AH Challenge: get rid of a major language

[dforgue]

I think it is next to impossible to net the big ones. After 1700 it is far too late to try and extinguish German . . .

Well, if you count fragmentation that destroys the likelihood of a unified language (like the Arabic alternative) below, I think German could be destroyed. The dialects already present in German are pretty different. If there were a number of principalities trying to justify their existance, and no wars of unification, I could see a prince or Elector trumpeting the local dialect as a unique language. Think about Bavaria trumpeting the use of Bayerisch as part of patrimony of the Bavarians. Same with the Sachsen dialect.

Just an idea, but over time it could become increasingly unrealistic to say that they all speak "German."

 

[dforgue]

Polish and Czech are extremely realistic casualties of a "successful" Third Reich. Maybe Ukrainian and Belarussian as well . . .

Didn't the Hapsburgs have Czech on its (apparent) last legs in the 19th century? Between German migration to the Bohemian cities and Maria Theresa's Germanization policies? That might be a good candidate.

Also, didn't the Soviets threaten Ukrainian just by the number of Russians that were settled in Ukraine? If Latvian or Estonian had more spreakers they just barely dodged the Russification bullet with the Soviets.

 

[Max Sinister]

Coming from Germany, I have to say that's close to absurd. Almost all Germans understand "High German" now, and even dialect speakers can speak it.

 

[Alcuin]

So which ARE the major languages.

My source here is the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Languages, edited by Professor David Crystal (and they're based roughly on mid 1980s figures).

Using the definition of "Spoken by up to about 15 million".

1 Amharic (borderline upto 13 million)
2 Arabic
3 Azerbaijani (borderline, up to 12 million)
4 Bengali
5 Bhojpuri (spoken by up to 23 million people in Uttar pradesh and Bihar provinces in India)
6 Bihari
7 Burmese
8 Chinese
9 Dutch
10 English
11 French
12 Fulani (10-15 million throughout West Africa)
13 German
14 Gujarati
15 Hausa
16 Hindi
17 Hungarian (Borderline, up to 14 million)
18 Igbo (Borderline, up to 13 million)
19 Italian
20 Japanese
21 Javanese
22 Kannada (aka Kanarese, spoken by 15-25 million people in Southern India)
23 Korean
24 Lahnda
25 Malay (Interesting borderline, 10 million native speakers but spoken by up to 130 million people in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand as a "common tongue".)
26 Malayalam (17-25 million in Southern India)
27 Marathi
28 Occitan (Borderline, up to 12 million in Southern France)
29 Oriya
30 Panjabi
31 Pashto
32 Persian (aka Farsi)
33 Polish
34 Portuguese
35 Rajasthani
36 Romanian
37 Russian
38 Rwanda (5-15 million people - no I never knew it was a language either), 39 Sebuano (also known as Cebuano or Bisaya - Borderline, up to 12 million people in the Philippines)
40 Serbo-Croat (and here's one that disappeared OTL when it split into 3 separate languages none of which have enough speakers despite Serbo-Croat's total of 17 million speakers in the 80s)
41 Sinhalese (borderline, up to 12 million people)
42 Spanish
43 Sundanese
44 Swahili (another Common Tongue - 3-4 million native speakers, but 30 million who use it as a common tongue)
45 Tagalog (Borderline, 12 million people but 30-50 million as a "common tongue")
46 Tamil
47 Teluga
48 Thai
49 Turkish
50 Ukrainian
51 Urdu
52 Uzbek (borderline, up to 14 million)
53 Vietnamese
54 Yoruba

That's an exhaustive list so we have 54 languages to play with, most of which we haven't even thought of.

 

[Alcuin]

I rather see Polish and Czech go extinct.

By the criteria of this thread, Czech is not a major language (only 10 million speakers).

 

[dforgue]

Coming from Germany, I have to say that's close to absurd. Almost all Germans understand "High German" now, and even dialect speakers can speak it.

Max, that is true, but that is also in a situation in which Germany was on a path to unification over time. Imagine if the culture would have supported the regional dialects to the detriment of Hochdeutsch. Imagine if Goethe and Heine had written in dialect. Maybe Hochdeutsch would have survived to be the standard, but perhaps not.

 

[dforgue]

POD has to be after 1700, though.
1. English
Nappy invades England, crushing the British Army, and proclaims himself King of England. Knowing that if England ever becomes a rival again, it will be formidable, Nappy institutes a harsh Francization campaign (also called Frenchification or Gallicization). The English language is basically outlawed across the British Empire. In The Celtic parts of the Isles, the Celtic languages begin to strengthen but generally the whole of the British Empire (including Canada, Australia, and even India), begin to speak more and more French. He also forces the US to cede back Louisiana and begins to settle it with French speakers. Then in 1869 the Franco-British Empire clobbers the tiny United States (only the 1789 borders, remember), and the Francization campaign rolls along. Despite the dissolution of the Empire some years latter, by 2007 French is the global lingua franca, and English is all but forgotten.

Well, in 1869 the United States is not all that small. It extends to the Mississippi (at least) and has a population of about 39 million. It also has a cadre of battle-hardened soldiers, possibly including Southerners willing to fight the French and British who failed to support them during the Civil War. It also does not need to cross the ocean to fight.

Maybe the Brits can win in 1812 and take back the U.S. colonies, then have the U.S. react to Nappy's victory more like Canada or something of that sort.

 

[Sir Isaac Brock]

Well, in 1869 the United States is not all that small. It extends to the Mississippi (at least) and has a population of about 39 million. It also has a cadre of battle-hardened soldiers, possibly including Southerners willing to fight the French and British who failed to support them during the Civil War. It also does not need to cross the ocean to fight.

Maybe the Brits can win in 1812 and take back the U.S. colonies, then have the U.S. react to Nappy's victory more like Canada or something of that sort.

Missed this part did you?

...He [Nappy] also forces the US to cede back Louisiana and begins to settle it with French speakers. Then in 1869 the Franco-British Empire clobbers the tiny United States (only the 1789 borders, remember), and the Francization campaign rolls along.

Your alternative idea has promise, but in any senario where the Brits are strong enough to reconquer the US in 1812, they must have allready beat Nappy, so it's hard for him to latter show up an conquer Great Britain. Don't you think?

 

[Sir Isaac Brock]

On the "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" principle, how about a different Indian independence where Pakistan never comes into being, with the result that Urdu is never considered to be a seperate language but just as a dialect or group of dialects of Hindi? (A bit like Serbo-Croat in former Yugoslavia as distinct from Serbian and Croatian now.) That wipes out the fifth most widely spoken language in the world...

Innovative thinking.

Another possibility, how about at some point in the last century or so have a Chinese government decide that in order to be strong and successfully resist the foreign devils China needs the sort of unity that only a single language could provide, and launches a "Mandarinisation" campaign which first downgrades the status of languages such as Hakka and Cantonese to dialects and then suppresses them altogether?

Isn't that basically what's going on there now anyway?

Germanic settlers in Britain, take up the local language and it's bye-bye English.

Al Andalus survives so no Spanish as a world language.

Kiev takes up Khazar as a language - no Russian?

Those are all well outside the timefrime.

 

[Sir Isaac Brock]

Most of those scenarios don't fit the timeframe or are simply ASB...

Well, here my thoughs:

Those are all plausible. Good work.

 

[Leo Caesius]

I'm not sure why a French-dominated America would be any less bilingual than an English-dominated Canada. In fact, I suspect that it would be considerably more difficult to suppress English in the New World, seeing as the Anglophone settlers outnumber the Francophone ones to an enormous extent. Languages can't simply be waved away by fiat, unless they are no longer natively spoken and merely maintained for the sake of tradition or inertia (such as Latin in Europe or Standard Arabic in the Middle East). The reverse is also true; languages can't be revived or promoted merely by decree, either, unless they are already widely spoken (or other special circumstances prevail, such as they did in Palestine/Israel). Even reforms of existing, widely-spoken languages have historically met with mixed successes.

Therefore, to meet this challenge, it almost becomes necessary for us to exterminate an entire ethnolinguistic group or restrict ourselves to prestige languages that aren't spoken by anyone natively. Most of the languages that are dying out today have several things in common: they are frequently unwritten, lack the vocabulary to be used in all spheres of modern life, and are spoken by people who are bilingual in the tongue and another, more prestigious tongue.

On the "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" principle, how about a different Indian independence where Pakistan never comes into being, with the result that Urdu is never considered to be a seperate language but just as a dialect or group of dialects of Hindi? (A bit like Serbo-Croat in former Yugoslavia as distinct from Serbian and Croatian now.) That wipes out the fifth most widely spoken language in the world...

Likely the lingua franca of the subcontinent would still be called Hindustani, and it would be much more like what we call Urdu, unless a movement similar to that in OTL "purifies" it of all the Persian and Arabic vocabulary. So both OTL Hindi and Urdu are wiped out of the equation.

Arabic has a great chance of disappearing as a united language. Q'uranic Arabic is far removed from the many dialects all over the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. Break the faith a bit more, make vernacular Q'urans a bit more acceptable and Q'uranic Arabic is gone.

That apostrophe gets around more than I do.

 

[Sir Isaac Brock]

I think it is next to impossible to net the big ones. After 1700 it is far too late to try and extinguish German or Japanese, much less English, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, et cetera with anything short of a mass nuclear exchange in the '80s. I'm not even sure that would do it.

What about my ideas for wiping out English, Spanish, and Chinese? Sure they weren't super likely, but not impossible either.

Maybe Ukrainian and Belarussian as well, though it would take mass forced resettlement mixing them up with the Russians so Great Russian became the camp language.

Also, didn't the Soviets threaten Ukrainian just by the number of Russians that were settled in Ukraine? If Latvian or Estonian had more spreakers they just barely dodged the Russification bullet with the Soviets.

I'd have to say that if the Soviet Union was still alive today Ukrainian and Belarusian would be on their last legs, and several other Soviet languages would be in danger (Baltics, Causcasians, Central Asians, Tartars). A successful Hitler would have definitely wiped them out given enough time. Sadly, any language group living between the Germans and the Russians was in mortal danger for most of the last century, it's almost a miracle they survived as well as they did.

 

[Sir Isaac Brock]

I'm not sure why a French-dominated America would be any less bilingual than an English-dominated Canada. In fact, I suspect that it would be considerably more difficult to suppress English in the New World, seeing as the Anglophone settlers outnumber the Francophone ones to an enormous extent.

I would normally agree, but there are some important differences.

Canada and Louisiana were already recaptured by France in the early 1810s, and the nascent Anglophone communities have been in decline since then. Add to that the fact that England isn't the leader of powerful globe-spanning commercial empire ITTL, so English looses most of the prestige it had OTL, by France’s Empire is so massive that has the combined economic might of the UK and US of OTL. What you end up with is a massive French Empire in North America that controls the whole continent, and where the French language is the majority language in the majority of that territory (everything except the 1789 boundaries of the US). Initially the numerical advantage will be with the English, but it would quickly shift to the French, the mirror image of what happen in Canada OTL. However, the French a likely to be much less accommodating ITTL than the British were in Canada OTL. Why? There is no other, threatening their empire. IOTL, Britain had to butter up the French Canadians because it was afraid they might be used as a filth column by the US or the French. ITTL the French don't have any conceivable threat to their North American Empire, and can be as hardass as them want. They also have the attitude. OTL France is very strict about making sure that French is the only language of business, education, and government. Now in the countryside the dialects persisted until WWI and I expect that to be the same in France's new possessions, English will be a minor language in North America or England, a peasant language, and French will be the prestige language. This is similar to the situation with Ukrainian and Russian in Soviet Ukraine, or with Haitian Creole and French in Haiti. This situation would remain stable for a while, until the greater centralisation afforded by modern communications came about. Then TV and film would be almost entirely in French (like it is with English OTL), and English would be almost completely dead by 2007.

Languages can't simply be waved away by fiat, unless they are no longer natively spoken and merely maintained for the sake of tradition or inertia (such as Latin in Europe or Standard Arabic in the Middle East). The reverse is also true; languages can't be revived or promoted merely by decree, either, unless they are already widely spoken (or other special circumstances prevail, such as they did in Palestine/Israel). Even reforms of existing, widely-spoken languages have historically met with mixed successes.

Overwhealming numbers can do the trick, though. That's why most idegenous North American langauges have died out or are close to doing so, and why New York speaks English and not Dutch, etc.

Therefore, to meet this challenge, it almost becomes necessary for us to exterminate an entire ethnolinguistic group or restrict ourselves to prestige languages that aren't spoken by anyone natively. Most of the languages that are dying out today have several things in common: they are frequently unwritten, lack the vocabulary to be used in all spheres of modern life, and are spoken by people who are bilingual in the tongue and another, more prestigious tongue.

I disagree, it would be sadly all too easy to wipe out any number of languages. There are what, 2000 language currently threatened with extinction worldwide?

 

[dforgue]

Missed this part did you?


Your alternative idea has promise, but in any senario where the Brits are strong enough to reconquer the US in 1812, they must have allready beat Nappy, so it's hard for him to latter show up an conquer Great Britain. Don't you think?

Well, the Treaty of Paris gave the U.S. up to the Mississippi. Illinois, Wisconsin, Kentucky, etc. were not part of Louisiana. The United States would still include the country to the Mississippi except at the very south end of the Mississippi.

 

[Leo Caesius]

Now in the countryside the dialects persisted until WWI and I expect that to be the same in France's new possessions, English will be a minor language in North America or England, a peasant language, and French will be the prestige language.

This sounds all too strangely familiar. Wasn't this the situation a millennium ago?

You assume that the advent of modern communication will tip the balance in favor of French, but (making the assumption that modern communications technology arises in this TL, and that the French take advantage of it) by that point English (which will remain a language of some prestige, unless the French engage in a scorched earth campaign, burning all of the books and reducing all anglophone schools and universities to the ground) will be able to avail itself of this technology as well, as many languages have. If the French are ruthless, that won't make Anglophones abandon their language more quickly, especially if they have numeric superiority.

In order to suppress English, the French will have to do two things - swamp newly-conquered Anglophone colonies with French speakers, so that the Anglophones become a minority, and make French an attractive alternative (by using incentives such as universal education, the media, and so on, while suppressing the use of English in these realms). That's a tall order, and will take generations to accomplish, if it is possible at all. If the French have a globe-spanning empire, how many colonists will they be able to spare to exterminate English?

I disagree, it would be sadly all too easy to wipe out any number of languages. There are what, 2000 language currently threatened with extinction worldwide?

More, but you didn't read my prerequisites for language death above. Apart those examples that are the result of genocide, language death is very slow. It almost always results after a prolonged period of stable or semi-stable bilingualism, as the moribund language retreats from spheres of daily life. Government and commerce are almost always the first to go, and these are the spheres that show the most intrusion in the form of loanwords even when the language isn't dying out. Religion and family life are inevitably the last to go, and these spheres usually retain a more pristine vocabulary. The language may even be reduced to the point where it is only used in one sphere (e.g. religion or scholarship for languages like Hebrew and Latin).

Finally, almost all of the languages that are moribund today are unwritten and undocumented (there are a few exceptions, under a dozen, which are the only ones that non-linguists seem to care about). When a language lacks a literary tradition, it must passed down from generation to generation orally, which diminishes its prestige and its utility to future generations. Thus the temptation for children to switch is so much greater. This temptation is greatly reduced if a language has a literary tradition (which is, in itself, prestigious - only 70 or so languages have developed a literary tradition, out of the thousands that have been identified) and can be used in multiple spheres of life.

 

[Sir Isaac Brock]

This sounds all too strangely familiar. Wasn't this the situation a millennium ago?

True. So just imagine that situation had persisted long enough to have benefits of modern technology.

You assume that the advent of modern communication will tip the balance in favor of French, but (making the assumption that modern communications technology arises in this TL, and that the French take advantage of it) by that point English (which will remain a language of some prestige, unless the French engage in a scorched earth campaign, burning all of the books and reducing all anglophone schools and universities to the ground) will be able to avail itself of this technology as well, as many languages have.

You're assuming that the means of production ITTL would be a widely diffused as IOTL, which is not necessarily the case. Luckily we don't live in a world where the French government goes around burning down any building suspected of transmitting any radio or television signal in Basque or Breton. But we could! It's not likely. But it's possible, and plenty of other states have done things like this throughout history. That kind of policy would have had a crippling effect on any non-French languages in the Empire.

If the French are ruthless, that won't make Anglophones abandon their language more quickly, especially if they have numeric superiority.

No but it could rob English of any public life and reduce it to a language for rustics and the old.

In order to suppress English, the French will have to do two things - swamp newly-conquered Anglophone colonies with French speakers, so that the Anglophones become a minority, and make French an attractive alternative (by using incentives such as universal education, the media, and so on, while suppressing the use of English in these realms). That's a tall order, and will take generations to accomplish, if it is possible at all. If the French have a globe-spanning empire, how many colonists will they be able to spare to exterminate English?

I wouldn't be easy at all. But I think it is within the realm of possibility. I think the Empire could help since it would be the "language of inter-ethnic communication" just like Russian was in the Soviet Union or English is in India. That is to say, when West African meets a Canadian or a Louisianan meets a Englishman, they will have to speak French to each other, so it will be in France's best interest to "rotate" populations, and use new settlers from other parts of the Empire to pacify any other part. (British were good at this OTL).

More, but you didn't read my prerequisites for language death above. Apart those examples that are the result of genocide, language death is very slow. It almost always results after a prolonged period of stable or semi-stable bilingualism, as the moribund language retreats from spheres of daily life. Government and commerce are almost always the first to go, and these are the spheres that show the most intrusion in the form of loanwords even when the language isn't dying out. Religion and family life are inevitably the last to go, and these spheres usually retain a more pristine vocabulary. The language may even be reduced to the point where it is only used in one sphere (e.g. religion or scholarship for languages like Hebrew and Latin).

You don't think 1805 to 2007 is slow enough? Maybe it isn't but I couldn't think of better candidate than Napoleon I.

Finally, almost all of the languages that are moribund today are unwritten and undocumented (there are a few exceptions, under a dozen, which are the only ones that non-linguists seem to care about). When a language lacks a literary tradition, it must passed down from generation to generation orally, which diminishes its prestige and its utility to future generations. Thus the temptation for children to switch is so much greater. This temptation is greatly reduced if a language has a literary tradition (which is, in itself, prestigious - only 70 or so languages have developed a literary tradition, out of the thousands that have been identified) and can be used in multiple spheres of life.

That's a good point, I guess English already had a cannon of literature and functioning press by 1700, so that makes it pretty tough. Basically you're saying then that to kill a major European language you'd have to go back to before they started vernacular literature (Chaucer, Dante, et all) or at least back to before the printing press. That would probably make more sense, but I had to do the best I could with the POD I was given.

 

[HueyLong]

That apostrophe gets around more than I do.

I'm not the linguist, so I'll bow to you in removing it. I had been told by a few individuals that it was technically incorrect without the ' after the Q.

But I've also been told that Quran is also completely incorrect so....

 

[Leo Caesius]

I'm not the linguist, so I'll bow to you in removing it. I had been told by a few individuals that it was technically incorrect without the ' after the Q.

But I've also been told that Quran is also completely incorrect so....

It's still technically correct to say Koran in English, although that is changing fast (so take advantage of it while you still can). If you want to be precise about it, you can say Qur'an or even Qur'ān - the apostrophe goes after the r. Since English words don't generally have an apostrophe in the middle, the apostrophe seems to migrate around the word (I've seen Qu'ran and now Q'uran, among others, which is the reason for my remark). If it helps, in Arabic it's pronounced as if you were saying two words - "cur" (as in "dog") and "on" (as in the opposite of "off") - and the apostrophe goes right between the two words.

To complicate things, it's actually written without the apostrophe in Arabic (i.e. it looks like qurān, which is an incorrect transliteration) because of a spelling rule governing the use of the letter alif (can't have two in a row). This is just one of those words where you have to "know" how to pronounce it properly.

 

[Grey Wolf]

You could get rid of Modern Greek and Modern Hebrew by not having Greece rebel successfully in the 1830 period and not having an independent state of Israel come into existence

One could argue that sub-national form of a language which becomes its national language could be replaced by another - 1700 is too late to have Castilian replaced as 'Spanish' by Aragonese, but according to what I read that Matt posted in another thread it might work for 'Italian' not to the sub-national form that became dominant in OTL, but a different one...

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

 

[Grey Wolf]

It's still technically correct to say Koran in English, although that is changing fast (so take advantage of it while you still can). If you want to be precise about it, you can say Qur'an or even Qur'ān - the apostrophe goes after the r. Since English words don't generally have an apostrophe in the middle, the apostrophe seems to migrate around the word (I've seen Qu'ran and now Q'uran, among others, which is the reason for my remark). If it helps, in Arabic it's pronounced as if you were saying two words - "cur" (as in "dog") and "on" (as in the opposite of "off") - and the apostrophe goes right between the two words.

To complicate things, it's actually written without the apostrophe in Arabic (i.e. it looks like qurān, which is an incorrect transliteration) because of a spelling rule governing the use of the letter alif (can't have two in a row). This is just one of those words where you have to "know" how to pronounce it properly.

I really don't like words where you have to write a non-spoken apostrophe, and whilst I realise that what I like is completely irrelevant, it does seem that in Welsh the apostrophised form is only for pedants

For example there is a place down the road from here called Caerlan, but on older maps and one I saw produced more recently (but only one out of about 6) it is written something like caer'lan

But it seems this is becoming archaic, so how come in transliterating Arabic all the apostrophes are coming back IN ? Is that just political correctness ?

Best Regards
Grey Wolf