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Erosion of Local Traditions and Globalization

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0.42@632

Active member
In some timelines like Look to the West a lot more of local traditions and traditional institutions (like monarchy) are preserved. Of course OTL's (irreversible) globalization with say, English as the global language and the strength of transnational institutions is not inevitable, nor is the erosion of traditions? But how inevitable is the further erosion of local languages and traditions anyways - after nation-states have imposed a common national language/culture?
 
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I don't think Globalization and the like needs to be viewed as inevitable; even now, it is coming to an effective end in favor of regionalism and the first stirrings of a return to the Nation-State. That the recent epoch existed at all is effectively the result of pure chance, and could've been radically different even fairly recently.
 
0.42@632 said:
But how inevitable is the further erosion of local languages and traditions anyways
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I think some degree of erosion and globalisation is inevitable as long as there are countries bigger & stronger than other countries and they go out into the world (and countries being formed necessarily erodes some of the localisms, more so when they get centralised, as What The Country Is Like gets more standardised). I don't think there should be any specific 'level' that's the inevitable end point though, that all seems variable in who the bigger country is, and when, and what they did.

Like, it's not inevitable that the Welsh language is crushed as much as it was when England took over (though its likely), and it's very much not inevitable that the Welsh language has a huge revival. That required specific events. Now the country is officially bilingual and more & more young people are bilingual, it's very unlikely that the language will go away just because of globalisation or any other -ation. You need some other factor that takes out the language in Wales itself, and that would require straight-up oppression.
 
Charles EP M. said:
I think some degree of erosion and globalisation is inevitable as long as there are countries bigger & stronger than other countries and they go out into the world (and countries being formed necessarily erodes some of the localisms, more so when they get centralised, as What The Country Is Like gets more standardised). I don't think there should be any specific 'level' that's the inevitable end point though, that all seems variable in who the bigger country is, and when, and what they did.

Like, it's not inevitable that the Welsh language is crushed as much as it was when England took over (though its likely), and it's very much not inevitable that the Welsh language has a huge revival. That required specific events. Now the country is officially bilingual and more & more young people are bilingual, it's very unlikely that the language will go away just because of globalisation or any other -ation. You need some other factor that takes out the language in Wales itself, and that would require straight-up oppression.
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Sure but on the other hand, look at icelandic, the official language of an independent country but not supported by most smart phones so if you want to text your friend, you do it in english.

You dont need government oppression if your population is on the internet and fins that icelandic twitter is 4 people and all the actual conversations are happening in English.
 
Ah, that's true. That could over time reduce the prominence of various languages that aren't big enough to have support. And that can still happen even if economies get less globalised, because the internet's a pretty big amount of worms to put back in a can.
 
Charles EP M. said:
Ah, that's true. That could over time reduce the prominence of various languages that aren't big enough to have support. And that can still happen even if economies get less globalised, because the internet's a pretty big amount of worms to put back in a can.
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Technically all of them except English - and this applies doubly so in the scientific fields
 
Arguably the kind of globalisation we've seen in OTL requires both a single-superpower scenario here and now with the US, and also for that superpower to speak the same language as was spread around the globe by one of the former superpowers over a period of centuries. That doesn't seem necessarily that likely. Like, if China became the world's economically and militarily dominant power, that wouldn't result in the world all immediately starting to speak Chinese to the extent of endangering major existing languages, as is the case with English.
 
Thande said:
Arguably the kind of globalisation we've seen in OTL requires both a single-superpower scenario here and now with the US, and also for that superpower to speak the same language as was spread around the globe by one of the former superpowers over a period of centuries. That doesn't seem necessarily that likely. Like, if China became the world's economically and militarily dominant power, that wouldn't result in the world all immediately starting to speak Chinese to the extent of endangering major existing languages, as is the case with English.
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Arguably one could get a world where English is even more important if there is a Cold-War between 2 rival Anglophone powers, so both bloc's members have to learn it:
  • US vs. India (Anglo-American Nazi War)
  • US [from Canada to Mexico and Cuba]vs. Drakia* [a more 'realistic' version of the Draka restricted to Africa and he Middle East] (Separated at Birth); SaB also had a bigger British empire including Indonesia, Vietnam, Siam [like OTL Egypt] and all the Guyanas
  • US vs. France-Britain (Reds!)
Of course there has to be a powerful US in these scenarios due to that making English important in Latin America, Europe, East Asia
 
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Gary Oswald said:
Sure but on the other hand, look at icelandic, the official language of an independent country but not supported by most smart phones so if you want to text your friend, you do it in english.

You dont need government oppression if your population is on the internet and fins that icelandic twitter is 4 people and all the actual conversations are happening in English.
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I am not sure about that. Stable bilingualism is a situation that can exist indefinitely. It rests substantially on the willingness of native speakers to continue speaking it. I wrote something a while back about my observations of the position of French in Québec.

www.quora.com

Why do some French-speaking people in Quebec think that French is under threat in Quebec, even with all the laws to protect the language'...

Randy McDonald's answer: Early in September 2019, with my then-partner I went on a four-day visit to Québec. The first day we spent in Montréal, touring the city extensively before retiring to a hotel just a few minutes’ walk uphill from Saint-Laurent station. The next two days we spent in the sm...
www.quora.com www.quora.com

Intergenerational transmission of the language, from parent to child, is the key issue. I am somewhat curious about immigration to Iceland: Are immigrants, better yet their children, picking up the language?
 
I also think that the history matters. English is arguably as important as it is because two world wars devastated the non-Anglophone great powers, and because the Spanish and Portuguese languages that were English's main rivals in the Americas were associated with countries that ended up underperforming. I can imagine scenarios where the United States ended up becoming the single largest and wealthiest of the great powers—indeed, I think it would be hard to have this semicontinent underperform badly—while other great powers and their histories might have had less traumatic histories.
 
0.42@632 said:
Could more countries go the Indonesian/Vietnamese route and ditch the colonizer's language entirely?
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The Dutch language was not very present in colonial Indonesia. Vietnam, meanwhile, was a distant colony that gained independence in a war, causing considerable hostility.
 
Ricardolindo said:
The Dutch language was not very present in colonial Indonesia. Vietnam, meanwhile, was a distant colony that gained independence in a war, causing considerable hostility.
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I know, but the official colonial language was Dutch - I meant as in replacing colonizer language with the largest native language
 
One major difference between African and Southeast Asian colonies is that, by and large, the latter already had well-established indigenous languages as regional lingua franca or even as national languages in ways not different from Europe. Vietnam, for instance, was a state with a millennial history and a clear majority population nation-wide of ethnic Vietnamese who shared a single linguistic and cultural heritage. Yes, Vietnam had substantial non-Vietnamese minorities and there were and are substantial dialectal differences between north and south, but did the existence of the Bretons and the different Romance dialects mean Third Republic France was not a nation-state?

It is important not to underestimate the extent to which pre-colonial states left legacies in the modern map of Africa. It is also important to note the extent to which many states were novel. The heartland of the old kingdom of Kongo was split between three colonial regimes and post-colonial states, and the biggest state named after Kongo extends most of the way to the East African coast, to territories that had never been in the orbit of pre-colonial Kongo.

(It is interesting, BTW, to contrast the DRC and Angola in language policy. In that first country, even though French is still widely spoken different regional vehicular languages like Swahili and Lingala also remain widely used, a consequence of a Belgian policy. In the second country, meanwhile, the massive population movements caused by the Angolan civil war combined with a lack of attention to African languages by post-colonial regimes to trigger a language shift to Portuguese as a majority language.)

What does this mean with regards to the POD? I think that colonialisms which take account of the cultural frontiers of the colonized are less likely to see radical language shift than colonialisms which do not. If the Kingdom of Kongo had been placed in its entirety under a protectorate, not divided, I bet that Kikongo would be in better shape. Conversely, if Vietnam ended up being welded into (say) a French colonial federation of mainland Southeast Asia that used French as a glue, I bet the French language would be much more widely used there.
 
There is something very interesting about East Africa, which to greater and lesser degrees is bound together by a shared Swahili language. This language indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa stands out as relatively unique in being an indigenous language that was also a regional lingua franca. What happened in East Africa? Could things have gone differently there? Could there have been other languages that could have been successful elsewhere?
 
rfmcdonald said:
There is something very interesting about East Africa, which to greater and lesser degrees is bound together by a shared Swahili language. This language indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa stands out as relatively unique in being an indigenous language that was also a regional lingua franca. What happened in East Africa? Could things have gone differently there? Could there have been other languages that could have been successful elsewhere?
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The Swahili coast served as East Africa's gateway to the rest of the world.
 
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