Psst - he’s referring to this guy, probably the greatest linguist in history.
Yes, I know. I was just ribbing him. You know, Jews… the Chosen People… God.
You may have heard. 
And you think that non native English speakers typically publish stuff in English?
I think they often do, and that with the advent of the internet it’s even more common. I never said “typically”, so I don’t know where you got that from. And in particular I was contrasting that to the number of non-native Mandarin speakers who publish in Mandarin.
It’s not really “survival of the fittest” when you are talking about already marginalized people, who lack the very real and very important resources that keep a language alive.
I was surprised (and delighted) in South Africa to see newscasts in a number of African languages. In Cameroon, outside of music videos you would NEVER hear a local language on TV- it’s all either English or French. The difference isn’t will-- lots of Cameroonians love their maternal languages and would like them to flourish. The difference is simply resources.
Exposure to English and French will allow them to participate in the global conversation. I’ve met people in non-English-speaking countries who English fluently in spite of never having left their own country and who attributed this to watching American and British television and movies.
Certainly they do in academic journals. Very frequently. Even when I was in grad school over twenty years ago a significant number of papers were written by native Chinese speakers.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Russian, not Mandarin, was second to English. I’m not nearly as sure about that as I am that English being first, but Mandarin just isn’t a language that non-native speakers are going to write much in. Sure, there are many speakers of Mandarin, but remember that China is still mostly rural, and a good number of those Mandarin speakers are essentially modern day peasants.
But that doesn’t require monolinguism, your own examples in the second sentence are multilingual, yet you think that people from Africa should give up on their ancestors’ languages, and you think that immigrants should give up on learning their ancestors’ languages for free; on the other hand, it’s ok to have one or two years of paid classes on a language they’ll never be proficient in… or are you one of those people who think that if you speak English, that’s all you need no matter where you are and what are you trying to do? Those ESL people who are fluent in English haven’t given up our primary language for English, we have both (or more).
My ancestors kept Basque alive through a couple thousand years of pretty much everybody being multilingual. The first recorded text in Spanish (or protoSpanish, or Navarro-Aragonés, depending on who you ask) and the first recorded text in Basque are on the same document and by the same hand. Spanish eventually replaced Latin for most uses and flourished, but Basque (which remained mostly unwritten until the 19th century) didn’t die. It stayed alive through all those years. Basque speakers were, and are, usually at least bilingual. And those terms which are difficult for someone with Basque as his first language are the same that require explanations for someone with Spanish or French or English as their first: technical slang, for example.
I definitely do.
Absolutely the case.
This article is behind a paywall, but the abstract points out that in France even as early as 2000 researchers were often publishing in English: French scientists turn to journals in English | Nature.
Another article, though still using data from 2002, includes the following money quote:
“This trend towards a more frequent use of
English has been observed in other countries… In 1985, France,
Austria, Germany and Spain published more than
25% of their publications in languages other than
English, but this percentage fell to 10% or even
lower by 2002. The French data is particularly
remarkable, because France used to be the least
English-oriented country within the European
Union: non-English publications in this country
decreased from 41% in 1985 to 10% in 2002. The
move of French scientists to journals written in
English has been previously discussed in different
studies…”
The French situation is especially interesting because of a law (I’m not clear whether it was passed or merely proposed) demanding that publicly-funded research in France be published only in French. The law was overturned, or prevented from going into effect, in 1994. Since then, without government “protectionism,” natural selection has spoken, and scientific academic articles published in France are almost always published in English these days.
Scientific articles published IN France, or published BY French researchers IN other countries? Very different animals.
I am not in favor of monolinguism at all, but if one is to know only one language very well, some–like English–are better choices than others, like some tribal language only forty people still understand. I don’t think people “should give up on” passing on ancestral languages, but the people in question who choose not to are exactly why the language dies. We should respect that they are letting the language die a natural death, rather than forcing their offspring to cling to the past and prop up a way of life that has been rejected.
Okay, agreed, but whence your assumption that “one is to know only one language very well?”
Edit: and it’s all very well that my grandmother chose to reject “clinging to the past” and “propping up a way of life that has been rejected,” but now that that decision has been made, I can’t unmake it. That’s part of the problem: once a community makes a decision, it’s pretty much irrevocable.
Not sure what you’re referring to.
If you’re talking about the law: I’m not an expert, but as I understand it, it would have kept any scientist who benefited from French public money (so, French scientists primarily) from reporting on discoveries in any language other than French. Presumably in or out of the country, though I can’t say for sure. I would assume that a French journal could publish an article in English or German, under this law, as long as the research wasn’t carried out using French public funds. But again…I’m no authority.
If you’re talking about the preponderance of English articles in French scientific journals, I don’t know that it makes a difference: hardly any scientific articles in France are published in French any longer, and I don’t suppose that French researchers publishing in other countries are more likely to publish in French than they are in France itself.
Or maybe you mean something else (or maybe your question wasn’t even directed toward me), but I don’t know what.
Most of us have a relatively brief window during which we can really internalize a language. Once that is shut, we don’t lose all ability to acquire a new language, but very few of us will ever acquire native fluency in a second language that we were not introduced to at a young enough age.
A child in the fortunate circumstance of being exposed to two or more useful languages early enough may indeed achieve fluency in more than one language, but why impose a language you yourself have discarded in favor of another? Who is in the best position to choose to pass along a language? Obviously the native speaker who has gained enough facility with another language to be in a position to make the choice for their offspring. Since often they choose NOT to pass along the obscure language, we should assume they might know what they are doing, no?
No.
Take my grandmother. Her parents insisted that she speak English, not Italian, because they didn’t want her to have the same experiences they did: having a strong accent and limited ability in English, and the concommitant discrimination and difficulty. They were utterly ignorant of the differences between child and adult language acquisition, and of the fact that you can be natively bilingual. It was so far outside their experience that it was inconceivable. They did not know what they were doing, though their motives were good.
Most people are more worried about earning a living than managing their children’s language acquisition. Children naturally pick up whatever languages are in their speech community, but if the home language is different from the community language, they acquire a passive understanding of the heritage language but cannot use it effectively, and certainly cannot pass it on. Most people who acquire a second language as adults are too busy trying to make a living to be able to take the time to ensure that their kids retain the heritage language, and too ignorant about linguistics to be able to assess the decision.
It takes a special level of self-hatred to be glad to be cut off from your heritage.
I don’t think they “often” do. Including on the internet. The overwhelming majority of what French people publish (or read) on the internet is in French, for instance, even though an English speaker might not realize it because most of his interactions will be with the small number of people like me who regularly surf on the English-speaking web.
And I added typically because if publishing in English is uncommon, then what matters is indeed the number of native speakers and the volume of production. Scientific articles are published in English for instance, quite often. But what about books? Only a small part is ever translated into English. Essentially none are published in English to begin with. Moments ago, I was reading a magazine about comics (*) . There were, for instance 271 album publications announced for one month. How many are going to be translated into English? Without reading all the titles I’d guess a couple at most. And that’s something that has potentially at least a small chance of being translated. My mother used to write articles about local historiography. How many will be translated in English? None, ever. The overwhelming majority of cultural production is not only published in one’s native language, but also never translated into any other language.
So, yes, if less material is published in Mandarin than in English, then it can only be because Chinese people produce few material in general (which might be true), not because everybody and his dog is writing in English in China.
(*) Which in France are mostly what you’d call “graphic novels” which is relevant to this thread because it shows that different cultures have different forms of expression. American comics can’t replace French comics, because they’re extremely different in nature. You could argue that nothing prevents people from writing tons of graphic novels in English, but language and culture generally go hand in hand. The “subjugated” culture “meld” into the dominant culture. Remove French language and the French tradition of graphic novels will dissapear without heirs. Remove the Breton language, and the “kan ha diskan” will go away forever, even though it’s theorically possible for a French singer to use it.
Yep, those poor fools weren’t bright and advanced enough to make the Right Choice for their kids, as they were just ignorant immigrants. :rolleyes:
They did what they did on purpose and there is no reason to second-guess them now. Italian is not terribly useful, but it isn’t going to die out any time soon anyway, so don’t worry.
There is no self-hatred involved with not giving a crap about the “heritage” that has not been foisted upon you. I’m glad that my parent did not pass along the lies that were passed down as truths and rejected ignorance in favor of knowledge. Inheriting outdated ways of life is not something to celebrate.
I see what you’re saying here, but it’s not that simple.
Personal example: Two of my great-grandparents were born in Germany. They moved to England (where they married and learned English), and then to the US during/immediately after WWI. They were marked by their “German-ness” in England, especially as the war approached, and though their English was pretty good (if their surviving letters are any guide) and though they were UK citizens, they could not escape that German identity in Britain.
Eventually their home and store (he was a butcher) were destroyed in anti-German rioting. When they came to the US, they and their children (including my grandmother) were–I think understandably–reluctant to call attention to themselves linguistically. So they all made a pretty conscious effort to speak English to the wider community and mostly to each other.
The result is that German is a dead language in my section of the family tree. None of my grandmother’s generation passed on German to their children. I don’t think they ever spoke German to each other once they reached the US. I can read the letters my great-grandparents wrote each other (they went back and forth between English and German), but that’s only because I studied German for many years.
Yes, sometimes I kind of wish that I had learned German as a child, at my mother’s knee, as a useful “home” language; yes, if that had been part of my heritage they would have passed on not just a language but a cultural sensitivity as well.
And it would be easy to blame my great-grandparents, whom I didn’t know, and even my grandmother, who died when I was three, for depriving me of that. But when I look at what they had gone through because they didn’t “fit in”–honestly, I have no right to be upset or even irritated that German stopped with them. They made a decision based on their life circumstances, and who am I to criticize that a hundred years after the fact?