(I mean, at least in the Metropolitan area) Earlier I waited in line at a shop in Helsinki and behind me was a large group of schoolkids, all various people of colour and all speaking American English with each other. It’s a fairly common occurrence in Eastern Helsinki and makes you feel like you’re in the US or Canada
It’s interesting how quick things have developed just since I was a kid
I think it’s cool but it seems to cause Finnish boomers enormous existential anxiety of the Great Replacement variety
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Assimilation of the Roman variety (i.e., the main language isn’t forced on anyone, but all the popular media and good-paying jobs require it) go brrrrrrrrr.
Economic penetration and entwinement with Anglo empire has sociocultural ramifications (homogenization of social and economic structures to resemble Yankland).
Similar process shrunk a lotta the native languages in the east/north of the USSR, despite state efforts to prevent that.
Class society, capitalism, empire all lead to such homogenization, historically with a large state or market comes homogeneity.
Given enough time I imagine the global north nations would fully anglofy, with the english language turning into a language family (similar to latin turning into the romance languages)
Oh boy I can’t wait to live in the vaguely Asian cyberpunk future we were promisedI’m sorry, the best we can do is
I mean…
I don’t see this as an ultimate own tbh. Capitalists do not care about what ideology you believe in. They’ll sell you the rope you use to hang them with if you’re in the market for one. They have no morals, no beliefs, nothing except the pursuit of profits. It’s the communists who have to pay attention to reality and maneuver and compromise around the unfavorable conditions.
That’s not me being delusional and thinking China is playing 5D chess and planning on pushing the communism button. While Xi is pushing for a return to ML and curbing displays of excess, it’s possible that everyone else in the party is simply a materialist, but not a communist, as with Putin.
It’s not supposed to be an own either way, the comrade I was replying to just wanted vaguely Asian cyberpunk.
The PRC is a (generally) state capitalist economy that’s broadly on a trajectory towards socialism. That means it has to accept a level of inequality and excess. That being said, you are right that constant vigilance is necessary against corruption and opportunism.
In my opinion, the end result of socialism is not a society where luxury goods do not exist but rather one where luxury goods reasonably reflect their cost of production and the proletariat can easily afford them. A $2000 Gucci bag has maybe $200 of labor and materials in it, so strip away the marketing and shareholder parasites and even with a better paid workforce it’s still reasonably affordable.
What we got to do is launch the nukes and build communism from the ashes, billions may die but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
:shanghai-cool:
All our attacks will be in Japanese, at least. The kids don’t seem to have a problem with subtitles since you can’t hear shit without closed captioning nowadays.
It’ll be really interesting when French people speak mostly English while French is mostly relegated to Africa and the Caribbean.
and Montreal, which will ironically be the last francophone stronghold.
Don’t most french people have trouble understanding Quebeccois? As in, the there might be a point where the two “dialects” diverge enough that it becomes a separate language (at least to anyone who isn’t a Quebec nationalist)
Idk they understand it well enough to make fun of it from what I can tell.
Ive only been there a couple of times and not very recently but I did ask about that and the explanation I got was that there are a lot of russian people there and the finns refuse to learn russian and the russians refuse to learn finnish so everyone just speaks english to each other. not sure how true that is or why finland in particular would go out of its way to switch to english when so many other european countries dont.
Yes, there’s lots of Russian immigrants but even more people from other places. The kids I’m talking about were mostly black and brown
Speaking of Russians, in my neighbourhood at least it seems all the white kids are Russian. Probably relatedly there’s an abandoned building with a bunch of anti-Ukrainian graffiti on it nearby
Ukraine = Nazi and stuff in Cyrillic I can’t understand
Thankfully I don’t see that. Mostly indigenous languages and Spanish on my end. Go to the capitol city and you’ll hear English phrases more.
I’d feel more sympathetic towards Europeans getting culturally colonized if they didn’t have a history of forcefully doing that to others.
I’d feel more sympathetic towards Europeans getting culturally colonized if they didn’t have a history of forcefully doing that to others.
Even le wholesome epic liberal Nordics have done it to both the Inuit and Sami peoples
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They are also indigenous to Lapland
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They’re literally indigenous people
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What would you call them? They were there first before Finns, Scandinavians and Russians showed up to boss them around and had their language, religion and traditional ways of life suppressed for a long time
…i used to work with a sámi; he called himself a black norweigian…
(most folks just assumed he was ethnically mexican)
Mfw they were literally sterilised by the state but because they have pale skin they are not ‘indigenous’
Sami look “white” i wonder what could explain that huh?
Sweden spent a lot of time and money to prove that this wasn’t the case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Institute_for_Racial_Biology
Supposedly one of the first in the world actually, which one of my swedish coworkers likes pointing out when Sweden makes the news for being “too politically correct”.
Is it really such a bad thing for so many working-class peoples’ second language to be a common one? Surely it’s a good thing for the working class of many countries to be able to speak directly with each other, rather than through intermediary translators working for media outlets who themselves work just for capitalism. And despite its country of origin, English is a highly adaptable language that lends itself well to a lingua-franca purpose.
Now I’m from a part of the world (
) where repression of indigenous languages was public policy for centuries, with an explicit end-goal of destroying indigenous culture. I’m very aware of that history. I’m speaking strictly about second languages here, I’m not at all advocating for forcing English as a common first language.It wouldn’t be as big an issue if English wasn’t also a large source of foreign right-wing propaganda
imagine with me, if you will, a hundred a thousand a million small-to-middle-sized anti-Murdochs
be the source of foreign left-wing propaganda you want to see in the world
The US has been successful with propaganda without the usage of English for decades.
I’m not saying it’s bad- just something I’ve noticed
I am genuinely worried about the future of languages. As you may know, parallel to the mass exctinction of species, we are living in a mass extinction of languages. The reasons of this are varied, and have a lot to do with indigenous rights.
But I think people here lean too hard on “people have always been worried about change”. It’s true that Plato was also complaining about the kids, but he was doing so in writing, a new technology.
Writing has only existed for what, 6000 years? And now we have a global empire and mass communication across the world. Sure, after the Roman Empire retreated Latin developed into the many Romance languages. But the vast majority of people were illiterate, and the Roman Empire only really included the Mediterranean!
Writing, and especially the proliferation of video and audio, could stabilize aspects of language across generations. And English is now a high priority business skill across the world. Worldwide pop culture increasingly favors English more and more. Although Japan and Korea are doing serious work right now.
I don’t know what will happen to language. I don’t know whether it’s good or bad. But things are going to change a lot. I wouldn’t predict a single worldwide language with all others being relegated to historical studies…but it’s not impossible. Or we could end up with several standardized world languages and few speakers of anything else.
I actually think we’ve just passed the high water mark of English. As a multipolar world emerges from underneath American hegemony, people will rediscover their own cultures and languages. You can see this in China when even 10 years ago the biggest blockbusters were all American movies but for the last couple of years American films have struggled to break the top 10.
Similarly, with China investing heavily in Africa, many Africans are choosing to learn Chinese for educational and business opportunities. Then you have places like the Middle East, where Saudi Arabia has introduced mandatory Chinese lessons im school.
Geopolitics also plays a huge role, for example in Russia where sanctions have caused people to turn away from Western culture en masse to look Eastwards and inwards.
That’s what I mean by several standardized world languages. It’s not impossible to foresee a world where 90+% of people natively speak English, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Hindi, or Arabic. Is that bad, is that good? Idk, but it’s definitely something new.
Interesting to compare languages by native speakers vs total speakers.
at least language is something we made up to communicate and two people not being able to is a failure, there’s no analogy to species extinction in that regard.
Language and culture arguably can’t be seperated. Language extinction is the loss of human cultural legacies. It’s the assimilation of indigenous peoples. There’s a reason language rights are often such a fraught political issue.
feel like there’s a difference between what was deliberately done to indigenous people and a more gradual “common second language” thing going on.
I think it’s a continuum. It’s less stick and more carrot now, but also the last speakers of languages are dying. Kids don’t necessarily understand the importance of learning their ancestral language when anglophonic pop culture seems more vibrant.
The Great Replacement but it’s anti American
I can live with that
I don’t think that’s cool at all. Learning about northern European countries genociding their own language is incredibly sad even if in some cases there’s an element of karma (the Dutch, French).
But these are the children of immigrants speaking whatever comes natural to them
That’s like saying immigrants from Latin America are genociding English if they speak Spanish to each other in the US
Those kids’ families probably aren’t from Anglophone countries right? In that case both Finnish and whatever their home language is is being eroded.
Plus from what I can tell as an outsider, this push for Anglicization is something European countries are doing to their entire population, immigrant or not.
But if their families are from all over, English might be the easiest language for them to converse in
It can make sense and also be kinda sad. Ideally they’d know their parents’ language, Finnish and also English or another lingua franca. Finnish is cool and relatively unique among languages so its sad to imagine a future where it doesn’t get spoken because more common languages supplant it.
Maybe. like yeah if English is the easiest language for them sure it makes sense to use that. But the only reason it’s easier for them is because (I assume) Finnish society is dedicating all this effort into teaching these kids English.
Or because it’s what they pick up in the media they consume and on the internet? That’s how I was reading and speaking English when I was still being taught incredibly basic shit in my actual English classes in elementary school and I’m a Finnish person
And I didn’t even really have the internet to rely on in the 90s/2000s
So Finland and Denmark are both relatively similar in the fact that we are the two most reactionary Nordic countries, but does the Finnish government also just take in a whole lot of immigrant children and put them in an english-speaking “reception” class to teach them Finnish language? I know that some of my wife’s cousins from Italy moved here and were just plopped into a class with a bunch of Syrian refugee children and some somalis, none of whom spoke english natively and ostensibly the goal of the class was to teach the children Danish, but since few of the kids even spoke english at first, my wife’s cousins had to act as translators for the kids who spoke arabic primarily.
I wouldn’t really know but I would not be surprised. Sounds like a brilliant idea that I’m sure is a lot cheaper than teaching them properly
The existence of a lingua franca is neat. The fact that it’s American English, less so.
anything that causes boomers enormous existential anxiety of the Great Replacement variety is good
in the rare circumstance I find a friends/acquaintances IRL that speaks Russian, I avoid talking in English. I was worried my Russian was going to get rusty because I only use it for the rare stranger or my overseas family members, but my mom just moved in with me so we’re going to be doing it 24/7. She says she’s had too much English practice lol.
so these are second generation immigrants who also speak finnish but prefer English? Could it be they feel alienated from Finnish society on the basis of their race they don’t even want to speak the language and they like English more because they see at least some representation of people who look like them in that context?
Idk just a hunch lol
i’ve gotten anecdotal reports that some rich white kids are learning Chinese so we might be in for some interesting times in the next century
Im neither white nor rich but Im thinking about giving mandarin a try. Want to be able to greet the PLA as liberators when they finally make landfall.
it’s a beautiful language and I wish I was better at it, best of luck
we’re all living in amerikkka, amerikkka ist wunderbar
This is awful. Fuck. This isn’t how this was supposed to be. The world should be speaking lidepla, not *nglish!
Learning English is cool, I just don’t want it to displace people’s own native languages. Here in the Netherlands I’ve seen groups of friends speaking to each other only in English, probably they’re so terminally online and consuming only English media that English begins to sound more natural to them.
