Re: NATLANG: English Homework - Keeping alive languages of minorities?

Carsten wrote:
> |    Europe, different than the Americas, has a big number
> | of cultures sharing a comparably small area. North and
> | South America lack this long history because they have
> | been settled by Europeans only since the 16th century.
> | These colonies could of course not develop the same kind
> | of variety there is in Europe after a few thousand years
> | of historical development in just four hundred years.
I should point out here that it is not, in fact, the
case that the indigenous communities of the United States
or, indeed AFAIK any country of the western hemisphere,
have been completely extirpated.  There are still approximately
150 indigenous languages spoken in the US alone, and language
is only one dimension of cultural differences.  Many tribes
which have completely shifted over to English (or in the case
of some Southwestern communities, Spanish) still practice other
facets of their original cultures.

Take the Meskwaki, for example. Only about half the Meskwaki
still speak the language, but most of them still practice their
tribal religion and even the Christians among them continue
with some social mores not common among the dominant white
culture, such as menstruation taboos. (Briefly, Meskwaki
woman must lead partially separate lives from men during the
few days of the month when they have their monthly period,
by for example eating separately, out of town usually.)

| Europe is not only rich and varied of cultures, but also
| of languages.

This really isn't the case.  Mile for mile, Europe has one
of the lowest ratios of number of languages to landarea in
the world.  For example, according to the Ethnologue, Germany
has 27 languages, counting various dialects like Allemanisch
as languages.  But California alone has approximately 50
*indigenous* languages (approximately half of what used to be
spoken there), not counting languages like Korean, Chinese or
Spanish, or English each of which have hundreds of thousands
or millions of speakers there.

> | The majority of the North American
> | territories was conquered by the British,
Not so:  even at the height of the Seven Years' War in
1763, Great Britain only technically claimed all the land
east of the Mississippi, plus the region surrounding Hudson
Bay.  Most of this, however, they controlled only on paper,
their effective control being limited mostly to the east
of the Appalachians, parts of the Great Lakes, and parts
of Quebec near the St. Lawrence.  At that time, probably
about as much or more land in North America was controlled
by the Spanish.

> | in South
> | America it was the Spanish who took the land and raised
> | colonies. That way, English respectively Spanish spread
> | all over the continent.
Most of the spread of English in North America resulted
from the western expansion of the United States and to
a lesser extent by the British in Canada. (Much of the
arctic is to this day not anglophone, either because
francophones settled there, or because the natives never
switched over.)

> | Due to conquering, the native
> | cultures of America were mostly wiped out, which is also
> | a pity because now it is very hard to do research on
> | them.
As I said above, this is somewhat of an exaggeration.  Some
tribes were, indeed, obliterated, but it was often by disease,
not conquest, and many cultures did survive in altered form.
And I would say from the natives' perspective, whether their
culture is documented by researchers is a quite secondary
concern.

> But now go and tell the currently about half a
> | billion citizens of the European Union to give up their
> | language and perhaps even parts of their culture.
It's somewhat less than that.  And the argument isn't
that the citizens of the EU should give up their culture,
but about what practical measures should be adopted to
allow them to communicate with one another.  The question
is emphatically not about one language or the other, but
which should be first among equals.

In general, I think your essay makes an error common to
many Europeans:  they see certain commonalities like
one common language and institutional similarities in
American society and take that to mean all the rest is
very similar too.  But equating people in New York with,
say, people in Biloxi is in many respects like equating
the citizens of Paris with those of Bucharest: they're
just not the same in a whole host of respects.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637