#That American currency is worth so much and that English be such a treasured language is in itself evident of that

[max1461]

thoughts on the relative utilities of a monolingual/multilingual society? intuitively i'm inclined to think societies should subtly nudge towards monolingualism because having to learn multiple languages seems like it'd be a big headache, like having to use multiple currencies or multiple directions on the road. "subtly nudge" because being too harsh about it would suck, but nudge nevertheless. the converse seems like shoveling work on ppl for personal taste. but I have a feeling you disagree?

I’m not a utilitarian. People should be allowed to do whatever with respect to what language(s) they speak, and we should make it easy for them to live pleasant lives while speaking whatever language(s) they want. Translation is pretty effective; whatever efficiency losses exist due to people speaking different languages are not worth worrying about.

I have made a post before, which I will try to dig up for you, on why moving towards global monolingualism would be bad. The same arguments apply on e.g. a national level (well, for sufficiently large nations, at least). The gist is as follows:

Because language changes constantly, a policy of monolingualism implies a policy of constant maintenance. That is to say, your policy options range from continuously punishing people in minor-to-middling ways for speaking wrong, for the rest of time (I believe this is the “slight nudge” to which you refer), to (on the more extreme end) massive restrictions on freedom of speech. Both of these are fundamentally authoritarian in nature and I am against them.

I am doubtful that “minor nudges” would even work—language changes very fast and very vociferously. That is, such a policy would be nothing but a continual drain on human wellbeing, leaving the only effective options major authoritarianism or major economic discrimination based on language. These have both been tried before, they both work, and they are both horrendous.

I am deeply committed to pluralism. The point is not to produce a utility maximizing society, the point is to tend to everyone’s needs sufficiently while allowing them to live the way they wish to live. State management of culture in the name of utility maximization is precisely antithetical to this and I am basically against it a priori.

As an addendum to point 3: remember, many people care about their language a lot. This is an important aspect of how many people wish to live. As such, you can’t support pluralism unless you support linguistic pluralism. I think the degree to which language matters to people would be obvious if you read, e.g., pretty much anything written by indigenous Americans (in the US, Canada, Latin America, whatever) on the long history of their cultural suppression. People want to speak the language they want to speak! And by god, in a just (a fortiori truly pluralist) society, they should be able to do so, without fearing social or economic repercussions! I think this would possibly become more obvious to you if English was dying, if you had nobody to speak it with, there was no English language art or literature being made, there was no place to obtain such art or literature outside of niche academic contexts, and indeed you were constantly worried about the stories and discourses you grew up with and which you treasured most being lost forever. If you know about the inherent difficulties of localization, you know that language death means story-death, experience-death, nuance-death, idea-death. Of course this happens naturally with time due to entropy, but we should not be helping it along!

From a more personal perspective, linguistics as a science becomes impossible if all the languages die. It’s not nearly as important a consideration as the whole “it would require massive authoritarianism” thing, but it does matter. We’d be throwing away the chance to understand something very fundamental about the human mind in exchange for minor efficiency gains. Bad, imo.

#linguistics #society

[panvani]

Most of these people seem to understand white privilege doesn’t function through the action of individual white people going out and deliberately individually oppressing people of color with every action they take. They understand it’s a function of white people being given structurally more opportunities than people of color and being made out to be structurally more important than the people of color the government had historically exploited and continues to exploit. The same is true of US residents and countries in the global south. Idk why this is such a hard concept to grasp

#logxx #''How does a black person living in the US or spending US currency harm non-US residents'' I mean strictly speaking it doesn't #But every piece of modern American wealth was made off the exploitation of people in the global south #Ofc it was made off the exploitation of people of color and particularly black people within the US as well #But that doesn't negate the truth that there is no way to live as a US resident w out profiting off of slavery/imperialism #In the global south #That's not a moral quality! That's not something anyone chooses! #It's simply a fact of the world we live in #That American currency is worth so much and that English be such a treasured language is in itself evident of that #And while America's system does exist largely to oppress people of color and Black people in particular #That doesn't erase the structural features that define American infrastructure which every US resident interacts w #Which are all derived from imperialism in the global south