I am against killing languages but this just seems like the likely outcome of a global economy. Eventually the planet will be cohesive if we don’t kill ourselves first. English isn’t my first choice in what language should be dominant though, it’s too fucking confusing and breaks its own rules too often.
The alternative global language is Mandarin which is even more of a mess
Arabic would also be an option, or an entirely new language.
Esperanto, sunken into it’s chair, slumbering, raises it’s head
The simple claim of calling Arabic a single language is inherently a political one, in the same way calling Cantonese and Mandarin the same Chinese language is. Or would be like trying to reduce the Slavic languages into one or two.
an entirely new language
Esperanto gang, rise up!
we should standardize on Lojban.
that way, nobody’s happy.
By that argument, you should already be learning Mandarin, the world language spoken by the largest number of people, and in what in future will be very, very likely the biggest industrial economy.
Fun fact, I was last summer in Ljubljana / Slowenia, and some shops already have signs in Chinese writing.
Even with my own language, Dutch, spoken by millions of people, I feel as if we’re gradually losing ground and nuance in favour of bad English among the younger generations.
As a Portuguese, I see the same thing. It’s funny that older people were so concerned about the possible “negative” influence of Brazilian Portuguese on Portuguese spoken in Portugal among young people, while nowadays the younger generations can’t actually speak a sentence without introducing a few English words. If there was any Brazilian influence, it was minimal.
I found myself writing an email to a Norwegian recipient the other day. I wrote in English, despite Danish and Norwegian bokmål being >95% the same.
It waters out our native languages when we do this, and it is, as you say, in favour of bad English. I find even the most English proficient Danish teens lacking in their vocabulary. Pronunciation is good, but they can express themselves.
I’ve given it a fair bit of thought. I think that the kids choose English, because it’s emotionally distancing. Saying something in English doesn’t carry the same weight, as using their mother’s tongue. Simply because they don’t feel the words the same. Occasionally I will catch myself using English for my internal dialogue, especially when I’m thinking about something that causes me emotional distress.
emotionally distancing
when I’m thinking about something that causes me emotional distress.
Or is English better at expressing emotions?
I don’t think that any language is generally worse for emotions than others.
Ruling something out though, without having anything but your own opinions to justify it, seems like scientific misconduct.
But in writing that, I had to search my vocabulary for 15 seconds for “opinion”, and I spend considerably longer to translate “scientific misconduct” without being satisfied.
So I will maintain my hypothesis that speaking a second language, adds an emotional shield by distancing the speaker.
And I always wanted to learn Icelandic but haven’t found an online source to do so.
Whatever you do, don’t get your pronunciation from the God of War games…
Supongo que es verdad, pero para eso se inventaron las lenguas auxiliares, como el esperanto (muchos diacríticos) o la interlingua
Is this officially the first bad thing to happen to Iceland that isn’t attributed to Denmark? I knew AI was coming to takes all of our jobs, but this is some black mirror level stuff.
