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Your Language Fantasy

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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
49 messages over 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7  Next >>
LorenzoGuapo
Triglot
Groupie
United States
Joined 6446 days ago
79 posts - 94 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: French

 
 Message 41 of 49
29 May 2009 at 12:33am | IP Logged 
If German and English were the offical languages of the US I could see three options.

1. Everything would be bilingual from music to Hollywood movies, from the NBA to the PGA. All schools would teach both languages equally from K-12 and even universities would require knowledge of both upon graduation. Americans would have mixed names such as Jurgen Williams and the children of immigrants would have names like Hans Gonzalez. I think 90% of the population would be bilingual. Also there would be a lot of German slang Americans would speak, and many people would probally switch the two languages without even noticing. Also whenever Americans would go to UK or German speaking countries they would speak the local language but then switch to the other language just because they want to.I think that in effect Europeans would probally know half as much of English as they do now and many German speakers might not speak English because if they go to the US they could just speak German.

2. English would be the dominant language but German would be taught from Kindergarten. In this case 2 out of 3 Americans, I am just guessing would know German. We would speak German to German speaking tourists and speak German to them in there countries. German would probally be spoken my more people than Spanish is today in the US.

3. German would be the dominant language and English would be taught from Kindergarten. I think 2 out of 3 Americans would know English and use it with foreigners but expect foreigners to eventually learn German to assimilate into society. Also the US might have soccer as the main sport, or have the same sports as now but all the teams names would be in German.

There are plenty of options but those are the 3 that I came up with. I think if anyone of these options were true Americans would definitely be more bilingual than they are today.
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orion
Senior Member
United States
Joined 7023 days ago
622 posts - 678 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Russian

 
 Message 42 of 49
29 May 2009 at 6:02am | IP Logged 
I have often wondered how different the Americas would be today if the Aztecs, Incas and Mayans had been able to repel the Spanish and Portuguese. Another scenario I have wondered about is what the British Isles be like today if the Norman invasion had failed. Perhaps modern English would be much more like Dutch, maybe even mutually intelligible.
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Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6705 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 43 of 49
29 May 2009 at 7:00am | IP Logged 
Russianbear wrote:
I think speech happened in very early stages. Like you wrote, it was probably a process, so it would be hard to pin point the exact point in time. Besides, when you say "when it happened and which human species did it" - what do you mean by "it"? If it is speech, then some forms of it existed (and exist) even in primitive primates. So the speech probably existed was probably just getting more and more complex as the species evolved.


Maybe, maybe not. I don' think that you could ever say that language suddenly appeared in a single day. However thre are a few very important mutations that are necessary for human language to evolve, and they must have occurred and be spread rather suddenly. Those that I have heard about concern the physical production of language (which for instnce apes aren't capable of, unlike parrots and dolphins). More importantly thee are some more abstract faculties concerning grammar and symbolism which probably also have occurred in a minor group at a certain time. But it is difficult to know about these things so long time after the event.
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JS-1
Diglot
Senior Member
Ireland
Joined 5985 days ago
144 posts - 166 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), German, Japanese, Ancient Egyptian, Arabic (Written)

 
 Message 44 of 49
29 May 2009 at 8:31am | IP Logged 
My fantasy would be a world where European languages hadn't spread like a plague.
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Russianbear
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6777 days ago
358 posts - 422 votes 
1 sounds
Speaks: Russian*, English, Ukrainian
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 45 of 49
29 May 2009 at 4:27pm | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:


Maybe, maybe not. I don' think that you could ever say that language suddenly appeared in a single day. However thre are a few very important mutations that are necessary for human language to evolve, and they must have occurred and be spread rather suddenly. Those that I have heard about concern the physical production of language (which for instnce apes aren't capable of, unlike parrots and dolphins). More importantly thee are some more abstract faculties concerning grammar and symbolism which probably also have occurred in a minor group at a certain time. But it is difficult to know about these things so long time after the event.


I strongly doubt parrots and dolphins are more capable than apes as far as the physical production of language goes. I think apes already have some primitive languages - which is probably not unlike the languages the ancestor spieces of humans had a long time ago. I would be surprised if dolphins or any other spieces could surpass the ape languages in terms of a variety of messages that can be conveyed and (potential for) expressison of abstract ideas.
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DrM
Newbie
United States
Joined 6227 days ago
12 posts - 13 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Thai

 
 Message 46 of 49
29 May 2009 at 10:17pm | IP Logged 
LorenzoGuapo wrote:
If German and English were the offical languages of the US I could see three options.

1. Everything would be bilingual from music to Hollywood movies, from the NBA to the PGA. All schools would teach both languages equally from K-12 and even universities would require knowledge of both upon graduation. Americans would have mixed names such as Jurgen Williams and the children of immigrants would have names like Hans Gonzalez. I think 90% of the population would be bilingual. Also there would be a lot of German slang Americans would speak, and many people would probally switch the two languages without even noticing. Also whenever Americans would go to UK or German speaking countries they would speak the local language but then switch to the other language just because they want to.I think that in effect Europeans would probally know half as much of English as they do now and many German speakers might not speak English because if they go to the US they could just speak German.

2. English would be the dominant language but German would be taught from Kindergarten. In this case 2 out of 3 Americans, I am just guessing would know German. We would speak German to German speaking tourists and speak German to them in there countries. German would probally be spoken my more people than Spanish is today in the US.

3. German would be the dominant language and English would be taught from Kindergarten. I think 2 out of 3 Americans would know English and use it with foreigners but expect foreigners to eventually learn German to assimilate into society. Also the US might have soccer as the main sport, or have the same sports as now but all the teams names would be in German.

There are plenty of options but those are the 3 that I came up with. I think if anyone of these options were true Americans would definitely be more bilingual than they are today.


In my humble opinion, if German ended up as an official language of the US, then its usage would be like that of French in Canada. Meaning there were would be a few regions where it was spoken predominately, and a fair amount of people who would have studied it from early childhood, but in the end English would remain the dominate language.


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Vinlander
Groupie
Canada
Joined 5823 days ago
62 posts - 69 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: French

 
 Message 47 of 49
30 May 2009 at 3:18am | IP Logged 
DrM wrote:
LorenzoGuapo wrote:
If German and English were the offical languages of the US I could see three options.

1. Everything would be bilingual from music to Hollywood movies, from the NBA to the PGA. All schools would teach both languages equally from K-12 and even universities would require knowledge of both upon graduation. Americans would have mixed names such as Jurgen Williams and the children of immigrants would have names like Hans Gonzalez. I think 90% of the population would be bilingual. Also there would be a lot of German slang Americans would speak, and many people would probally switch the two languages without even noticing. Also whenever Americans would go to UK or German speaking countries they would speak the local language but then switch to the other language just because they want to.I think that in effect Europeans would probally know half as much of English as they do now and many German speakers might not speak English because if they go to the US they could just speak German.

2. English would be the dominant language but German would be taught from Kindergarten. In this case 2 out of 3 Americans, I am just guessing would know German. We would speak German to German speaking tourists and speak German to them in there countries. German would probally be spoken my more people than Spanish is today in the US.

3. German would be the dominant language and English would be taught from Kindergarten. I think 2 out of 3 Americans would know English and use it with foreigners but expect foreigners to eventually learn German to assimilate into society. Also the US might have soccer as the main sport, or have the same sports as now but all the teams names would be in German.

There are plenty of options but those are the 3 that I came up with. I think if anyone of these options were true Americans would definitely be more bilingual than they are today.


In my humble opinion, if German ended up as an official language of the US, then its usage would be like that of French in Canada. Meaning there were would be a few regions where it was spoken predominately, and a fair amount of people who would have studied it from early childhood, but in the end English would remain the dominate language.

French Canadain's are about 9 millions people. Meaning there the population of sweden in the america's that speaks French. If the same percentage was used in the States there would be over 80 million yanks speakin it. Which would put German in an economic and cultural importance unmatched by any other language except for English. Sure there are many speakers of the Latin and Asian languages but these are poor people. Poor people tend not to have much of effected on internet culture, what langaues is used for business, education, movies, television, music etc.
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pmiller
Account terminated
Groupie
Canada
Joined 5676 days ago
99 posts - 104 votes 
Speaks: English*

 
 Message 48 of 49
30 May 2009 at 7:10am | IP Logged 
Actually, German almost became the language of the United States. The US Founding Fathers voted on whether English or German should be the national language going forward. Remember, they hated the Brits at the time, and a substantial percentage of the American population was German (still today more Americans claim German heritage than any other). For example, the Pennsylvania "Dutch" were/are actually Deutsch (German). Anyway, German lost by only one vote!

EDIT: I just checked and apparently the above is an urban myth. I remember hearing it a couple of times, including from my high school German teacher, whom I took to be a credible source. (DOH!)

But if the above scenario HAD occurred, and if German had won, it's very likely that the US and Germany would've been closer by the time WW I (or something like it) came around, so that the US likely would've sided with Germany instead of Britain, in which case the German-speaking countries would most certainly have won, so that by now English would be a language in decline while German would probably be the international language.

German and Japanese had a big chance in WW II - that war could've easily gone the other way. Suppose those two countries had better coordinated their war strategies. Instead of attacking the West and the USSR at the same time, they could've attacked them one at a time, in which case they probably would've won the war. For example, instead of attacking Russia when it did, Germany could've redoubled it's effort to defeat Britain first. Or else Japan could've helped Germany defeat Russia before attacking US and British bases in the Pacific.

Or they could've won if either Germany or Japan had perfected the atom bomb before the US (they both had their own programs).

In any case, German and Japanese would've been the two major languages in the world.

In preceding decades the Japanese had already almost completely Japanized Korea and Taiwan (the people spoke Japanese, had Japanese names and were punished for speaking Korean or Taiwanese). They planned to do the same to the rest of Asia, wiping out all the native languages over a generation or two. They had even worked out a system of writing English using their katakana script in anticipation of winning the war and enslaving the English-speaking nations of the Pacific rim.

As for Europe, the Nazi plan was for Czechs, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Russians and Ukrainians to be enslaved and eventually eliminated, leaving all of the European part of the former USSR as part of Germany proper, which would be populated entirely by Germans. (Some allowance was to be made for especially nordic/Aryan-looking young people of these lands to be absorbed into the German population).

It would be a very different world indeed.

My language fantasy? That one language becomes truly universal ASAP (maybe Esperanto - I don't really care which - but that would be the only language of school systems all over the world, so that kids who are 6 years old today will grow up totally fluent in it). Everyone can keep their heritage languages as well, but humanity needs to have more holding us together if we're to avoid WW III (nuclear + biological), which no language is likely to survive.


Edited by pmiller on 30 May 2009 at 7:44am


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