What are the Pros and Cons of a bilingual society?

[Az]

I am against it, esp. all those secluded societies.

I will add more later.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Hurricane
Denying part of a country's population of service in their native language is both discriminating and economically unsound. All studies I have seen show that minorities that are forced to "unlearn" their own language and culture are less productive (i.e. unemployed), less happy (i.e. troublemakers) and less well (i.e. use more medical services=cost more). All this has a negative effect on the country as a whole.

This doesn't always apply. The comparative history of France and Spain can be interesting about this : both countries had an ambitious policy of unifying their languages and reduce regional languages to unsignificantness (in the 19th century). While Spain used almost exclusively force to destroy regional languages, France used a wide array of tools, from public education and strong economic integration to force (too). The results are very different in both countries, as regional autonomous parties are nearly non-existent in France, whereas they have much influence in Spain. Regional languages are also much less of an issue in France than in Spain.

Currently, Brittany is a productive and rather happy region of France, where there are much fewer problems than in "truely French" regions, despite the Bretonian language being nearly killed in the past, and barely resurrected today.


OliverFA :
Thanks for the answer. I didn't know the majority of "Catalans" were actually speaking Spanish as their first language.

[Sava]

A country should have one official language that everybody does business in.

Foreign languages should be taught to children as early as elementary school. Educated people often speak more than one language. Others... well... don't. But in America, the freedom to be stupid is one of the most cherished ideals. Don't try to change that.

[CerberusIV]

The real issue is that people should have one common language (at least) so they can all communicate. More than one common language does cost money though (if you are ever in Wales think how much smaller the traffic signs would be if they were just in one language and how much paint and metal would be saved).

Other languages can get out of hand in the UK with our (relative) willingness to take refugees from other countries. I lived in Sheffield a few years ago and at one point they changed the days of the week they emptied people's household bins. The leaflet explaining this was published in English but two thirds of it was taken up with lines in other languages saying that people could get copies of the leaflet in their own language. The list IIRC included Urdu, Punjabi, Vietnamese, Somali, Arabic and two or three others. Crazy! If someone really wanted to know what it said they would find a person in their community who could translate it for them.

I also remember a conversation with a MEP who explained that all EU documents were produced in English, French and German. A small (large?) army of people are employed in Brussels to do all the translating and check the documents all say the same thing.

I'm not insisting on English - if there is a real move for a different global language I will learn it - but there is a lot of swimming against the tide by government institutions and minority rights protesters which is a ludicrous waste of time and resources.

{rant} end of rant {/rant}

[Az]

Esperanto for official EU language!

[Sava]

I agree Cerberus... my family has kept its own ethnic identity. I was the first person on my mother's side to be born in this country. If you would ever meet my mother, you wouldn't mistake her for anything else but a born and bred American. Yet she didn't speak a word of English until age 9. We still speak Serbian, and practice our ethnic and cultural rituals and such. I don't see the problem with making English a mandatory, official language for America. There are people that choose not to learn English, and that's fine. But if you want to participate in society, you need to learn it's language. That's a general rule regardless of the country's official language. If I move to France, I'll learn French. If I move to Russia, I'll learn to speak... better Russian

My grandfather recently shared with me his idea about English. He feels that a common, official language is a unifying force. Despite whatever native cultural or ethnic background two people in the world might possess, if everyone spoke English, everyone would be able to communicate with each other. I'm not advocating English be an official world language, I was just using it as an example.

[Frogman]

I don't understand why the US is always picked on for not being multilingual like our european friends. They have to be multilingual, they have a variety of countries, nationalities and ethnic groups that cling to native languages.

I took spanish for six years, I'd be happy to use it, but you just don't get that much opportunity in most of the US. We're a big country with a common language and most people who speak english as a second language want the practice of speaking it.

Its not american arrogance or ignorance that keeps us from being multilingual. The forces of society have molded a dominant language and those forces will continue to pressure minority languages into oblivion. The US will not become bilingual, generations of hispanics born here will ultimately lose the mother tongue just like every other immigrant group that isn't fed with a constant stream from the homeland.

Europe will soon face similar pressures and some languages are already endangered. I'm curious to hear from europeans on how they see language evolving and which languages are becoming more dominant and which ones are declining.

[CerberusIV]

Part of what happens in europe is that new words, often english (american), get adopted into the national language. This apparently gets the French language purists really worked up so they dream up new french words to replace adopted words like "email" and no-one bothers to use the made up words anyway.

I think education is part of the answer by offering a range of languages in school. I am always amazed by the standard of english spoken by most europeans I meet, especially compared to my own inability to put more than four or five words in french together.

It will really be decided by the majority. If people choose to speak english or esperanto or whatever and that is the language that is used and people can fluently communicate with then that language will grow and others will decline. For commercial reasons (computers, TV/movies and not many other globally widespread languages) english in one dialect or another is likely to be the global language of this century.

[Spiffor]

There is a driving force in the world so that high-end managers work in English, because English is the business language. There have been occurences in France and Germany where English became used at national level by managers instead of the national language.
English is also the scientific language, though many scientists still produce their works in thei mother tongue.
Lastly, in the EU institutions specifically, there is a drive to unite towards a one working language, which will be English once France and Germany stop their resistance.

The aim of English as the international language is not to replace national languages ; it is to become a common ground when you encounter foreign people. This forum is a great example for it : Russians, Germans, Spaniards, Brazilians, Chinese etc. meet each other here and are able to communicate because they speak English. It doesn't mean they are losing skill in their mother tongue when speaking to RL people.
This "common ground" is the ideal case.

However, the problem is to see the elites adopting English as their daily language. Such a phenomemon has begun and will continue. Historically, every time a language has been massively influenced by others, the elites have played a major role in the process. As we speak, more and more English words are integrated in national languages. It is fairly possible some languages become very much assimilated to English in some decades or so.
This is not necessarily a doom : historically, languages have re-emerged when elites from the language community became interested in it. We may be experiencing the rising tide of English, and we may experience the downing tide in a few decades.

[Frogman]

from spiffor
We may be experiencing the rising tide of English, and we may experience the downing tide in a few decades.

I don't see how that can happen. All the forces at work only serve to increase the domination of english. Languages develop in isolation and you just can't live in isolation in the world anymore. What other language do you see coming to to replace english as the universal common language? Asians learn english not spanish and there is no way were going to move to an asian language thats not based on the 26 letter alphabet.