[dimitar]

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_67]

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.

[qart]

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.

[akg_67]

In central government, there need to be a common language for communication. Which one would you prefer? Two primary choices seems to be either English or Hindi.

I recall talking to an Indian woman, who was doing PhD Engineering in Japan, on this topic couple of years ago. Her take was very interesting when I mentioned that more and more decent jobs in India require command of English and if this trend continues, the Indian languages will go extinct. Her response was it is just part of evolution, cultures, languages are just part of that evolution.

[qart]

English. Easy choice. I prefer a simple two-language formula for all official communications in India. Local+English. There are plenty of languages that English is swallowing up. They are mostly in UK itself. Like Gaelic, Welsh, etc. Not any Indian language.

Hindi is swallowing up languages too. All those languages are in the so-called "Hindi belt". I am not all that concerned about either English or Hindi replacing other local languages. My bigger concerns are legal and economic hurdles placed by Hindi imposers. I'm OK with teaching and requiring English though. Because whether they like it or not, English has become the world's language of knowledge. Especially in computer science. Ruby was developed by a Japanese person, Lua by Brazilians, Python by a Dutch, the Linux kernel by an ethnic Swede. And yet, the best documentation for these is in English.

I'm not an English fanatic. If I were around a few centuries ago, I would have advocated Latin. A couple of millennia ago, I might have advocated Sanskrit in India.

[bluishgreen]

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...

[akg_67]

IMO, India has still done very well compared to other countries, for example Japan, China, US, when it comes to stamping out cultures, languages and ethnicities, the people with power don't want.

[hollerith]

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.

[dimitar]

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