Steven, You certainly have an interesting background. Both your father AND your uncle taught Russian Literature? How did that happen?
Your remark about "trading in European languages for obscure (Asian) ones that almost nobody has ever heard of" got me thinking. In Europe, all states (except Switzerland) are national states; based on one majority ethnic group, and one national language. In the USA, where there is no one dominant ethnic group, we look to the English language to buttress the sense of national unity. In fact, it is difficult, I think, for most people here to conceive of a "nation" that does NOT have a single official national language in which everyone is literate.
But Asia is FULL of such nations: take the Philippines, Indonesia, and India, for starters. For an American, the question would be: what holds these nations together? (Assuming that they ARE holding together -- perhaps a dubious proposition right now, in the case of Indonesia.) What sense of national identity links individuals from different ethnic groups, who may have no language in common? How do they communicate?
What is the situation in the Philippines, in this regard? According to the "Ethnologue", there are 168 living languages spoken there (granted that some may be just dialects of the others). Here is Ethnologue's rundown, FYI:
sil.org
Again according to Ethnologue, English, the former "imperial" language, is reportedly spoken by 52% of the population as a second language (a much higher proportion than in India, which surprised me). As for Tagalog, now the only "official" language, only about 23% of the population of the Philippines are said to use it!! (Incidentally, please explain to me why the authorities have chosen to call Tagalog "Pilipino", and what it means when Ethnologue writes: "Pilipino is presently the national language. Filipino is to be developed from it to replace it.")
Steven, you are based right in the heart of traditional Tagalog-speaking territory. Have you travelled around? In your experience, just how widely is Tagalog spoken? Is the use of Tagalog speading, or is the government trying to "prop it up" artificially? Is English, or Tagalog, the preferred lingua franca for non-native-Tagalog speakers? Is there any resentment of the ascendancy of Tagalog (and, by extension, of the ethnic group for which it is the native language)? (That was true in India, when the government originally tried to push Hindi as the one and only official language. Intellectuals, of course, preferred to use English to communicate with one another -- it was more "neutral" ethnically.) If there are ethnic tensions, how does the government handle them? What about neighboring countries (if you follow developments there)?
The point of my question is that it could very well be that Europe could learn a lot from the experience of multi-ethnic Asian nations. Of course, in Europe's most recent and most spectacular "ethnic" conflict -- I have in mind the Bosnian/Croatian/Serb conflict-- the adversaries were actually all of the same ethnic group, speaking the same language (Serbo-Croatian). What divided them was religion (Catholic, Orthdox, Muslim), as well as disparate historical experiences. It is only in Kosovo that the ethnic element has really come into play.
jbe
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