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Is a universal language undesirable? | ||
Tags: Lingua franca | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| vilas Pentaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6958 days ago 531 posts - 722 votes  Speaks: Spanish, Italian*, English, French, Portuguese | Message 17 of 75 29 March 2012 at 11:30am | IP Logged | ||
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Is a universal language undesireable? Do you mean "undesirable" ?
An universal language is desirable, but probably impossible. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 18 of 75 29 March 2012 at 2:43pm | IP Logged | ||
11 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6657 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 19 of 75 30 March 2012 at 12:43am | IP Logged | ||
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As much fun as learning a language is, it is also often a great deal of work. People are usually only interested in putting that work in if there is some sort of reward.
English is not a comparatively easy language for many people, but they learn it anyhow because English is so widely spoken in so many parts of the world. Fluency in English can help learners get work. Esperanto is often held up as an "easy" or "simple" language, but still only a relatively small number of people bother to learn Esperanto. Maybe this is because only a few million people around the world speak Esperanto. Unless you find an Esperanto conference, you aren't going to meet many people to speak Esperanto with. There is no Esperanto-land where you can go at any time and surround yourself with native speakers of Esperanto and absorb native Esperanto culture. People will always learn the languages they need or want, languages that will help them get jobs, travel, talk to men or women or boys or girls they find attractive, honor grandparents from the old country, enjoy untranslated literature and so on. If a universal language ever arose, it would probably fragment into other languages sooner or later, much as Latin did. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 20 of 75 30 March 2012 at 1:59am | IP Logged | ||
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With the status English has achieved it is likely that people from non-Anglophone countries will begin to learn it as children, both from music and TV and in school, and if you already know a language to a certain degree your chances of surviving its thoroughly rotten orthography and its unlimited stock of idiomatic expressions are far greater than if you had to learn both the writing and the language in parallel as an adult. So any other language you learn later will seem to be more difficult and less natural for you, and the result is that the status of English will be extremely hard to usurp for any other language. Those who have to learn to speak and especially write English as adults have my deepest sympathy. But at least in Denmark few people land in this sad situation because English is stuffed down in our throats in the same way as the French forcefeed geese to produce foie gras.
The result of the dominance of English in media and business all over the world is that the study of other languages tend to decline - which is absurd when you consider that we never have had so abundant access to materials in other languages, including access to cheap airtickets. In this situation it is important to stress that fun and a broader horizon are perfectly valid reasons for studying other languages than English, especially if you can find ways to do it which are cheap and effective. The tragedy is that the pedagogical research and the practical pedagogues never have taken this development seriously, but continue to discuss language learning as if it only took place in the school system. So the real question is now not whether we need a universal language or not - we have already got one - but how we can make ensure that the study of other languages doesn't wither away in its shadow. PS: I have corrected the spelling of the headline Edited by Iversen on 30 March 2012 at 2:06am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Raccoon Newbie United States Joined 4643 days ago 4 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 21 of 75 30 March 2012 at 9:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the spelling correction!
I think the question of how to get people to want to learn anything--including other languages--almost always haunts me. In my experience, most people would rather do anything but learn about science, history, culture, language, etc. in their free time. Heck, we can't even get people to exercise here in the US without a cattle-prod! I still think it's a matter of culture. But I have no clue how to make self-improvement as culturally-desirable as watching reality-shows or learning about celebrity trivia. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Heather McNamar Senior Member United States Joined 4780 days ago 77 posts - 109 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 22 of 75 31 March 2012 at 12:25am | IP Logged | ||
I agree. As far as the global economy is concerned, a good grasp of English gets you in the door, but the language of a particular nation/society is a measure of its cultural identity, and nobody should have to sacrifice their cultural identity just for the sake of some corporate entity or what have you. I would support learning a lingua franca (whether it be English or not), but not at the expense of one's own linguistic or cultural heritage. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| vilas Pentaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6958 days ago 531 posts - 722 votes Speaks: Spanish, Italian*, English, French, Portuguese | Message 23 of 75 03 May 2012 at 9:51am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes I mean it
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| COF Senior Member United States Joined 5829 days ago 262 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English* | Message 24 of 75 04 May 2012 at 2:01am | IP Logged | ||
Maybe I've got the wrong idea, but I get the impression from many Dutch people that they aren't that keen on their own language, have little interest in preserving it and see English as far superior because it is the language of all the films, books, TV, music and popular culture they most enjoy. Many people who try to learn Dutch for the most part report total indifference, and occasionally down right dismissive attitudes from native Dutch speakers. The general consensus amongst Dutch speakers seems to be "who the hell would want to learn our language?". While most countries prefer tourists to try to speak at least a bit of the native language, most Dutch people seem to prefer tourists to speak English, and seem to discourage them from speaking Dutch. For the most part the Netherlands appears to be a country that is totally indifferent to its own language and has no real desire to preserve it, protect it or promote it. If the Netherlands suddenly became an Anglophone nation in the next 40 years or so, I doubt most Dutch people would loose much sleep over it. In fact, many might be glad. Edited by COF on 04 May 2012 at 2:07am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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