Article

2014-09-04 -Short Attention Span Theater-

Economic Growth Kills Minority Languages

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Posted by Fred 2014-09-04 00:00|| E-Mail|| Front Page|| [11124 views ] Top

#1 Can't tell who fisked that but it was "coffee meet keyboard". Made my night. Going down to B & N to see if they have a Vep to English phrasebook.

Posted by Bov Flimbers 2014-09-04 01:56|| 2014-09-04 01:56|| Front Page Top

Atlanta being an at risk "hotspot" for the extinction of English.

Posted by Besoeker 2014-09-04 03:05|| 2014-09-04 03:05|| Front Page Top

#3 ok make that a Vep to Ebonics phrasebook

Posted by Bov Flimbers 2014-09-04 03:24|| 2014-09-04 03:24|| Front Page Top

#4 Spotted owls of linguistics?

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2014-09-04 05:50|| 2014-09-04 05:50|| Front Page Top

#5 Bov the frisking in yellow highlight is done by the Fred, owner proprietor and mayor of Rantburg. Other highlight colors of interest belong to Moderators and can be viewed on the right sidebar. Avoid annoying the periwinkle one and the haze gray unit.

Posted by Shipman 2014-09-04 07:19|| 2014-09-04 07:19|| Front Page Top

#6 What are you gonna do? Require people to speak them?

My God Fred!!! Don't give them any ideas!!!!!!

Posted by AlanC 2014-09-04 08:40|| 2014-09-04 08:40|| Front Page Top

#7 Looks to me like 1) these knobs are sounding the alarm bells in order to justify their own existence and 2) in an offhand way, the natural market is being influenced by the economic market, just as expected. Companies come & go all the time (American Motors, Standard Oil, etc.), so why would these tools expect any different on the language front?

Just shaddap already...

Posted by Raj 2014-09-04 08:57|| 2014-09-04 08:57|| Front Page Top

#8 Nature isn't static. It evolves. The same applies to human organizations and societies. Adapt or perish. You'd think the Left would understand the 'science' it keeps harping about to the 'bitter, bible thumping, gun clutching' crowd.

Posted by Procopius2k 2014-09-04 09:52|| 2014-09-04 09:52|| Front Page Top

#9 And the Wichita language of the Plains Indians, now based in Oklahoma, had only one fluent speaker by 2008.

How do you know she was fluent? She coulda been lying and you'd never know, wouldja

That is Elizabeth Warren, and we are darn lucky to have saved her traditional high plains Native American pemmican recipe of crab and papaya, mister.

Posted by swksvolFF 2014-09-04 10:15|| 2014-09-04 10:15|| Front Page Top

#10

I'm going long on Madiba memorial signer Thamsanqa Jantjie. I feel strongly that a correct interpretation will be found and history will vindicate him in the end.

Posted by Besoeker 2014-09-04 10:29|| 2014-09-04 10:29|| Front Page Top

#11 Keeping an ancient and obscure language alive is a tough business that requires a lot of effort, education, and social cohesion. The Jews did. So have the Armenians and the Irish. But not everyone is up for the challenge.

Posted by Secret Master 2014-09-04 11:20|| 2014-09-04 11:20|| Front Page Top

#12 Secret Master, I think you and the researchers have it exactly backwards. Minority languages rely on economic isolation, and tend to wilt in market-system economies. It's subsistence farming and, even more, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle which preserves the hyperlocal languages and microcultures they're talking about here.

I've been slowly making my way through Seeing Like a State, and one of the author's main points is how states cultivate uniform cultures in their subject societies so as to make them more "legible", more discernable by central bureaucrats, tax-collectors, and educators. Every serious state cultivates a "national" language, and aims at the dissolution of dialects and sublanguages, because those stand in the way of the state communicating with its ~~taxpayers~~ citizens. The author, being a big lefty, tends to talk about the market in the same terms, but acknowledges that the state and the market both have an interest in macro-communication, and reducing hurdles to economic communication, such as local little pocket languages which set up barriers against trade and thus, prosperity in general.

Posted by Mitch H. 2014-09-04 12:13|| 2014-09-04 12:13|| Front Page Top

#13 Also, both Hebrew and Irish represent state-driven cultural-formation creation of official "national" languages. Or, to put it another way, they're both examples of heritage languages which were used as part of a "nationalizing" state project, wherein they became the official language as part of an attempt to differentiate the society of the new state from the subjects of their former sovereignty (in the case of the Irish Free State) or to form a proper nation from a collection of poly-linguistic groups in the case of Israel and Hebrew.

In the latter case, you had a bunch of Jews from three different regional groupings, who spoke Ladino, Yiddish, English, Arabic, and a vast array of other languages. Hebrew was at least a cultural commonality, which partially explains why it's been far more successful than Irish, which continues to be a notational "national" language.

Anyways, long story short, both Irish and Hebrew were attempts to synthesize a state-supported "majority" language, in a classic case of a state "self-colonizing" its own people. (Again, terminology lifted shamelessly from James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State)

Posted by Mitch H. 2014-09-04 12:21|| 2014-09-04 12:21|| Front Page Top

#14 Poor people find communication harder. Let's keep them poor and force them into making it harder to communicate.

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2014-09-04 15:20|| 2014-09-04 15:20|| Front Page Top

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