Greetings Economists, On Apr 15, 2007, at 10:48 PM, Patrick Bond wrote:
Colonial policy meant that the language of the colonising nation was forced on to local people, often with a systematic prohibition of indigenous languages.
Doyle; This topic is quite complex. Starting in the French Revolution, the Paris French language was imposed on the many regional languages and dialects to unify French culture which they still take seriously as opposed to typical English attitudes toward language. This process of unification is very important in the nation state. Empires like Great Britain could not over ride languages in very large subject peoples like India, but English as an administrative tool with much inherit cognitive wealth is a great unifier in the former Empire. The perfection of administrative access is what has spread English over virtually all other great language except Chinese. Nigeria is a good example in that it contains in it's border some 1000 plus different languages. Africans often in the center band of states speak multiple tongues as a matter of course. So that knowing three different languages is common enough. At the same time languages make it difficult to administer a big state. So that English is really important for this purpose in Nigeria as elsewhere. The problem of a shared language depends upon the writing system as well. Mandarin writing does not unite regional dialects in China, and that common though difficult script is the great alternative tool to alphabetic scripts. It is my view discussion of language now goes well beyond writing systems because of the computing tools. It tends to be that technical people poo poo computer translation as weak and fallible, but that is the obvious avenue to address English chauvinism. If one's native language does not need to be lost to the massive common languages of the world, then there must be a framework to knit together small group languages into the larger big language system of commerce and industry that continues to pull more and more people into English. When one looks at small languages there are very large body related shifts in cognition that they reflect. African is rich in how language uses the body that English is relatively insensitive to. Finally, whatever language people use, publishing books relies upon one to many media, which fundamentally conflicts with language use. No revival of small languages will occur because of book publishing shifts. It really depends upon great increases in recording and access to language by anyone. It's hopeless for the great poly-language savants to operate in a very large language rich environment of African small languages or for that matter China. These are massive technical problems in automating how language is really used and made. Doyle
