In Canada we have two official languages. We also have several indigenous languages which may be in danger of being lost if people stop speaking them. I can’t see how forcing everyone to embrace a single language won’t put the cultures that speak the other languages in danger of being subdued, permanently altered, or even of disappearing.
Humans are at our best when we embrace diversity.
What’s the maximum number of first-class-official languages that are usable for all official use and actually equal in stature?
- Belgium has French and Flemish, though they’re essentially partitioned by region (i.e. in practice, you can’t rely on Flemish in Wallonia or French in Flanders). The language blocs have their own separate political parties and everything, and have the bare minimum amount to do with each other, like a divorced couple who can’t afford to move.
- The UK recognises Welsh and Scottish Gaelic, though they’re only used in their geographic areas (and even there, you get periodic cockups like some monolingual anglophone pasting a Google Translate error into the Welsh part of a sign).
- Ireland seems to be making a reasonable fist of having English and Irish; most business is conducted in English, though pretty much every Irish citizen learns Irish in school and spends a few months in the gaeltacht where English is not spoken, so I’d venture that the sorts of errors seen in Wales wouldn’t occur there.
- Sweden, meanwhile, has five official languages you can conduct any official business in; they include Sami, Yiddish and Romani, though not English, which almost everyone of working age speaks to a reasonable level. I imagine that dealing with the government in English would probably be easier than doing so in Romani, if those were your two choices.
- Not sure about Canada and Switzerland, but I get the impression that they’re geographically partitioned, if perhaps not as much as Belgium. In Canada, packaging seems to be bilingual by law, though Québec is aggressively francophone, with STOP signs reading ARRÉT and bans on English-language signage, whereas elsewhere, everyone speaks English. In Switzerland, meanwhile, there’s a sharp line between the French and German-speaking parts, which is sometimes called the “Rösti ditch”, and the Alps divide the German- and Italian-speaking parts. Meanwhile, more people primarily speak English than the fourth official language, Rhaeto-Romansch.
So from the above, I’m guessing that after about two languages at most, the country partitions into language regions which develop their own cultures, and ultimately economies and political orders.
Ireland seems to be making a reasonable fist of having English and Irish; most business is conducted in English […]
Historically, that’s mostly because of colonial rule by the English government.
For decades (if not centuries) the Irish language was severely suppressed and might have even died out, if not for the continued efforts by the Irish people to preserve their language and cultural identity.
A combination of the introduction of state funded […] primary education, from 1831, in which Irish was omitted from the curriculum till 1878, and only then added as a curiosity, to be learnt after English, Latin, Greek and French […]. The National Schools run by the Roman Catholic Church discouraged its use until about 1890.
It’s only quite recently that Irish has become an official language in Ireland:
In July 2003, the Official Languages Act was signed, declaring Irish an official language, requiring public service providers to make services available in the language […]
Of course, the fact that Ireland is trading a lot with the UK and other countries in the anglosphere and EU, is a reason to keep English as a major language.
Your dataset is a bit biased towards countries of the Global North.
South Africa for example has 12 official languages.
Senegal has French as official language, but very few actually understand it.
The EU is not a country, but it has a parliament with most languages being live-translated.
I think that there’s no hard limit. Each official language might add a bit of an additional cost to the government, but that cost is relatively small in comparison with the social and political benefits - including stability.
Eventually speakers of each language end clustered together, as you said near the end. But that’s fine, too; a population (subjects of a country) doesn’t need to coincide with a people (individuals sharing a common identity).
Ganesh Devy isn’t the only one with those views; they’re pretty common among linguists. Perhaps because linguists know that language gives you a sense of belonging, connecting you to your peers, and to erase the language of a people is the same as to erase that people. Or, let’s be blunt: like @Nakoichi@hexbear.net said, it’s genocide.
That gets specially obvious if you rephrase the question in the title as “Should a government destroy that sense of belonging and the cultural diversity of the peoples subjected to the government, for the sake of some nationalistic babble like «cultural unity»?” (For any decent and morally sane person, the answer is “no”. )
Language could liberate, but it could also disintegrate […]
How’s Switzerland going? There are language struggles there, such as the Romansch varieties slowly dying out, but you don’t typically see independence movements there gaining any sort of traction; not even among the Gallo-Romance speakers, even if they would be backed up by some rather powerful nextdoor government. “Perhaps” because Switzerland doesn’t treat its citizens as second class based on language?
In other words, because the government of Switzerland does the opposite as the government of India is trying to?
One aspect of genocide is forced cultural assimilation just saying.
Tangent re: New Yorker: I’m about to host-block websites that drop a non-dismissible paywall over the browser and force a quit-and-restart
Here’s an archive link to bypass the paywall.
@koavf@lemmy.ml it would be great if you included this archive link into the OP.
Thank you!
Betteridge’s law of headlines strikes again
