[johan_larson]

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, yes, it's a pity to see a cultural artifact like a language fade away. I get that. But on the other hand, having the world Balkanized into thousands of mutually incomprehensible linguistic ghettoes is a bad thing, because it makes it harder to get things done on large scales. Things would just be easier if we spoke a manageable handful of languages.

[tmountain]

It'd also be easier if everyone painted all their houses the same color, ate the same foods all the time, and lived in a universally cookie cutter world, but that'd be terribly boring.

Culture is embedded into language, and suggesting that we should standardize on a handful of languages for the sake of convenience places very low (or maybe no) value on cultural preservation.

As someone who's been working very hard for the last two years to become bi-lingual, I had no idea how much I'd learn about my own native language from studying a different language, and incidentally, I've learned a ton about the underlying culture of the target language I'm learning. Every time a language dies, we lose a another piece of our global cultural tapestry, and I think that's a loss that's hard to quantify.

[gruez]

>It'd also be easier if everyone painted all their houses the same color, ate the same foods all the time, and lived in a universally cookie cutter world, but that'd be terribly boring.

not a fair comparison. learning a second language takes much more resources (time and money) than having different paint colors or food choices.

[tmountain]

Putting energy into cultural preservation of languages (learned at birth in the case of the article), is a different proposition than asking someone to learn them from scratch later in life. The question boils down to what is worth saving and investing in, and why we place value on those things.

[nitwit005]

> places very low (or maybe no) value on cultural preservation.

All the cultures that exist today will die, no matter what actions we take today. People see cultural continuation, but if we hopped in a time machine and went back 100 years, none of us would fit in.

I understand the urge to preserve things we appreciate, but it's not possible to preserve living things.

[thefounder]

You can't experience much of that said culture without learning the language and something tells me you don't speak more than 3 languages so you end up with houses painted in 3 different colours while the rest are hidden in a dark wood.

[marten-de-vries]

There's a middle road, you know: being bilingual. To run with the Icelandic example, you'll be hard pressed to find someone who speaks it but not English.

Where I live, there's also a local language (Frisian) spoken beside the 'bigger' language (Dutch). And here too, lots of people speak English. Or if not, you might get lucky with German.

[dalbasal]

A generation ago, Dutch minority dialects & languages were really discouraged and some were nearly killed. Kids were disciplined in school for using them. A generation before that, British accents/dialects^ actively suppressed to give way to standard (King's) English.

I think there were almost no advantages to this dialect killing.

Small minority dialects are at a danger of dying out, not crowding out the bigger languages. This is how all of europe worked for hundreds of years. My Grandfather grew up speaking yiddish (german dialect) in school, czech in town & Hungarian at school. These are completely unrelated and individually difficult languages. He later went to college in German & Latin, later on English. He spoke 10 languages in total, most fluently. I knew him in a language that he learned in his 40s. This was normal in his day. They weren't afraid of languages then.

Anyway... if your "home" language is a tiny, local one. There is no danger that you will be monolingual in a commercially useless language. You will speak a big language too. Speaking 2 makes the 3rd one easier to learn.

^more on the dialect end of the spectrum than most people realize.

[ocschwar]

Jersey Dutch died out completely in the US, without any suppression by the government. Cajun French is on its last legs despite government support.

And it was purely the result of broadcast radio.

[_emacsomancer_]

The US culture/society also tends to kill off non-English languages. Spanish is large enough and with a 'renewable' resource of Spanish speakers from other parts of the Americas that it manages to survive, but other languages do not fare as well.

[schoen]

I don't think that's quite right. Chinese is a notable counterexample in a lot of places, as well as Vietnamese and Tagalog and some others. But Spanish definitely has a more universal geographic distribution in the U.S. than any other non-English language.

This article and map were pretty interesting:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/langua...

[_emacsomancer_]

There's enough immigration that other languages can get 'renewed' too, but the general pattern is for languages to die off by the second generation. This is in stark contrast to what happens, say, in India where speakers maintain ancestral languages much better even when they have been resident in area which employs a different language for many generations. It seems to come down to cultural handling of mono- vs multi-lingualism.

[smitherfield]

But is it a sustainable road? French-Canadians have been complaining for many years that Montreal's "bilingual" neighborhoods become English-speaking in a decade or so, and "French-speaking" neighborhoods become bilingual. And this is despite extensive government efforts to encourage or even enforce the use of French. You can see the same trends in Catalonia, Wales, Ireland, etc.

Where the government intervenes in the opposite direction, the transition can be much more rapid. Visiting Strasbourg (in Alsace, France), people's surnames, street and place names, and the local cuisine are all German, but nobody speaks a word of it. It was amazing (and slightly depressing) to see how in 2-3 generations a city could forget the language it spoke for nigh-on 1,500 years.

The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if Dutch were considered a dying language 50 years from now.

[graeme]

Strasbourg was French from 1681, then German in 1871, then French in 1918. Then only briefly German in WWII.

So it wasn't German very long, only 50 years.

As for Montreal, it will be interesting to see how the city evolves. I notice more English in my neighbourhood than when I moved in (8 years ago). But, there is also more French in the old anglo neighbourhoods of the west.

One factor is that a lot of "allophones" are perfectly fluent in both English and French. When you add in the francophone tendency to switch to English when dealing with anyone who shows even a whiff of not being a native francophone, a lot of francophone majority neighbourhoods may see English conversation.

(I'm perfectly fluent and speak French in public. But for the life of me I can't francophone friends to speak French. I think they all want to practice their English. Also, the Quebecois that care about Anglicization probably don't move to urban montreal)

[smitherfield]

“Germany” hasn’t been a country very long, only since 1871, but an identifiable German culture has existed since Roman times. German (or precursors) was spoken in Alsace for well over a millennium before declining and dying out in the 19th and 20th centuries.

[Grue3]

>Visiting Strasbourg (in Alsace, France), people's surnames, street and place names, and the local cuisine are all German, but nobody speaks a word of it.

Maybe they don't speak it normally, but I'm pretty sure a lot of people there can speak German. You can literally take a city bus (or walk) over the border into a German town Kiel. And everyone speaks German there. There are people who work in Strasbourg and live in Kiel, or vice versa.

The Alsatian dialect was always more of a rural thing. Both French and the Nazis suppressed it so unfortunately it's pretty rare these days. Still, according to Wikipedia, 43% of adults in Alsace could speak it in 1999. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsatian_dialect

[Balero]

In Wales the Welsh language has had a massive revival. It's taught in schools, and a basic understanding is very common amongst younger generations.

[smitherfield]

Sure, there's more interest in Welsh in recent decades, but I strongly suspect it will resume declining if it hasn't already.

I used Welsh, Irish, Catalan and French-in-Quebec as examples because they're all languages that declined (to varying degrees) over several centuries under (varying degrees of) government suppression, experienced a partial rebound in interest and popularity in the 20th century after government policy was changed to encourage their use, but ultimately returned to the same trend of declining usage, something like

  100|
     N
     |\_
     |  \_
     |    \_          ____
     |      \_      _/    \_
     |        \____/        \
     N_______________________
    0|suppressed   encouraged

[ocschwar]

Speaking of declining usage, ASCII art is on the same trajectory.

[Retric]

That's the first half of a language dying. If everyone speaks Dutch and it's on signs and menus etc then learning Frisian has limited value.

[marten-de-vries]

I don't think so, or the language would have died out already. I'd argue it's more about whether children learn it as their primary language.

Also, because of concerns of linguistic extinction, similar to the ones mentioned for Icelandic in the article, you see somewhat of a counter-movement as well. This caused e.g. a special status of the language by law (see e.g. [1]), and also:

* it's a mandatory school subject

* you are entitled to using it in government interactions, e.g. in court

* a small part of the public television is in Frisian, and there's also a regional tv/radio channel using it exclusively

* place name signs are often at least bilingual, and sometimes Frisian-only.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Charter_for_Regional_...

[dkarl]

I'd argue it's more about whether children learn it as their primary language.

I'd say even that can't accomplish much by itself, which is why the other things you listed are so important. A lot of Mexican-American kids in my hometown spoke exclusively Spanish at home, and now as adults if you ask them if they can speak Spanish most of them say "not really." They're embarrassed if they have to speak Spanish with someone from Mexico who has an adult vocabulary and a sophisticated grasp of the language. When your education, media, and social life is entirely in English, you end up so much more capable in English that that's all you want to speak. Even with their friends who also spoke Spanish at home, if the context of the conversation was their English-language schoolwork or an American band or an American TV show, it was more natural to talk about it in English; if there was somebody present they didn't know, it was safe to assume they spoke English; et cetera.

[Retric]

This stuff is not that fast. Give it 3-5+ generations.

The tipping point is IMO what language people start conversations with. That shifts language skills and feeds off it's self.

[davidy123]

The local language is likely to have a lot of associations and nuance. Common languages can lead to cultural collapse; the world becomes less rich. "Chinglish" (bad translations) are one extreme outcome of this, but it's not always funny or trivial.

[chicob]

It's not like people resentfully segregate from each other just because they speak different languages.

Languages evolve, change, innovate and sometimes they go extinct. Latin disappeared with the downfall of the Roman Empire (although it is still used in the Vatican, including ATMs), but paved the way for many romance languages. Even Navajo saved lives during WWII.

Like species, we know they're condemned to eventual extinction. But who likes seeing something disappear forever?

Many translations are impossible to make because different languages allow for different meanings, metaphors and concepts. Their coexistence is actually beneficial and adds something to human culture.

If one would apply that reasoning to programming languages, the programming landscape would suffer terribly.

E só para enriquecer um pouco este comentário, aqui fica uma linha na minha língua materna!

[groovy2shoes]

Latin emphatically did not disappear with the fall of the Roman Empire. Classical Latin was preserved not only by the Roman Catholic Church, but also as the lingua franca of all educated discourse in the West into the 18th century (at least!). Initially, this was probably because education was typically provided by the Church, yet its use persisted after the Protestant Reformation and through the Age of Enlightenment before learned folk began to variously adopt French, German, and eventually English.

Classical Latin aside, sermo vulgaris ("the common speech"—"Vulgar Latin") never died so much as it evolved over time into our modern family of Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Occitan, Catalan, Romanian, Dalmatian, Sardinian, …; the list goes on, but I'm sure you get the idea.

I think that, in the context of what I'm seeing throughout this thread, (and to be clear, this isn't directed at you specifically) before we worry that English will establish some sort of linguistic hegemony over the globe, we should first consider the processes by which some language or another comes to dominate international communication in such a way, and likewise the processes by which such an "auxiliary language" comes to be replaced eventually by another. I contend that the main reason English now serves the role once served by Latin is because the Anglosphere currently has much influence on the sociopoliticoeconomicocultural stage, yet it is not currently without rival on this stage. A century from now, it could happen that everyone will be learning Mandarin Chinese or Arabic or something else altogether. Perhaps Esperanto will finally take off.

Returning to Latin for a final thought: throughout medieval Europe this side of Macedonia, all educated people could read, write, and speak Latin, and no doubt they found that these abilities came in handy from time to time. Notwithstanding, it remained in place as a second language, reserved for specific situations and purposes, and they continued to employ their native language in their day-to-day activities—after all, we still have English, Irish, Gaelic, Scots, French, Dutch, German, Polish, Spanish, &c., &c. in the present. These are not the same languages that were spoken in the Middle Ages, nor are they the same languages that were spoken 100 years ago, but, as you pointed out, languages evolve and change.

[chicob]

Thanks for your correction. It is quite complete.

I didn't mean it disappeared overnight but, as far as I know, formal education in Latin declined with the fall of the Empire, thus giving preponderance to Vulgar Latin. As a consequence, correct pronunciation diverged from the canon. At the same time, Germanic peoples travelled south bringing with them new dialects.

Anyway, I am not as worried about an eventual hegemony of English as I am about the disregard for the value of other languages.

Portuguese language, for example, was made the official language for matters of law by King Denis in 1290. But Castillian was still the lingua franca of the court for centuries. The then recent creation of the University of Coimbra helped build the formal Portuguese we know today.

I believe that it is always by creating something new, alongside the old, that good things happen. Hoping progress to come by following utopian notions of simplicity, making tabula rasa (oh, Latin, you...) of former culture is a recipe for disaster.

[chicob]

Regarding what you said about English, Mandarin, Arabic (or Hindi might I add), it is curious to note that, in some more modern erudite circles, English and French played roles I find similar to Classical Latin and Classical Greek in the erudite circles of Renaissance Europe: to speak the first was good, to speak both was great.

In my line of work I encounter many emigrants looking for temporary jobs in agriculture. No one here speaks English very well, let alone their languages.

I was very impressed by a worker from Nepal that, besides his mother tongue, spoke Hindi, Russian and English. In Portugal, his boss didn't speak but Portuguese.

Now I see a lot of emigrants from Eastern Europe and Nigeria.

The Spanish don't speak Portuguese. We chat in Portunhol, mainly.

Esperanto would be quite handy, but I suspect it won't take off anytime soon...

[mbid]

Do we really want billions of people who all talk the same, think the same, and have the same values? I don't see how that could possibly be a good thing. The world is already bleeding ridiculous amounts of accumulated knowledge and wisdom. It may be true that the average person today knows and understands more about the world than the average person in the past, but we all know the same things today.

[krapp]

Just because people share the same language, it doesn't mean they think the same, or share the same values.

Many people around the world speak English, but they don't become culturally American or British because of it.

[ionised]

> Just because people share the same language, it doesn't mean they think the same

Actually it kind of does of does;

https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/11/multilingua...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/03/speaking-second-lang...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201111/c...

https://www.edge.org/conversation/lera_boroditsky-how-does-o...

At the very least having multiple languages ensures a diversity of thinking.

[ocschwar]

I used to think that.

Then an Englishman asked for my John Hancock.

[_emacsomancer_]

And an American went missing.

[sotojuan]

Toute l’expérience d’un individu est construit sur le plan de son langage.

[An individual’s experience is built entirely in terms of his language.]

[throwaway7645]

This is Sapir-Whorf thinking. My understanding as a non-linguist is that this has never been proven. I know there is a strong/weak form of the hypothesis, but can't remember what the distinction is.

[danans]

> but can't remember what the distinction is.

The strong hypothesis says that language determines and bounds your thinking, the weak hypothesis is that it influences and conditions your thinking.

[throwaway7645]

Thanks...weak sounds a lot more plausible than fully binding.

[oh_sigh]

Is it?

[mbid]

Could your language affect your ability to save?

https://www.ted.com/talks/keith_chen_could_your_language_aff...

[sdhgaiojfsa]

Perhaps, but y=x+1 and u=v+1 are the same, even if they use different terms. Likewise, y=x+1 !== y=x-1, even though they use the same terms.

It's really unclear to me that much harm will be done if everyone speaks the same language, and it's clear to me that there will be great benefits. That's an easy position for me to take as a primary speaker of the world's dominant language. It's also no skin off my back if other language groups wish to continue maintaining their own languages. But I guess that those which aren't strong enough will fade over the centuries, as many already did in the past.

[mbid]

Not all knowledge is logic or maths.

[sdhgaiojfsa]

It's an analogy.

[mbid]

Yes they do. Look at popular music around the world. It's all slight variations of American popular music. I don't think this is only because of the dominance of English, but the two phenomena are definitely symptoms of the same disease.

[Balero]

Well yeah, looking at popular music will do that. There's a massive amount of advertising money to make it popular.

Look at the less forced genres of music. Rap in the USA, Grime in the UK, similar but different. The UK has a very different type of indie (named from coming from an independent label) music. And Country is only popular in the USA.

If you have a quick look on the surface it can be similar, but if you look deeper, where it matters, then the variation is there.

That said, I do think having more languages is better, a more diversified ecosystem is more likely to survive. And from my point of view, it's more interesting to live in.

[krapp]

Also, styles of music aren't equivalent to the culture that produced them.

American rock has its roots in Jazz and Bluegrass, which has its roots in the African slave diaspora. Japanese Visual Kei was influenced heavily by American glam rock bands. Does that mean Visual Kei merely an imitation of American culture, or that it expresses the same things that American rock does? Of course not. You can borrow the sound and the style but still make something culturally unique.

K-Pop is probably more "Americanized" than Japanese pop, but it's still distinctly not American. I don't think anyone would confuse either Japanese or Korean culture for American culture, even though both incorporate Western aesthetics and English into their cultural expressions.

[jejones3141]

I'm kind of sorry to hear that about country music; some time ago I occasionally caught a country show on, I swear, BBC World Service, featuring singers clearly from the British Isles.

[drharby]

This is a massively flawed conclusions for so many reasons

[throwaway7645]

I'll be that guy that brings up Esperanto. I don't speak it fluently yet, but know it faaar better than Spanish which I have years of formal instruction in and have been exposed to a lot of Latin American culture. The important point is I've gotten very comfortable with Esperanto with only < 50 hours of learning. When around the house I can think of small things in Esperanto without trying. Esperanto was invented to be an easy auxiliary language to easily allow the world to communicate. It is against language imperialism.

[Mediterraneo10]

> Esperanto was invented to be an easy auxiliary language to easily allow the world to communicate. It is against language imperialism.

It is only a rather recent development, since roughly the 1960s, that the Esperanto movement has advertised itself as a force against language imperialism and as purely an international second language for everyone, one that supposedly “protects” their native languages. Some Esperantists have criticized this change in marketing as simply trying to jump on the anti-imperialism and anti-globalization bandwagon just to get more attention for Esperanto.

L. L. Zamenhof himself hoped that Esperanto – or at least something like it – would eventually replace all world languages, because he saw those differences between peoples as purely a negative thing. (Just like his Homaranismo was an attempt to level out religious differences with a single spirituality that hopefully would be taken up by all.) Zamenhof’s own writings and his lifelong efforts show that he did not really care for cultural diversity as many people today would understand it and hope for.

[schoen]

I appreciated our discussion on this point in a thread a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15521817

[bbctol]

Considering how many Icelanders speak English at quite a high level, they seem perfectly capable of contributing to large scale projects around the world. Conversely, diversifying languages, cultures, and geographic locations seems like a more stable strategy for ensuring long-term human survival, compared to a fragile monoculture.

[erispoe]

Icelanders pretty much all speak english. Having a common language does not mean having a single unique language.

[Bromskloss]

> having the world Balkanized

That makes it sound like such a division is something that is happening now, being _done to_ the world, even. Rather, of course, the world _is_ already diverse like that, and what is happening, if anything, is a homogenisation.