Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2022/01/15/dominant-languages-can-spread-even-without-coercion

by brimnes • 5 years ago

68 69 5 years ago

economist.com

zozbot234• 5 years ago

This is good news for Rust.

nick_• 5 years ago

My HN bingo card is filling up.

dustintrex• 5 years ago

You misspelled "Bitcoin".

fomine3• 5 years ago

Bad news, isn't it? Because of C/C++ is dominant now.

kmeisthax2• 5 years ago

What's already happening is that languages that aren't tied to their own unique literary cultures are slowly shrinking. The countries that don't have their own media import it, and will often learn other languages to access it rather than waiting for translations of varying quality. France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, and India all have enough unique, untranslated culture to get people to consider learning the languages that culture is written in.

This isn't the case for, say, the Netherlands, or Sweden. And I'd specifically cite the need to import English-language cultural works as driving the use of English in those countries. There's plenty of other countries' whose languages never really had a literary culture to begin with, too - although usually at that point you can find some kind of forced cultural erasure rather than mere economic need to learn English.

Multilingualism (both in countries and individuals) lessens the zero-sum nature of language competition. But it is costly, in both time and money. Ultimately, some societies may have to put a price on a cultural inheritance that, once lost, is nigh-impossible to recover.

That being said, this is peak anglobrain. The EU bloc is already a deeply multilingual society, and people are perfectly willing to dabble with multiple language proficiencies. Ironically, this is because much of the EU just falls back to English - like, to the point where the EU has it's own dialect of it[0]. French, German, and Spanish are also commonly learned and used as second languages, too.

This "languages are hard to learn" meme is, more than anything, the product of bad educational practices, lack of student motivation, and difficulty in finding speaking partners. For some reason, the entire anglosphere[1] is just plain bad at language education[2]. That's not to say that learning a new language is easy, of course. It's just that we aren't even really trying. The anglosphere is perfectly willing to just sit and make the rest of the world speak our language.

[0] This is known as Euro English.

[1] And, arguably, Japan.

[2] The UK is so bad at it that it was probably the deciding factor in Brexit. Nobody wants to immigrate to countries they can't speak the languages of. This meant that the UK had a uniquely lopsided ratio of immigrants to emigrants, and that much of the UK simply didn't get the benefits of being allowed to leave.

MattGaiser• 5 years ago

Most learning is neccesity driven learning. If you speak English, in most major cities around the globe you need nothing else.

Canada has a kerfuffle about how the CEO of a major company here didn't speak any French after a decade of living in Quebec, but virtually nobody I know who has lived in Montreal has picked any French up at all (assuming they started out Anglophone).

I know people in Germany who have picked up next to no German too.

pottertheotter• 5 years ago

Your comment about people in Germany not picking up German surprised me. I don’t have a ton of first-hand experience, but my impression has been that it was more of necessity there than other European countries.

raverbashing• 5 years ago

I can understand not learning it too much, but not picking any of it just sounds lazy and privileged

I tend to agree with "Lazy Anglo Brain".

slibhb• 5 years ago

For some reason, the entire anglosphere[1] is just plain bad at language education[2]. That's not to say that learning a new language is easy, of course. It's just that we aren't even really trying. The anglosphere is perfectly willing to just sit and make the rest of the world speak our language.

Is this fair framing? Doesn't it seem likely that English speaking countries are bad at learning languages precisely because there's no urgent reason to learn one?

And is it really "making them speak English"? There's always going to be a lingua franca and it's English right now for complicated historical-political reasons. There's no reason to assume it will be English forever.

lotu• 5 years ago

I kinda think that the lingua Franca, is very sticky. Think base 10 or the Gregorian calendar or QWERTY . None of these are the only or even best solution but they are going to all stick around forever just because it will never make sense to change them.

ashtonkem5• 5 years ago

That’s fair for America, as it’s both the local hegemon and a long way away from any near peer power that’s not English speaking. Our weight means that everyone in the neighborhood bends to us, for better or for worse. If someone from Mexico wants to come to America or do business with Americans, chances are they’ll learn English rather than expecting the converse to happen.

America is also huge in the way that few countries are. This means that you can trivially go your entire life enjoying vacations without leaving the country. Nobody in the EU has that luxury.

The UK though is not the local hegemon. They’re peers and close trading partners with several non English speaking countries, many of which are extremely close physically too. The UK is not politically and economically powerful enough to expect all the other European countries to learn English in order to do business with them.

RubyRidgeRandy• 5 years ago

The US military is actually very good at teaching people new languages. The issue when learning new languages is incentive and exposure. If you are stuck in a classroom for 8 hours a day and only exposed to a single foreign language, and you have no other job to do but learn that language, you pick it up pretty quick.

It's easy to learn English. No matter where you are, you are probably constantly exposed to English media and are taught it in school.

ashtonkem5• 5 years ago

The countries that don't have their own media import it, and will often learn other languages to access it rather than waiting for translations of varying quality.

Also, even when such media cultures exist, they’re competing against the incredible might of Hollywood, Netflix, Disney, etc. It is very difficult to compete with the budget and production quality that these companies can maintain if you’re a smaller economy. Disney’s revenue last year was 12% of Sweden’s GDP ($65B vs $541B). Sweden would have to sink a massive chunk of its GDP into movies in order to compete with just Disney, let alone all the other streaming services.

My suspicion is that there needs to be not only a tradition to act as a bulwark, but also some national self identity that causes people to reject the homogenizing effect of foreign media. That can either be pride in extant local media (I understand that the Paris novel scene is rather hostile to non-native involvement, for example), or an explicit rejection of the foreign media for more explicitly political reasons.

ipaddr• 5 years ago

There must be more to this; places like Nigeria, India, China, Japan all make more feature films compared to the US. Countries like Spain, France, Germany, UK make about half as many. Mexico, Brazil are in the top 15..

But Anglo countries like Canada or Australia or New Zealand make many fewer. UK makes slightly less than the US.

Population size probably matters more and gdp less but having some unique to say helps.

kmeisthax2• 5 years ago

You don't need to "compete with Disney"; and quite honestly I consider that to be a bad way to think about the production of creative works. If you think about production that way, then it just becomes a budget measuring game, and everyone in the industry winds up producing largely similar mass-market works. Producers like doing this because it boils down the complex process of actually making a movie, book, or game down into whoever is the best capitalist. The problem is that the people who are here for just Disney are just going to buy Disney, and ignore whatever competing product you churn out.

The best way to compete with Disney is to offer something they aren't (and, ideally, couldn't).

In the case of streaming services, many of the countries I mentioned before actually condition local market access on having a certain percentage of original works produced in that country. This is why Netflix has a lot of foreign-language originals; they need to meet that national production quota and the easiest way to do that is to just fund a lot of lower-budget productions.[0] Of course, these kinds of laws also put Hacker News into apoplectic fits, and it's also the same bullshit China pulls to get cultural influence in Hollywood; so I'm not going to try and sing their virtues too much.

Thing is, Sweden (or any of the other countries that regularly import most of their culture from America) doesn't need their own Disney. Nor do they need cultural protection laws or a bunch of anglohostile novelists[1]. They just need novelists, in general. Lots of them, and writing works exclusively in Swedish. Cultivating your own literary culture makes it more likely that some of those works will find international success[2], because the kinds of people who read lots of books or watch lots of movies are suckers for novelty.

[0] My current impression, which may be wrong, is that this is how we got Squid Game.

[1] Related note: France acts like the Red Sox of the former brutal colonists club sometimes, and I really find it irksome.

[2] ex. Nobody in the Anglosphere cared or even knew about Polish literature or game development until The Witcher.

throwaway893742• 5 years ago

France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, and India all have enough unique, untranslated culture to get people to consider learning the languages that culture is written in

India is different from the other countries that had been mentioned. India is a union of many larger states. The government of India is actually called as Union Government in the constitution. India has 23 officially recognized languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India .

inglor_cz2• 5 years ago

The English probably have no good system for learning foreign languages for the same reason that (landlocked) Czechs do not have a good system for training sailors; absence of need.

Even our own bodies will shrink unused muscles or organs, because the resources are needed elsewhere. As anyone who returned to a gym after a Covid pause found out.

adrianN• 5 years ago

Learning a new language to fluency takes hundreds of hours at least, some languages require thousands of hours. That's not the fault of educational practices. It just takes time to memorize thousands of unknown words and figure out in which context they are used.

Delk• 5 years ago

Fluency also requires learning the basic grammatical rules of the language by heart well enough that one can apply them without consciously thinking about them most of the time. Being able to communicate in a few everyday situations probably doesn't require so much of that especially if you focus on communication rather than getting things pedantically correct, but that's not the same as fluency or a professionally useful level of skill. Being able to read fiction or understand other cultural works is again a whole another thing.

I'm not from the anglosphere and I consider learning languages hard and laborious.

GP may be right about language education in the anglosphere -- I wouldn't know that -- and education could probably be improved just about everywhere, but there certainly is an intrinsic difficulty to learning languages as well.

BossHogg• 5 years ago

The thesis that once you ignore all the force it took to make a "dominant language" dominant they spread without coercion is not especially compelling. It still remains the backdrop for things like wanting to "internationalise and attract overseas experts."

hunglee22• 5 years ago

great observation, exactly my sense of it.

AnAfrican2• 5 years ago

It’s weird how the article does not give any example of languages that did spread and become dominant without any coercion. They do exist: Swahili and Lingala for instance. They mostly spread through trade and as « neutral » language used to communicate between ethnic groups (with their own language).

rgergerge3• 5 years ago

I am not sure about Lingala but Swahili absolutely spread through coercion in colonial times and post independence. In Tanzania the Germans and later the British heavily promoted Swahili as a lingua franca.

Nowadays Swahili is the first language of most Tanzanians but in the past it was mainly limited to coastal areas formerly controlled by the Sultanate of Oman. The government of Tanzania promotes Swahili to this day, and many native languages in the interior of the country are declining.

AnAfrican2• 5 years ago

Yes but it did and does spread beyond Tanzania. Lingala probably did have some government help too in Mobutu’s era but still.

dimitar2• 5 years ago

The spread of Russian in Ukraine fits this model (coercion to establish dominance, then continued spread without coercion) very well. Urban areas in the East and Center became Russian-speaking through Soviet measures like mixing nationalities at work/army to force them to use Russian. There were other coersive measures like the central planning not providing not enough Ukrainian media (only folk music programs on TV for example) and limiting the classes available in Ukrainian in some regions.

Now the "language of inter-nationality communication" is so entrenched, that Ukrainian needs government support to incentivise media and businesses to use it. As everyone understands Russian nowadays, and few people know English, companies that serve the CIS market actually promote Russian better than the government promotes Ukrainian.

To talk about the elephant in the room, note that the politics don't correlate perfectly with the language situation on the ground - on one hand there are quite a few Russian-speakers that don't want Russian as an official language and also plenty of pro-Western people want Russian to be co-official.

akg_673• 5 years ago

Similar changes happened in Japan (Ainu and Okinawan languages displaced by Japanese) and Taiwan (Taiwanese language displaced by Chinese). In this aspect, I credit India for not coercing a national language to displace regional languages. But then such unification of languages may be a contributing factor to keeping country together and alleviate regionalism.

bluishgreen• 5 years ago

Regarding India, I am not exactly sure if any credits are in order. Oh they tried, they tried hard. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Hindi_agitations_of_Tam...

qart2• 5 years ago

Hard coercion did not work in India. They are doing pretty serious strong-arming now. Want a job in the central government? Gotta know Hindi. A lot of money is getting poured into Hindi promotion schemes. Hindi is definitely a dominant language now. Native speakers just assume everyone else in India will just play along. There was a minor scandal last year when a customer in Tamil Nadu was mocked by the customer service rep of a food delivery service. That particular issue got resolved, but Hindi hegemony remains.

hollerith• 5 years ago

It starts well before Soviet times: Wikipedia says the Ukrainian language was banned in the Russian Empire starting in 1804 when what is now Eastern, Central and Southern Ukraine were part of the Russian Empire.

dimitar2• 5 years ago

That is true, and while these bans had a huge historical impact, they didn't change the language that was used in villages and farms.

Until the 1920s Ukraine was a mostly rural country and in the countryside Ukrainian was alive and well. After the wars and insurgency the Soviet government felt compelled to create a Ukrainian SSR and allow widespread use of Ukrainian. Most towns and cities spoke Russian (and also German, Yiddish and Polish), but then as industrialisation forced many peasants into urban areas, they quickly became Ukrainian-speaking. In this context a new wave of language repression began, which became really intense only in the 1960s and 1970s. Of course there other forms of repression besides language

jillesvangurp• 5 years ago

The keyword here is incentive, not coercion. Most of the world uses English as a second language because the British used to run a fairly large part of it and most of their former colonies still have a lot of English speakers and quite a few even maintain it as an official language. And then after two world wars, their former colony the USA of course became a super power. So, for the past few centuries, understanding English meant access to a large market where English just was the main language to do business.

There is an enormous economic incentive to do business in English as it gives you access to these huge markets with wealthy customers. Additionally, a lot of content is published by English speakers, which re-enforces the need to learn English. Finally because pretty much every country does at least some business in English, it's also the most common language for any two countries that wish to engage with each other.

I'm actually Dutch but I live in Germany. While I speak a little bit of German, my English is far better. I don't actually need German to do business in Berlin; so I don't use it a lot I have no economic incentive to learn it. There's a critical mass of foreigners here that mostly speak English far better than they speak German. And while some Germans don't like that, a lot of them don't mind it and actually move to Berlin because they speak English and because is so international. You see this dynamic in a lot of economically important cities across the world. As soon as you get any concentration of foreigners living in them, English becomes an important language to the point where the locals start using English to be able to keep up.

tinco2• 5 years ago

The Americans gave us Cartoon Network. If the Germans had better cartoons we probably would be speaking German a lot better. In my opinion there's actually great economic incentive to speak German fluently. For me personally I've had multiple meetings with friends and business relations where I sometimes felt left out because I can't understand German well when it's spoken at native speed. Besides that I know of multiple great universities where I would have liked to go, but can't really because I'm not fluent enough in German.

Obviously as a software engineer it would be ridiculous to not at least read English, but I know for a fact there's great German language forums and learning resources out there. I imagine there exist programmers out there working in some deep and dark VW or Siemens lab that have been able to work for years without reading a full English sentence.

I'm pretty sure Berlin is also the only city (or one of very few) in Germany where you can actually live and work happily and productively without learning German.

madrox• 5 years ago

The Americans gave us Cartoon Network. If the Germans had better cartoons we probably would be speaking German a lot better.

It wasn’t until you said this that I considered my motivation to learn Japanese as part of this conversation. My whole reason for doing so was for better appreciation of anime.

r_hoods_ghost• 5 years ago

I don't think the dominance of English has much to do with the quality of English or American cartoons or their wider culture. Even ignoring the British Empire, the USA has been one of the largest ever continental empires for 200 years and is now a quasi hegemonic global empire with around 600 overseas military bases and the ability and willingness to launch military strikes and enforce it's will across large swathes of said empire. Knowing the language of your overlords has always been a good idea and English is now even more widespread as a second language than when the British were stomping around engaging in the odd genocide and searching for a decent meal. I suspect that even if Germany produced the most amazing cartoons in the world only a tiny fraction of people would ever to learn it compared to English. That's what dubbing and subtitles are for.

Having said that, between roughly 1850 and the end of the second World War it was considered necessary for engineers and scientists in the UK and USA at least to know German because of the German's achievements in science and technology (especially chemistry) and the political and economic power of the various central European states and empires controlled by German speaking elites. Gaining a competitive advantage over your peers and expanding your knowledge has always been a good incentive to learn another language independent of wanting to learn what your occupiers are saying.

flohofwoe2• 5 years ago

The Americans gave us Cartoon Network.

...and MTV, and the Brits the music to go with it! That's how I learned English as a teenager anyway.

knuthsat• 5 years ago

I remember that a bunch of my classmates in elementary school knew German through watching Pokemon on a German cartoon channel that was broadcasted in Croatia (required no paid subscription, unlike Cartoon Network).

It was incredible, the accent was impeccable.

throwaway893742• 5 years ago

The keyword here is incentive, not coercion.

This summarizes. In India the union government is trying to push Hindi as the national language while the state governments are pushing back. This has been going for 70 years.

The interesting change is the due to jobs in south India north Indian state migrant workers moved to southern states. Their kids who go public school score higher in the native language classes than the native kids. This applies only for the low income migrant workers. The white collar job workers send their kids to private school and still learn Hindi.

In South India at least English is given more importance than the regional language.

PS: To those who are unaware of India, India has 23 officially recognized languages

viztor• 5 years ago

Language is the classic case for network effect, the more people speaking one language, more information would be communicated in that language, more beneficial it will be for learning such language.

JaumeGreen• 5 years ago

All languages can spread without coercion. I knew people learning Catalan without even living anywhere nearby, and even not knowing Spanish, French or Italian. Maybe it was an elective in their university and they were bored, maybe they heard a song and loved it, ... plenty of different reasons.

But dominant languages have plenty of advantages.

First of all just by being spoken by lots of people make then a "de facto" common language, and sometimes people change to the dominant language in a conversation just because one person spoke in that, EVEN when all the people can talk and understand the same non-dominant language. I've seen it happen, and this may be a leftover from times when it was persecuted to speak the non-dominant one.

Second there's lot of non-aggresive coercion. You may have less job opportunities if you don't use the dominant language, your works less promotion, not considered serious, ... . I'm sure that (except for the novelty) a punk-rock Navajo band singing in Navajo would have less media exposure that the same band using English.

And third, there's lots of remanent coercion. People being agressive because you are using the "wrong" language, not being able to use the language in a trial (in the same country that contains the dominant and dominated languages), ... .

If you add all three it's clear that without some organized help the dominated languages have a hard time. And when a language is lost some of the knowledge is lost, because a language is not only a means of communication, it's also a way to see the world. The expression the language holds gives us a unique view on different ways of thinking.

hunglee22• 5 years ago

Highly debatable premise. Eliminating linguistic diversity is one of the main pillars of nation building. English, French, Spanish - all prestige languages which inhabitants were forced to learn and speak. You only have to look at the marginalisation, and consequent decline of Celtic languages in these countries to see that coercion (soft or hard) was forcing factor

Dominant languages can spread even without coercion

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