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

> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of R A Brown
> <deinx nxtxr> wrote:
> >> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of R A Brown
> >
> >> <deinx nxtxr> wrote:
> >> [snip]
> >>> Yes, English as a world standard will erode away even the
> bigger of
> >>> the local languages over time as the local languages become less
> >>> useful.  It's just a matter of how long it will take.
> >> Welsh is still going well enough after some one and half
> millennia of
> >> coexistence with English on this small island.
> >> If Welsh can manage it, I don't see why others cannot (If
> I thought
> >> you & I would live long enough I was hazard a sizable wager that
> >> there will still be Welsh speakers about at the end of the current
> >> millennium).
> >
> > Welsh is still alive, but only with political backing.
>
> No. There is currently political backing, and that does help.
> But it is simply not true that it survives *only* because of
> political backing because .......
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.


> > Politics are fickle,
> > and someday these feel-good ethnic policies that support minority
> > languages are likely to disappear.
>
> Politics are indeed fickle. But Welsh survived into the 20th
> century through periods when it was politically discouraged
> or, indeed, actively suppressed (as in schools in the 19th
> century with the notorious 'Welsh knot'). It was only during
> the second half of the 20th century that political backing
> became positive. You may be right in your cynical assessment
> that it is merely "feel-good ethnic policies,'; but some of
> us see - at least in the instance of Welsh - it as an example
> of enlightenment and _respect_ for the cultural of other people.
In a lot of cases, that "respect" is more damaging that good.  It causes a
group to be isolated from the mainstream if they don't know the national
language.


> Welsh has survived because, as Jörg, observed:
> "When it comes to chances of survival of minor languages, a
> key issue is how much the language is considered worth
> preserving by its own speakers, and AFAIK in Wales there
> indeed is a strong awareness that the Welsh language is worth
> preserving."
What's happened/happening to North American languages.  Languages that
thrives only  a few centuries ago are now extinct, or close to it.  I
recently saw a documentary about the Miss Navajo pageant.  At some point the
contestant had to speak Navajo, and all of them struggled just to get out
one sentence.  It's English they are using in their daily lives, not Diné.
FWIW:  This is the North American language that's supposed to be furthest
from extinction.  Most of these idigenous tribes are trying to preserve
their traditional languages, but the younger generations are seeing more
utility in English so that is what they prefer.  It's just a matter of time
before they stop passing on the tongue of their ancestors.

It's kind of funny you pick Welsh, because yes, Welsh is one with a lot of
staying power, but languages like Irish and Scottish haven't done so well.


> An even better example, of course, is Basque which, against
> all odds, has survived the encroachment of Romance for an
> even longer time that Welsh has survived the encroachment of
> English (and Basque on the French side of the Pyrenees does
> not have the political support that is currently enjoyed by Welsh).
Again, isolation played a big part in keeping this group separated from
everyone else.  Those were different times.  We don't live in a world like
that any more.  We now have more mobility and communications.  This is still
a recent thing so the effects aren't all there yet.


> >>> I'm betting on Spanish to have the
> >>> longest staying power.
> >> I see - altho there are far more speakers of Chinese and of Hindi
> >> than there are of Spanish? Do you really think these people with
> >> their long history will supinely give way to English? Also
> I find it
> >> very difficult to imagine that the Arabic speaking world
> will simply
> >> keep Arabic for reciting the Qur'an and use English among
> themselves
> >> as their daily language.
> >
> > Mainly because Latin America has a lot of monoglots and seems to be
> > the slowest in accepting English.  Nations like India and China are
> > already on the English bandwagon.
>
> English is being used as a matter of convenience, but I see
> no evidence at all that either Hindi or Chinese is on the decline.
Not yet.  These things don't happen in a few years.  They happen over
generations.


> > I would expect the liturgical languages to remain "alive"
> but only the
> > academic context, something like Ancient Hebrew is today.
> I wouldn't
> > expect it to survive as an L1.
>
> Qur'anic Arabic may be considered a liturgical language (and
> related Classical Arabic is the literary auxlang of the
> Arabophones countries), but spoken Arabic, in its several
> varieties, from Morocco through to Iraq shows no signs of
> decline. The only change that may happen is that with more
> traveling and modern means of communications, regional
> differences may well level out and the spoken variety become
> closer to the standard literary norm. I think it most
> unlikely that these peoples will cease to use Arabic in
> normal speech and reserve it only for worship & reading the
> Qur'an, unless Islam itself declines in these countries.
Again, it hasn't been that long yet.  The educated elite in these countries
already speak English very well.

More travel, but also more cross-migration of peoples.  This Middle East
isn't just Arabs.  There are workers flooding these countries from places
like India.  Now figure at some point, these people may only have an auxlang
like English to communicate with their bosses.

>
> >> No - I suspect the world will remain multilingual, tho the
> number of
> >> languages will probably decline.
> >
> > It's already declining, it's just a matter of how long it
> will take to
> > get down to 1.
>
> Never, I guess. Nor is there any reason why it should.
> Switzerland seems to hold together as a political unit,
> despite its having four official languages.
If you can call it *a* political unit.  Technically it's confederation, so
it's loosely held together.


> [snip]
>
>  >Cultures come and go. I find it arrogant to assume that we
> will be any different.
>
> Quite so - who knows what effect the emergence of China
> and/or Indian as global economic powers might have. If,
> indeed, the Chinese did come to exert global economic
> influence it is not beyond imagination, surely, that Chinese
> might come to have a similar dominance on the world stage,
> especially if Pinyin (or something similar) were adopted as
> the 'international' way of writing the language.
But English is already deeply entrenched, well established and gathering
momentum in the International role.  Try googling "TEFL" and check out the
results.  Notice the huge demand for English teachers worldwide, and most
seem to be in China.

I have no doubts China is the next in line as the US global influence wanes.
That doesn't mean their language will becoming the next world language.  It
could take centuries to stop the momentum that English has established.  By
then, it will have so many speakers worldwide that it will take some type of
fascist language policies to go up against it.


>  > Besides, native languages survive within empires. British
> influence in its heyday was very significant in India, for
> instance, and yet while English remains a powerful language
> in India today, the native languages survived, enough to
> drive a successful push to rename Bombay back to Mumbai.
>
> Exactly - and Madras is now _Chenai_ etc.
Yes, and I expect proper names to survive.  I still call it Bombay out of
habit, and even did so when I was there despite the signs reading "Mumbai".



>  > Even though the Middle East was firmly ensconced within
> the Roman Empire, the Semitic languages survived, with the
> New Testament being written largely in Aramaic.
>
> Greek, actually (tho there is a tradition that the 'original Matthew'
> was written in Aramaic) - but it wasn't written in Latin. The
> idea that under the Romans Latin supplanted native languages
> is erroneous. It happened only in certain areas.
And of course back then communications and travel were slow.  In some areas,
the Roman presence was likely to have been stronger than others.

> ....
>
>  > I think you're assuming that the only real purpose of
> language is communication. Were that so, we'd have settled on
> a global language years ago. Latin, possibly, if not Greek
> (or Egyptian, or Sumerian). A lingua franca of the past would
> have taken hold. English certainly isn't the first language
> to have a go at that. But language has several other purposes
> that are at odds with linguistic globalization. For one
> thing, people have a great deal of pride in their native
> languages ......
>
> EXACTLY!!!
>
> [snip]
>  >
>  > We will never get to the point on this planet where there
> is but a single language spoken, not until we get to the
> point where there is but a single being capable of communication.
>
> Or - heaven forbid - a single monoglot community that has
> disposed of all dissidents far more thoroughly than Hitler
> managed to do in his 3rd Reich.
That's a possibility too.  A major superpower using fascist policies and
methods of enforcement methods to force a different language upon people.
There's a fine line between forcing a language onto people and preserving
one.


> But as no one on this list is likely to live long enough to
> see if the world becomes depressingly monoglot or not, I'm
> not sure how useful continuing this thread will be. It seems
> to me that participants have made their positions quite clear.
That's one part of my vision of the future I don't find depressing.  A world
without language barriers is a good thing.  People will all be able to
communicate freely and share information.  The destruction of individuality
and freethought for conformity on a behavioral level is where the biggest
threat lies, and that's already well underway too.

> CENEDL HEB IAITH, CENEDL HEB GALON.
> (A nation without a language is a
> nation without a heart)
> [Welsh proverb]
So the US has no heart?  (wait, I think you're right on that one.)

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