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Post by rogerbuck on Nov 23, 2020 17:50:20 GMT
I can't see repatriation as realistic either. I'd worry I have to be re-patriated, as an immigrant myself! And I feel far more at home in this country than either my native America or my parent's England.
Assimilation and culture - cherishing culture - seem more realistic ways of addressing the very real problems here.
But countries have long histories of assimilating immigrants to the culture. In Ireland there is the case of the "old English" - actually more like Welsh-Normans - who famously became "more Irish than the Irish themselves" - thus the Statutes of Kilkenny.
More recently, France has had massive European immigration, prior to its middle Eastern immigration in the 1960s. Immigration that is, from Portugal, Italy, Spanish starting circa 1900. Today, the descendants of those people feel, I believe, far more French than they do Portugese, Italian, Spanish.
Obviously, though, it is much easier for Portuguese, Italian, Spanish to assimilate in French culture than it is for Muslims.
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Nov 24, 2020 10:29:14 GMT
I can't see repatriation as realistic either. I'd worry I have to be re-patriated, as an immigrant myself! And I feel far more at home in this country than either my native America or my parent's England. Assimilation and culture - cherishing culture - seem more realistic ways of addressing the very real problems here. But countries have long histories of assimilating immigrants to the culture. In Ireland there is the case of the "old English" - actually more like Welsh-Normans - who famously became "more Irish than the Irish themselves" - thus the Statutes of Kilkenny. More recently, France has had massive European immigration, prior to its middle Eastern immigration in the 1960s. Immigration that is, from Portugal, Italy, Spanish starting circa 1900. Today, the descendants of those people feel, I believe, far more French than they do Portugese, Italian, Spanish. Obviously, though, it is much easier for Portuguese, Italian, Spanish to assimilate in French culture than it is for Muslims. I wonder if this assimilation will continue to operate in the era of globalization, though. Until now, populations were relatively cut off from the rest of the world and necessarily grew more like each other. But does this still apply in the age of the internet, mass movement and the global economy? What I fear is that the large countries, such as France and Spain and the UK, will continue to hold onto their character to some extent, being worlds unto themselves, to some degree. But that the smaller countries will simply be absorbed into the larger cultures. A book that I found very sobering reading in this regard is "Voices Silenced: Has Irish a Future?" by James McCloskey. (It is written in both Irish and English.) Despite the book's title, it is as much about language death in general as it is about the prospects for Irish (about which McCloskey is actually quite optimistic; Irish has the benefit of a state supporting it, which is a big factor). I think this book is so relevant here that I have taken the trouble to type out a fairly long excerpt, even though it applies to language specifically as opposed to culture in general. I'm sure I needn't point out the relevance to the discussion of culture. I have never found this question addressed in any other book. " But languages are also created. Could it be the case that the process of change and fragmentation that creates new languages out of old might be sufficient to make up for the elimination of local languages around the globe?
It seems very unlikely. There are two principal sources from which new languages emerge. One of them is the slow and incremental process by which change is piled upon change in a living language, working differently in different sub-communities, until over time the sub-varieties become distinct enough that their speakers come to think of them as separate languages. In this way, the Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French, Catalan, Romanian, Portuguese, Sardinian and so on) were slowly moulded out of despised local dialects of vernacular Latin. The process of gradual change and differentiation took perhaps half a millennium. The speed with which new languages emerge in this way depends largely on teh extent to which the various subcommunities in which change i working are in contact with one another. The less contact there is, the more quickly new languages emerge...
At the time of the framing of the US Constitution, some of those who most influenced its final shape (notably Thomas Jefferson and John Adams), as well as the great lexicographer Noah Webster, argued strenuously that it was crucial for the independence of the new nation that the two languages ("English" and "American") should divege as much as possible and as quickly as possible, so that they would be at least as distinct as Dutch and English. That never happened, and the pressures that prevented it from happening are at least as strong today as they were two centuries ago. English-speaking communities all across the world are linked by strong cultural, economic and ideological links which have prevented them from drifting apart in a way that would be necessary to compensate for the murderous onslaught that English has itself visited on languages across the globe.
There have been geographical expansions before which rival the expansion of European languages over the past couple of centuries... [He gives the example of 'Austronesian' language expansion between 3000 BC and 500 AD]. But in the absence of binding technology and social structures to preserve a memory of unity, the normal processes of linguistic change and diversification have operated to turn one mother language into a family of some 959 distinct languages and traditions.
The spread of European languages across the globe in more recent times has been very different. These languages have been bound together by technological and ideological ties, which have prevented them from splintering and regenerating, as the Austronesian languages did. [...]
Given all of this, it is maybe not so surprising that I can point to barely three cases in which something which is clearly a new language has been created this century. Tok Pisin [the national language of Papua New Guinea] did not exist a century ago. Nor did Nicaraguan Sign Language, which was invented by deaf children only when the Sandinista government opened the first schools for the deaf in Managua some sixteen years ago. We should perhaps include the very strange case of Modern Hebrew.
Ask me to list languages which have come to the point of extinction in the same period, and I could list thousands." |
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Nov 24, 2020 12:30:59 GMT
So if mass repatriation doesn't seem tenable (or, to me, palatable), and the sort of gradual and natural assimilation we had in the past also seems unlikely, what is the answer?
I think I'd have to agree with Roger that "cherishing culture" is the only possible answer-- the self-conscious protection of traditions, all the more deliberate since it is done against the background of global homogenizing forces.
I don't see why these can't be all the traditions present in a country, both native and "newcomer".
How likely is this? I don't know. But it seems, to me, the only route available to us, both realistically and ethically.
Others will disagree, of course. Which is the whole point of a forum!
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