[kmeisthax]

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.

[slibhb]

> 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]

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.

[inglor_cz]

Another example: Quechua, the lingua Franca of the Incan empire, is still widely spoken on its past territory, even though the empire ceased to exist 500 years ago and the conquerors brought with them a very different language and civilization (Spanish/Christianity).

The cultural switch brought about by the Spanish conquest succeeded fully on the coast, but not so much in the mountains.

[umanwizard]

Yep. Latin was the lingua franca (or at least one of the major ones) in Europe until 1800 or so, more than 1000 years after the fall of the western Roman Empire.

[cowl]

Maybe you are confusing what lingua franca means. Yes the literature used Latin but at that period only a tiny fraction of people could read or write. There where many more languages that we even have today spoken by the general populace.

French maybe came close to being a Lingua Franca in the 18-19th century when almost all aristocracy could speak, read and write it but then again the people did not. The Real Lingua Franca was a mix of Italian, French, Spanish and Greek that was used by the merchants of the Mediterranean. Only English has the People Mass to be considered a Lingua Franca for all intents and purposes.

[oblio]

Spanish, too.

[CryptoPunk]

Was Latin really the lingua franca, or just the language of liturgy, over that period?

[inawarminister]

Latin was also the lingua franca of nobles and merchants. Lingua Franca Mediterrania itself, the language spoken by medieval sailors in Italy, Egypt, and nearly all the coastline of Mediterranean is a creole of Italian, Portuguese, and Arabic. To the point that Shakespearean Moors spoke it as "Arabic".

Then, the language of science until the 1900s is Latin. Isaac Newton wrote in Latin. Nearly all scientific papers and books were published in "Neolatin".

[kragen]

Latin was also the language of academia, which gradually separated from the Church starting in the Late Middle Ages.

[umanwizard]

Both. (Less and less towards the end, of course).

[morelisp]

Well, it's sticky, but not sticky enough that it's known as the "lingua angli". It will probably outlive QWERTY, but I'm not so sure about the calendar, and it'll die long before base 10.

[ashtonkem]

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.

[JetSetWilly]

It doesn't really matter about the UK's status. Nobody is saying "well I live in a hegemon, I won't bother learning another language". For the most part, people learn languages because they are useful.

I live in the UK and only speak English. I'm happy enough with that because speaking another language well represents thousands of hours of effort that I was happy to spend elsewhere - it is a huge opportunity cost. However, if I had to learn French in order to gain access to learning materials in my field and become qualified, then I would have done so.

But I didn't. The only reason for me to learn a foreign language would be curiosity - learning French or German or Spanish has almost no actual utility whatsoever for most in the UK. So few bother.

[ashtonkem]

> It doesn't really matter about the UK's status. Nobody is saying "well I live in a hegemon, I won't bother learning another language".

That's a straw man.

> For the most part, people learn languages because they are useful.

Duh. But how useful learning a new language is to you is mediated by where you're living and it's local influence. As an American, I would have to go way out of my way in order to use a new language, let alone find it useful. This is largely due to the cultural and economic weight that America exerts on the region. Literally everyone I've done business with who isn't a native English speaker taught themselves English specifically to move to or do business with Americans. The UK is not in this position.

Also, again, size. I have to travel a very long way before I hit anywhere where English is not the overwhelming majority language. This also is a factor. If I want to learn French and use it, it's a $600 and 14hr flight for me to actually make it to Paris and use it, while a Eurostar ticket from London is $60 and 2hrs. This absolutely affects how useful a new language might be, even for pleasure, and is exactly why my attempts to learn French petered out.

> I'm happy enough with that because speaking another language well represents thousands of hours of effort that I was happy to spend elsewhere - it is a huge opportunity cost.

YMMV.

[JetSetWilly]

If learning a language was useful to people in the UK, they would do it. I don't know why you are saying that people in the UK are not in the same position - they evidently are, which is why few bother learning languages. If what you say were true, it would be reflected by reality.

In fact, although the UK is near other countries in Europe where speaking non-English languages is common, anybody who travels anywhere in Europe will find that everybody speaks English. If you are in the UK and want to do business with anybody across the EU - they're going to speak English. If you want to learn any materials for any speciality - it will be available in English.

The majority of people in the UK go through their whole life without ever having to communicate with people who don't speak English. That includes the odd week they might spend on holiday in France or Spain.

So people in the UK are in much the same position as those in the US. There is no economic incentive to learn a foreign language. That's 95% of the motivation to do so, completely gone.

[RubyRidgeRandy]

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.

[MattGaiser]

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]

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.

[umanwizard]

I’ve visited Berlin three times and most people I interacted with spoke English perfectly. The English level was about as high as in Montreal.

Perhaps it’s different if you live there and have to interact with more people; I’m not sure.

[not2b]

I did more than 20 trips to Germany for work in the 1990s and early 2000s (I'm American). Of course my work colleagues there spoke good English, as did the staff at the hotels I stayed at, museums and airports, but enough people did not (shop owners, some restaurants, agents at train stations) that it really helped me to learn at least enough German to order at restaurants and shops and struggle through basic conversations; I took classes and practiced when I could. Often a mixture of my bad, limited German and the person I was speaking to's bad, limited English got things handled.

[umanwizard]

Was that in Berlin? Maybe the English level has improved since then.

[CogitoCogito]

I lived in Berlin 2005-2006 and found learning German to be practically a necessity then. Since then the city seems to have changed significantly. In fact, in my experience I would even put most of the changes to be post 2012 or so (at least I remember it seeming fairly similar then). The city seems to be evolving at an incredible rate.

[not2b]

Aachen (my employer acquired a company that was started by RWTH-Aachen people). Aachen is a university town on the border so I expect more English speakers than average. I travelled all over the Rhineland, often did two-week trips and played tourist on weekends. Some conferences took me to Munich, Frankfurt and Mainz.

[raverbashing]

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".

[CogitoCogito]

I would find it odd to live in Quebec without learning French, but I find languages and language-learning very interesting. I guess there are many people out there who don't share my interests, yet are able to live and succeed in Quebec despite of this. Language romanticism aside, I'd expect this to become an increasingly common phenomenon.

[inglor_cz]

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.

[throwaway89374]

> 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 .

[adrianN]

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]

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.

[ashtonkem]

> 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]

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.

[ashtonkem]

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

No surprise there. Same language (no translation barrier) and a shared background as former British colonies (well, or being British) really seals the deal there. But also there's really no language aspect to analyze here; we can't say that America's media culture undermined the local non-English speaking of say, New Zealand, because most of the people there already spoke English already.

Although the impact on accents is another matter, I am sure.

> 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..

Some of those other countries definitely fall under my criteria. Japan and India both have their own traditions to preserve (Bollywood is a thing), and my understanding is that the CCP has made resisting Hollywood's influence an explicit goal.

The rest of it? Dunno. There's clearly just some other factor at play here that I don't have my thumb on. I can't explain why Brazil and Mexico produce that many movies, this is the first time I've heard that.

> Population size probably matters more and gdp less

I think that's really close, but not quite it. I think the real thing here is having the cultural and economic circumstances that allow people to go and produce media and art for consumption. For some forms of media (especially movies) this is going to largely be a factor of money and population, since that is expensive. But that might not be true for all types of national media. Manga in particular is a fairly small industry, with roughly 40,000 workers and a mere 4,000 artists. Hollywood alone is 10x bigger.

My mind also jumps here to Russia, and how important its literature scene is to both the country and the language. Population is certainly a factor, producing great literature at the country level is often about giving a lot of people the chance to try and seeing what happens, but money really isn't as much a factor given that novels are cheap to produce. Funding great novels is pretty cheap once you've identified worthwhile novelists, since it involves paying maybe the living expenses of a few people.

Perhaps my takeaway here is that Movies are the national media of America (and India too, to be fair), and what we're seeing in some countries is the competition between American movies providing pressure to move to English, and other forms of local media grounding the country in question in its native tongue. That idea might need more fleshing out.

> but having some unique to say helps.

Oh yes, that is certainly very important.

0 - Although for a short while the UK definitely punched above its weight, from the 60s until the 80s or so. The theory I've heard is that this was a side effect of having a really good welfare system; people were able to quit their jobs easily and create music and art, and some of it was really good.

[kmeisthax]

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.

[ashtonkem]

> You don't need to "compete with Disney";

I'd say that it depends. I think some cultures seem to have their own creative thing going on that resists the homogenizing effect of American movies and TV[0]. Those cultures don't need to compete with Hollywood. Others might, and that's probably not a winning strategy.

> 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.

This is a pretty common complaint about current media in the US though. So maybe that's already happening?

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

Oh yes, this was entirely my point. Bollywood, Russian literature, and Manga were three examples I picked out at random. It seems like some cultures produce identifiable examples of this, and others do not. But that might also be more a consequence of which ones I've observed, rather than the cultures themselves.

> 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.

Agreed! Although I suspect that anglohostility is probably a helpful trait if your goal is to resist the encroachment of English. Although that's probably not strictly necessary; my understanding is that anglohostility is characteristic of the French literary scene and not say, Manga. But I could be wrong. I don't think cultural purity laws work.

But the question is, does Sweden have a lot of novels writing only in Swedish in order to preserve and foster Swedish culture and language? Or are they getting swamped with external stuff? I genuinely don't know.

> France acts like the Red Sox of the former brutal colonists club sometimes, and I really find it irksome.

That seems to be the near universal assessment of the France, which is entertaining to me.

> Nobody in the Anglosphere cared or even knew about Polish literature or game development until The Witcher.

Much to the Poles annoyance, I'm sure. The relatively low rate of breakthroughs of non-English works into American culture is interesting though. I'm not sure if that speaks more to Polish literature (in this case) or American media culture.

0 - The funny thing is that the Soviets regularly accused America of being a cultural desert compared to the USSR. It's kind of hard to square the argument that capitalism doesn't produce a lot of (or good) culture with the complaint that Hollywood is part of US soft power doctrine.