Language Shift does happen. They would still have been speaking French in 1960, but less so in 1990, and even less so in 2010. By 2045, the French language would probably still be spoken by the majority in France, but most of them would have been bilingual in German, and there would be plenty of monolingual German speakers among the ethnic French.
Centurion: What’s this, then? “Romanes eunt domus”? People called Romanes, they go, the house?
Brian: It says, "Romans go home. "
Centurion: No it doesn’t ! What’s the latin for “Roman”? Come on, come on !
Brian: Er, “Romanus” !
et cetera.
“The version of German officially authorized by the Nazis for use by Germans” seemed a bit bulky, but I thought what I wrote was clear enough.
I understood what you meant, but (as a German reasonably well educated in the history of the Third Reich) cannot identify which policies you refer to.
IOW: Cite?
Read somewhere years ago:
Listen, my children, and don’t be skittish,
If Cornwallis had won, we would all be British.
I wrote: "I’m not aware of any historic instance of evil conquerors being obsessed with rapidly wiping out the languages spoken by their defeated subject races; if they’re ready to let the conquered sub-humans stay alive at all, they’re happy to let them talk together in their barbarous baboon-jargons – they have more urgent things to do, than be the ‘language police’ ".
I’m aware that this is an instance of this thing which you Earthlings have, which you call “humour” – which we have a lot of trouble understanding; and that furthermore, it involves a part of the sacred texts which you call “Monty Python”, the comprehension of which we find even more difficult. However; with all due respect to you, our defeated subjects: the above is a matter of gentle education in the conquerors’ tongue, not of vicious and cruel attempts to extirpate the “Aramaic” language of the conquered race.
Reminds me irresistibly, of a – theologically wildly wrong – couplet which I heard long ago, quoted humorously by a (Catholic) work colleague:
Roses are reddish, violets are blueish;
If it wasn’t for Christmas, we’d all be Jewish.
I’ve always found it interesting to note how few people in Indonesia speak Dutch (almost no-one), considering the country was a Dutch colony for about 350 years. I understand French isn’t popular in Vietnam either
I’m not aware of any of the former British Colonies effectively saying “Fuck you, English language!,” though - I think pretty much all of them still use it in some form or another, if not as an official language then a widely understood one (such as for business).
My understanding is that this is largely a practical thing. The people of Indonesia and Vietnam speak, pretty much, respectively all one language – they have no need of the languages of their former colonisers. In Africa, and India, it’s a matter of many communities / tribes who speak different languages. However happy or otherwise the colonised-by-Europeans experience may have been; people in those places find the tongue of their former European rulers (English, Portuguese, French, or whatever) very useful as a lingua franca, and employ it as such.
There have been cases where the indigenous language was almost completely replaced by the conqueror’s language. Ireland for example, there are still some people who’s first language is Irish, but the overwhelming majority speak English as a first language.
But even in the Soviet Union, Latvians grew up speaking Latvian as a first language, Kazakhs spoke Kazakh, Ukrainians spoke Ukrainian, Armenians spoke Armenian, and so on.
And in the Warsaw Pact, countries subject to Russian military domination and occupation, Poles grew up speaking Polish, East Germans spoke German, Bulgarians spoke Bulgarian, and so on.
Of course everyone learned Russian in school, and if you wanted to be somebody you had to know enough Russian to get by.
There certainly was a certain amount of Russification, but it wasn’t a systematic attempt to root out and replace other languages.
So our position, after a Russian conquest would be similar to that of East Germany–a hated enemy, now conquered, and anyone who wanted to collaborate with the Russians had better start learning Russian. But nobody tried to make Russian the native language of the DDR.
That was my point about language shift, though. Whether or not there is a systematic attempt only affects the speed. People are going to gradually shift to the national majority language, which has both economic and social advantages, at the expense of their original community language. It is a complex process with many factors, but it is inevitable to some degree. That’s why maintaining minority and heritage languages is so difficult. Ireland is a great example: they really wanted to preserve Irish (so they said), and put a ton of resources into it, but English is still by far the dominant language thanks to (primarily) 1600–1900.
Well, occupation for 300 years is different than occupation for 50 years. And note that in Russian occupied Germany, there never arose a population of ethnic Germans who spoke Russian as a first language.
It seems to me that what we might call “major languages” are much harder to displace than minor languages. If you spoke Irish you were part of a very small, powerless and poor linguistic community. If you spoke English, you were part of a very large community. How many books were published in Irish compared to English?
So to replace Breton with French or Hopi with English is one thing, but it’s another to replace German with Russian.
From Wikipedia: “The Education (Scotland) Act 1872, which completely ignored Gaelic, and led to generations of Gaels being forbidden to speak their native language in the classroom, is now recognised as having dealt a major blow to the language. People still living can recall being beaten for speaking Gaelic in school.”
Welsh, too was seen as backward and culturally isolating and children were strongly discouraged from speaking it at school. The numbers of Welsh and Gaelic speakers continue to decline remorselessly, despite the amounts of public money poured into them in recent decades
In my opinion, such policies utterly suck. As with – adduced by Dr. Drake in post #13 – the “Welsh Not” (England, against Welsh), and the “Symbole” (France, against minority tongues). I’m all for fringe languages surviving and flourishing, where possible.
All the Celtic languages were “up against it” for a long time, most of them with measures taken against them in primary education. Their fates seem to have been various and diverse: Welsh is holding up fairly well; Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, and Breton, are in decline – birth-speeches for ever fewer people. (Manx and Cornish are dead, as birth-speeches.) One wonders, overall, “how come?”; or whether it even makes any sense.
I’ve mentioned previously, the factor of human contrariness – persecution tends to be counter-productive: inflaming people’s passions, and making them keener on that which is persecuted. I understand that the protracted strife in Northern Ireland has tended to strengthen the Irish language there, among Catholics who have both valued it as part of their “tribal” identity, and found it useful as a “secret language” for the purpose of hostilities against the other side. I’ve seen it speculated that if, tomorrow, tolerance and mutual benignity were to permanently break out between the opposed factions in Northern Ireland; the use of the Irish language there, and surviving vestiges of the old Gaelic culture, would rapidly decline.
I gather, too, that earnest attempts in the Irish Republic since independence in 1921, to foster and encourage the Irish language, have largely backfired. Making it a compulsory school subject for everyone in the Republic, including the Anglophone-only great majority; and insisting on certain levels of proficiency in Irish, for various qualifications and professions; have given most of the Anglophone-only great majority, a great hatred of the Irish language as a toilsome nuisance imposed on them, and a very strong wish that the stupid language would totally die out. One feels that Irish in the Irish Republic might have been better served by a policy of “benign neglect”, plus plenty of help for all who were truly and voluntarily interested in learning and using the language.
This is somewhat similar to a straight, white male wondering what all the fuss is about with regard to race or gender. You are a native speaker of the predominant world language, presumably (correct me of I’m wrong) of the same ethnocultural stock from whence the language originated. It doesn’t seem a big deal to you possibly because there is no remote possibility of you or your children feeling forced to communicate in another language, unless of course you emigrate.
I’d be interested to see a cite for this as it’s not something I’ve ever heard before and I know plenty of Northern gaeilgóirí.
So if a magic spell suddenly divested Northern Ireland of its history and culture nobody would express their culture? Makes sense.
There is a third way. Make artistic and cultural things of great attractiveness that just happen to use the language.
I am reminded of the surprising number of people who want to learn Japanese in order to read manga and watch anime. That’s a cultural phenomenon that is using the carrot of artistic desire rather than the stick of artificial economic necessity to make the language attractive.
So, Ireland needs to invest in the arts and create new and amazing things. In Irish.
They are working on that, with some success. But they are also competing against all of the new, cool, interesting, exciting things coming out in English.
Also, imagine you’re an artist. What is the best choice for paying your rent: producing art that only a small minority will access, or producing art that millions upon millions of people can access?
I wrote: “I have trouble ‘getting’ why what language one communicates in day-to-day, is such a big deal.”
Yes, I’m British, English variety, English my birth-speech; so will confess to being in a comfortable position language-wise, from which it’s easy for me to belittle the troubles which may come the way of others for whom such matters are, shall we say, more complicated. Nonetheless: I persist in considering that people often make more drama about matters of language, than is really called-for. If one’s birth-speech is, in whatever way, a minority tongue – need it be a huge problem for one to use a more common and widespread language to deal with “the world at large”, and to use one’s birth-speech among one’s own folk?
I do think that attempts by those who “run the show” trying, by coercion, to wipe out minority languages – are foul things to do; but in my perception that is (pace Dr. Drake) not all that common a phenomenon. It’s a bee in the bonnet now and again, of a few dominant nations, vis-a-vis those that they dominate; but honestly, I get the picture that most “evil overlords” have a lot of higher priorities in their evil-overlording, than extirpating the underdogs’ languages – they are more commonly, happy enough for the underdogs to go on chatting with each other in their own weird lingos.
A thing I’ve read about in more than one (non-fiction) book about the Northern Irish “Troubles”, written from the point of view either of those actively combatting the Republicans who take up arms, or from a neutral POV. (Mention of people in the British Army or the N.I. security agencies, learning Irish in attempts to thwart the other side’s using it as a “code”.)
I fear I don’t on the whole remember here, authors and titles whom I might cite – have a feeling that the matter is touched on in Dervla Murphy’s book about the N.I. situation, “A Place Apart”. By the way, I’m not a proponent of either side in the “Irish Question” – just feel it all to be sad and regrettable.
Governments don’t really need to make an effort to eradicate minority languages. It’s happening on all on its own, for economic and cultural reasons. The world will lose something like 1,000 languages over the next 50-ish years.
Only speaking it at home is a step on the path to language loss. The children realise the language is not important and stop bothering with it. They still understand the minority language when spoken to but reply in the majority language. Their children will not learn the minority language at all.
I think the saying in the OP is a metaphor that recognises the imposition of another culture and language. Occupied countries lose prestige and influence. This leads to language loss, in the long term.