chinese opression is in any way worse than the European one was, I just want to make sure we're talking in the correct tense.
3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cthulhu Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7226 days ago 139 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English, Mandarin, Russian | Message 15 of 28 12 January 2015 at 2:40pm | IP Logged | ||
1) It's only historical in the case of European languages because the process is already completed; everyone in France already speaks French, everybody in Germany can already speak standard German, everyone in England knows English. Some people still speak Welsh, Low German, or Occitan, but the goal was always the spread of a standardized national language, not the elimination of all other languages. If Westerners want to fight against things that China's doing, the whole "This thing that we already did to help make us powerful and united as a country? Stop doing it" spiel might not be the best approach. 2) The current policy of the PRC is not even close to the same level of repression that occurred in most western countries. The vast majority of non-Chinese languages get a lot of official support trying to counteract the pressures that are put on minority languages, something western countries didn't start doing until they'd already reduced their own minority languages to quaint local customs. The non-Mandarin Chinese languages don't receive the same support, it's true, but after nearly a hundred years of official government endorsement of Mandarin and putting pressure on the dialects they're still going strong with tens of millions of speakers each. Maybe China is REALLY bad at oppression (It isn't). Official policy has been to push the dialects out of the public sphere entirely, but they still dominate the private sphere throughout China; sometimes this gets out of hand at local levels, overzealous local officials or educational administrators, but policy is policy. Even after all this, according to the latest research only something like 7% of the Chinese population can fluently speak Standard Mandarin; if anything, the problem here is that China has been far more lenient about promoting a standard national language than Europe ever was. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6585 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 16 of 28 12 January 2015 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I disagree with a lot of what you're saying. It seems clear to me that the goal of the PRC government is NOT just the spread of Mandarin, but the extinction of the local languages, and you need to have a very narrow definition of "Standard Mandarin" to get that 7% figure, especially when Mandarin dialects is the native language of 80% of the population. I don't want to get too political, but punishing children for speaking non-Mandarin languages in school, stripping the Canonese audio from all Hong Kong movies (whilst keeping the English audio on Hollywood films), and propaganda like "Be civilized, don't spit and speak Mandarin" or "Speaking Cantonese gives you throat cancer" or the video where Cantonese is personified as a demon that tries to kill children (luckily the main character defeats the evil monster through her Mandarin knowledge) are not just attempts to promote Mandarin.
Again, I'm not saying Europe has some sort of moral superiority here, I'm just reacting against a post that might be interpreted as saying that this is no longer going on in China. Edited by Ari on 12 January 2015 at 4:07pm 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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