"What! Must every little language have its own country?

Post Reply New Topic

Clemenceau's reaction to the deconstruction of the empires after WWI, though of course it was by no means as extreme as that suggests, else what happened to the Lusatian and North Frisian homelands?

Any old how, please to consider the two opposite tacks:

A Setting up Serbia. Croatia, Macedonia, Bosina, Kosovo, Old Uncle Tm Cobley and all as independent ethnically coherent [well, kinda, ethnicity gets complex and nobody is perfect] nations, one country per "language",

OR

B establishing a "nation" that will include Frenchmen [yes, I know there is no such thing as a Frenchman] ranging from Picards to Savoyards, and Provencals and Catalans, plus Bretons, Basques, and Alsatians, ignoring ethnicities to forge a stronger economic unit.

Preferences? Reasons?

My friend Pierre-Phillipe says that the quality of being a frenchman is the affectation of an attitude problem.

For this reason he considers himself a french person but not a frenchman.

Edit: He also says that what a frenchman and a rooster have in common is that they are the only two animals on the planet who can stand in s**t all day and crow about it.

But i digress.

This sort of argument seems silly to me, since i was just discussing with several of my hindi coworkers how diverse indian culture is.

India has dozens of languages. The wealthy are able to educate their children in english and hindi (if they don't already speak hindi), but poor people from different regions of india often have very little understanding with which to communicate with.

At least, that's what my coworkers tell me.

They are not all from the same regions. Some of them converse with each-other in their native languages, some of them converse in hindi, and some of them converse in english.

Edit: And while various people have insisted to me that indian people think it's rude to converse in their native languages in the presence of people who don't speak it, nobody seems to have told my coworkers that. Or at least they think it doesn't apply to anglos.

On the power as motivation for language choice in multilingual nations - tell me about it, why don't you? I could tell you stories - but obviously you are experiencing the same stories. The BEST fun came when the staff of the finance office, who had not put two and two together me being linguist and all, realized I could understand what they were saying in front of the assumed to be uncomprehending foreigner.

It is a GREAT advantage to KNOW the only guy who can solve the problem will not be coming in today. Frees up your schedule.

Be that as it may - I love Pierre-Philippe's "quality of being a frenchman is the affectation of an attitude problem." You have to have worked and roomed with a Frenchman to get the full impact.

But to business: I am not clear whether you

A. Back multiethnic nations, of which India is an excellent example, though I used France as easier to count]

B. Endorse smaller, more uniform nations.

C. Think both are great or rotten and would rather not talk about it.

I think it's easier for lazy people - such as myself - to live in a country with a single language.

I, however, do not believe that i am entitled to be lazy. I think i currently get away with it, and i find that convenient, but i don't think I'm entitled to it.

If i had kids, I would hope to find a way to educate them in multiple languages from a young age, because it appears that this will be an important skill in the near future.

In the USA we are unavoidably at least a bilingual country. Anyone who says different hates mexicans. They are here in numbers we cannot remove without some sort of horrifyingly bloody holocaust, so they should get over it.

I speak very little spanish and can't claim to be proud of that.

On the other hand, human trafficking in India is a wholly different problem than most regions. In India, you only have to take your slave girl 100 or so miles from home and she finds herself in a place where she does not speak the language and does not understand the local customs at all.

One of my brothers is married to a girl from india. For the first two years i worked with indians, I did not understand why, whenever i brought up the fact that my sister-in-law is from gujarat, that i might as well have insulted them or something.

It turns out that most of my hindi coworkers are from the south of india, an entirely different place, in their minds, from the north of india. And moreover, it turns out that people in the south of india think that gujaratis are a**holes.

They were less stand-offish when i clarified that, while my sister-in-law was raised in Gujarat, her parents are from Orissa.

At that point, one of them explained that Gujarat is the only state with almost completely uniform faith, and almost completely uniformly fundamental about it, and almost completely uniformly vegan.

I commented that Hina (my sister-in-law) had mentioned that her parents complain that their neighbors in Gujarat throw a fit when they see egg shells on the side of the compost heap facing the property line, and they got a good laugh out of that.

One of them told me that the joke about Gujarat is that the best place to have a beer in Gujarat is the next state.

But still, they seem to have a functioning nation.

The major thing i have learned about India as a nation is that they have a dynastic cycle just like china, except perhaps less formalized, or maybe we just know less about it. When the british controlled india they were just near the nadir of their cycle. They are unquestionably on the up-swing of their cycle right now. And frankly, if the USA fears losing economic dominance in the world, India is the bigger threat.

The proposal that every language must have its own country is, of course, totally idiotic. There are obviously many more languages than countries so every language does not have its own country and where and how such a concept should exist is a total mystery.

Long before there were countries or nations there were languages. Language is a family matter. Extended family.

ruveyn

And dialect differences within families, believe you me.

Of course a very practical difficulty is the impossibility of determining what the boundaries of a language are - an issue no thinking and sane linguist will touch.

Not to extend this, the case reported by one of my students: a village where one guy - who talked exactly like everybody else - insisted despite his relative's laughter that HE spoke a different language. So much for placing boundarides by self identification.

AND the one where the Po-Dunk claim the Paw-Dawnk speak a debased dialect of Po-Dunk - and the Paw-Dawnk say no, not at all, the Po-Dunk speak a debased dialect of Paw-Dawnk/

Great quote by the french diplomat.

He was responding to the breakup of two empires- Czarist Russia, and Austria-Hungary, into their ethnic components. Finland became a country for the first time, and the Finnish language became a written language for the first time.

After the fall of communism the process continued with the breakup of the old USSR, the breakup of Yugoslavia. Even the Czechs and Slovaks divorced. A czech lady I worked with thought that last one was rediculous- czechoslavakia worked fine the way it was.
I tend to applaued oppressive empires falling but you can go too far.. New Guinea has thousands of language- they each cant have thier own country. And maybe Czechoslavakia was fine the way it was.

Returning to France as an example: not only are there parts of France inhabitated by non French speaking ethnic groups ( The Celtic Breton, German speaking alsations, and so on), but the opposite is also true. The French language spills over into nieghboring countries.

The southern two thirds of Belgium is French Speaking, and northern third is Flemish ( a dialect of dutch). Part of Switzerland is French speaking ( other parts are german, Italian, and part is dominated by an obscure Romance language akin to, but distinct from both Italian and French).
Why not just get rid of Belgium: have the north merge with the Netherlands, and have the south merge with France. Have the French speaking slice of Switzerland join France as well. At the same time lets geive the Alsace Lorraine back to Germany, and allow the Breton to be free ( perhaps to merge with Wales beacause the Celtic Welsh language is virtually identical to Breton), allow the Basques to be a seperate republic. Oh-yes- Quebec- Quebec should be pried from Canada and become a kind of commonwealth( satellite) of France the way all of Canada is a commonwealth of Britian today ( let the anglophones keep their ties to britain)!

So finnally ALL frenchmen would be united in a purely French nation- that would have nothing BUT Frenchmen! Except for all of those North African migrants we need to do the skut work.
Is that a plan or what?

Dont think that all would be very feasible.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 11 Jun 2011, 12:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I wasn't even going to touch the put-all-Francophones-in-one-basket side of the question. Where do you find a territory that will comfortably hold all the Anglophones - or are Murricn and Scouse the same language?

Your Czech friend may not have approved the establishment of Slovakia, but I knew a Croat who would have applauded separation from the Serbs.

The only reason we have the national boundaries we have is medieval grabbing [or inheriting] the teritory next door, followed by shipping out to grab what was left. One people divided by an artificial line drawn by treatty thousands of miles away, bitter enemies stuck in the same country because that is how far Belgian power extended.

There is a small movement in southwest Germany calling for Alemannic independence and unity. To give a little background, the people speaking Alemannic and the related Swabian dialects are the descendants of Germanic tribal confederations of the Alemanni and the related, older Suebic confederation, who had forcibly colonized Romanized areas north of the Alps in the 4th century. Their direct descendants are to found in the southern two thirds of the German states of Baden-Wurttemberg, and southwestern most Bavaria, as well as most of the French region of Alsace, as well as German speaking Switzerland.
Now, this Alemannic separatist movement doesn't have many adherents within Germany, and really none at all in France or Switzerland. But the people behind this are insistent that one day, all Alemannic/Swabian dialect speakers of southwest Germany, northeast France, and east Switzerland will be all free and independent within their own state - apparently, whether they want to be included or not. While all Europeans who speak Alemannic/Swabian dialects are proud of their barbarian ancestry, the simple fact is, modern national loyalties and pride can only take precedent.
If such a thing would ever be possible, my long lost relatives in the Franconian dialect areas of Baden-Wurttemberg and Alsace would probably have the dumb luck of being included in this impossible, language based fantasy kingdom, just because of geographic location!

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Wow. I didn't know about that. That is less foreseeable than Scottish nationalism by a long shot. The Alemanni have not been a unit for a long time.

But see - if they make it then your guys [my ancestors who paused in the Kraichgau were pure Alemannic, sorry to say] can start up a Franconian Liberation Movement. Be easier to secede from them than from Deutschland in toto.

I know other readers on this thread are going to hate me for asking this, but could you please elaborate on your Alemannic ancestors? Germanic antiquities is one of my Aspie obsessions.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Ive been told that all European languages have the same word for the country of "Germany" as our english word except two: German itsself, and French.

Deutschland, and Alemaine (dont know how its spelled) respectively.

The ancient Romans called the area in the heart of europe north of the Danube and east of the Rhine that was beyond the control of their empire 'Gemania".

The place was home to dozens of wild tribes, but the subjects of Rome who lived west of the Rhine in the province of Gaul traded with the Alemmani tribe - and the latter became the middle men between the latin speakig roman subjects and the rest of the tribes of the german interior. So the Alemmanii were the tribe the Roman subjects knew best. After the fall of Rome when Gaul morphed into France the French speaking inhabitants inherited the word "Alemaine" for the area and people of that part of europe east of France.

Being that the very name of France was derived from the Franks - tribes also from Germania - it's very odd that they would have associated the lands east of the Rhine with a single confederation of tribes, the Alemanni. Within Germania, there were several confederated peoples beside the Alemanni, such as the Franks (who became French and Franconians), Saxons, Bavarians, Thuringians, the Frisians, and the Swabians (who were virtually indistinguishable from the Alemanni). While it was true that the Roman world was very familiar with the Alemanni, they probably had more dealings - both peaceable and hostile - with the Franks. Yet, because Gaul was colonized by Salian Franks, they associated the other across the Rhine with a specific enemy people, rather than their kindred Ripuarian Franks.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Being a Frisian myself, this topic piqued an interest in me
The setting of the nation is not that important. It is about the freedom for language and culture. Most Frisians are perfectly happy being part of The Netherlands, since the language can be used in schools, government and court to a certain extent. There is also place for typical cultural things like egg-gathering etc.

Making it a separate country would make it rather small and defeat some advantages of a larger country. However with the European Union in place borders are not that important anymore. It was easier for me to move to another country than to another part of NL.

About my multi-language skills, yes, they are quite useful. I can switch between Frisian and Dutch within the sentence. Besides that my command of English is satisfactory and my German is good enough for official letters. It makes it easier to look for jobs across the borders, at one point I was running for a job in Germany.

NL: Duitsland
FY: Dútslân
Does not seem the same. But the in Dutch the word "Germanië" is known as a term for ancient Germany.

Do the Frisians in Germany still speak their traditional dialect? Or has their language been replaced by German?

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer