Yiwu, don't over estimate the importance of language. Young people couldn't care less about their ancestors' culture [unless there's money in it].
When people take their offspring to a new country, within a month or three, they start adopting the ways of the new place and within a year, you wouldn't know the difference [other than a bit of colour, different nose and hair etc]. Then the youngster refuses to use their mother language unless they have to to placate silly old fool relatives.
If there's a critical mass of relatives, their old language can be self-sustaining, at least for a generation, but then, unless it forms a community of use due to large numbers of them in an area, it fizzles out.
That happens whatever immigrant language is involved - Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, French, Dalmatian, Vietnamese, Samoan. Even Maori children don't bother learning Maori unless they get it rammed down their throat in the last ditch attempt to keep it going which is under way. Unfortunately, Maoris keep stealing the money which is intended to promote Maori language. Which doesn't endear them to the anglophone taxpayers [or Korean, Chinese etc who form an increasing number of taxpayers and who rapidly become anglophone].
Language is just a tool, like a hat. Fashions change. Language isn't intrinsic to us, though die hard traditionalists claim it is. Well, it's intrinsic to the person who grew up with it, but their offspring don't care - the offspring have to make their own life and the parent's life is not especially important.
If the dollars are in another language, that language will make headway. Our son is semi-Japanese and is selling New Zealand to the Japanese. We Kiwis are modern Maoris, with a useless culture being sold out to the richer and more successful tribes. They can have my house if they offer me enough, which they can afford, so it's only a matter of time. Tarken, our son, learned Japanese, and some Chinese, not Maori. Japanese have the money! Chinese have the numbers and a fair bit of money.
Chinese isn't an effective language. That's why brains hum away flat out when using it [as shown by the brain scans]. No tense, plural or other sophisticated grammar. Meaning comes too much from context. It's an anachronism. The British scholar is obviously ill-informed.
In morse code, one only would need to learn two characters to deal with everyday life and specialty life and everything else. In English, one need only learn the 26 letters of the alphabet. In Chinese, it's a huge jumble of ideographs. In Hiragana, it's 53 [I think] symbols.
I first realized how similar Japanese and Chinese was when standing in the British Museum in the 1980s and some Japanese guy was standing beside me, moving his lips while looking at some 3000 year old Chinese writing. I asked him whether he was reading it and how come and how much of it he could read and he said he could read most of it.
Now that's a stable language. Olde Englishe is not very intelligible after a few hundred years.
Romanji is gaining ground in Japan with the advent of computers. They type in the letters eigokyoshitsu.com or snowadvenures.co.nz to get to the Japanese place they want to go. Computers don't accept the squiggles. Not yet anyway.
In the next 100 years, there is going to be a LOT of action in the languages used around the world. The world is now one place. Anyone can be anywhere, linguistically, in a few clicks. Unlike 100 years ago when actual travel was necessary and that was a luxury for few people.
Just as our son learned Japanese and Americans learn Spanish and English learn a smattering of French and Germans learn English and Chinese learn American and so on, people around the world will pick a language to focus on and it'll almost always be a big language.
Increasingly, smaller languages will be pushed aside in the interests of young people being able to earn a living. Local lingo will be for local use only. Village and family level usage. Gossip about each other. Normally, people will use a big language.
Just as in China, the local dialects will gradually fizzle out in favour of Mandarin, so will local languages fizzle out. You for example use American and don't learn another dialect of Chinese. Nor do you learn whatever they use in Tibet or Mongolia or Korea. Each person who does that gives a bit more impetus to the falling into disuse of the little languages.
It's the good old Metcalf Law network-effect business. www-ec.njit.edu Unless the littlies have something really good going for them, it's game over.
You, Jay Chen, Ramsey Su and umpty others learn American and Englishe because it's a big big network effect with pots of gold hidden in the seams. Learning some mickey mouse language from the jungles of Indonesia or backwoods of Bengal just wouldn't do it for you.
Mqurice |
