Re: World English (was: Fictional auxlangs as artlangs)

From: "<deinx nxtxr>" <deinx.nxtxr@...>
"Most of the minority languages today are either endangered, or propped up by
some type of protectionists policies.  Ethnic pride helps to some extent,
but really only prolongs the inevitable."
=====
I think it's more than a bit of a leap from this to "one language to rule them all."

For one thing, there's an element of begging the question, since an obvious
component of the notion "minority language" would be its cultural
peripheralization, which would endanger it. Languages with fewer speakers are
naturally more prone to extinction than languages with many speakers.

Using the Native American languages as your lead example makes for a weak argument.
These are the languages of people who have been told, repeatedly, by what
started as an occupation force that their culture is inferior; they live
overwhelmingly in poverty in autonomous ghettos, with regular access to
information promising better straits... if they learn English and leave their
nativism behind. That's a mighty big carrot.

In contrast, while Pennsylvanian German is also fading as a native language, its
demise is slower. There is less shame in knowing it than in knowing the NA
languages (and, of course, it's easier to learn and maintain alongside English,
being a sister language).

And again, look at Europe. These cultures were once united by the Roman Empire,
and Latin was widely spoken. Later, French was widely spoken in England under
the Normans. So why do English-speaking students struggle to get the nuance of
grammar in German class? That is to say, why do German and English have
different grammars in the first place, when they came from the same language
only a couple of thousand years ago?

I wouldn't argue that, in 500 or 5000 or 50000 years (if humans survive that
long), we will see the same linguistic diversity we see today. Many of today's
languages, if not most, will be gone; others will be mutated beyond
recognition. It's highly unlikely that, were we to get into a time machine and
find ourselves in AD 52008, we would be able to communicate easily with anyone
on the planet except a handful of particularly adept archaeologists. English
itself would have fragmented into numerous languages... would it be two or
twenty or two hundred? Time will tell.

When BBC America is captioning some of its ENGLISH-LANGUAGE programming for
American audiences, though, that doesn't tell me that English is a monolithic
language. It's already showing signs of that divergence. And when American
networks are spending money remaking ENGLISH-LANGUAGE programming from
elsewhere (Kath and Kim, Coupling, Life on Mars, etc.), rather than simply
buying the rights to air the "foreign-made" programs (which should be
completely intelligible to US viewers), that reminds me that there are strong
cultural influences still alive and well, influences that will keep English
from ever being not just one language to rule them all, but the only language
there is.

The concern isn't the language, it's the cultural diversity. You note that the
Native Americans are losing their language skill, so what? They're also losing
their cultural heritage. These are not independent losses: They're turning
their back on their native tongues BECAUSE they're turning their back on their
native cultures. It's part and parcel. Where languages die, it is because the
cultures tied to those languages die.

Of course, it's possible to have a single language used by different cultures.
The US English-speaking communities have diverse cultures, and the prime reason
for the American need to remake, rather than merely rebroadcast,
English-language programs from elsewhere (and the reason they usually fail) is
that there are cultural references that Americans don't get (see especially
"Life on Mars").

But even within English, I give you a challenge: Think of two culturally diverse
Americans, and I'll bet that more often than not, they speak different dialects
of English. Urban vs. Rural, Northern vs. Southern, etc. Boston famously has a
large number of dialects, and they're primarily split by cultural lines.
Cultures use linguistic markers (be they small, dialectal markers or large,
language markers) to differentiate themselves. That won't change in the new
Internet order. 1nd33d, nu d1alex R alr3ddy here, KWIM? LOL!

-- Paul