In France, the project of creating a French nation and a French people required taking a diversity of cultures and languages that already existed in the territory, and trying to standardize and unify them. This is what modern nationalism did in many parts of Europe.
The USA is a different kind of project, wherein people from Europe came to take over the continent from it's previous inhabitants, stamping out the various cultures and languages that were on this continent by displacing whole peoples, not by assimilating them. Initially there were different European groups that were also kind of fighting each other for power. Obviously the ones from England were the dominant power in creating the United States of America, but other European cultures existed on the continent for a while too, the Lone Star State in Texas actually had three official state langauges -- English, Spanish, and German (yup).
So, yeah, these were very different things. I'd start from the actual history in comparing them.
I guess the commonality is the end result of homogenizing culture and suppressing cultural diversity for the purposes of political power.
Which in almost all cases are the result of top-down processes. You're arguing that individual adjustments to change are the agents of change.
English gives opportunity because of the colonial foundation created by English invasion being transferred to the US, due to their long-term Western military hegemony resulting from their distance from a destructive pair of European wars.
Of course, a lingua franca is good, but the cultural and professional domination is too much in my opinion. US culture is awful, but is heavily marketed and sold (and ironically is almost all of foreign manufacture due to the continuing trade deficit/strong dollar policy. US professional dominance is due to its corruption, lack of regulation and labor rights, military aggression providing and preserving new markets, and diplomatic aggression making it the gatekeeper to those markets.
The dominance of English is a result of that, just like the domination of Latin, Spanish, and French (or Arabic for that matter) were. It's something that's happening, not something to be supported.
edit:
> But the national government of Sweden is a different story. They currently consider Elfdalian a dialect of Swedish, not its own language.
> Speaking in Elfdalian, Swedish MP Peter Helander recently asked Parliament why that’s the case. But before Culture Minister Amanda Lind could answer the question, the parliamentary speaker interrupted them both to say that only Swedish may be spoken in the chamber. Helander said the "only Swedish" remark proves his point, that Elfdalian should be considered its own language.
I don't know how much more official a condemnation of a minority language can be.
I think saying "US culture is awful" weakens your point. US culture is extremely diverse, from The Rock to Jeff Koons. It's also central to the twentieth century. Dismissing it all as awful doesn't make much sense.
It's a pity that Gresham's Law ended up making English almost ubiquitous, to the detriment of the many languages from all around the world. (I don't think I need to mention the many advantages that counterbalance this.)
So the native population was obviously suppressed in a bid for political power, but were any other cultures oppressed into homogenizing for the purpose of solidifying someone’s political power? Did someone oppress the Germans to cause them to speak English, or did they assimilate for the obvious economic and social efficiencies? Homogenized culture is the result, but it’s not clear to me that it was nefarious in these cases.
Fighting Everything German in Texas, 1917–1919 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24449071
"…World War I not only intensified fears that the "melting pot" was failing, but also broadened this concern to include German Americans as a suspect ethnic group. Before the war, German Americans were one of the most respected immigrant groups in America, having achieved success in many spheres. Brewery magnate Adolf Busch, intellectual and U.S. Senator Carl Schulz, and financier John D. Rockefeller were among the German Americans who had risen to prominence in the United States. Significantly, German Americans acquired their favorable reputation despite being the ethnic group most resistant to assimilation…"
"…Furthermore, Texans’ historic distrust of German Texans helped inspire anti-German activities. During the antebellum period, slaveholders had viewed German Texans with suspicion, especially after an 1854 convention of German Texans adopted an anti-slavery resolution. In fact, only a minority of German Texans supported this resolution, but most Texans did not understand that subtlety. They were preoccupied with German Texans’ common culture which prevented them from discerning political, religious, and social differences among Germans…"
"…Claiming that German Texans’ ethnicity was equivalent to disloyalty, many council of defense members in Texas were determined to purge all traces of German culture from their state…"
(DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6563.1994.tb00925.x for your sci-hub needs...)
But my main point is that these are very different situations -- national projects in Europe unifying/homogenizing various long-existed local geographically-specific cultures (I'm not sure 'assimilation' is even the right word here). Vs America, where various European populations came, only in the last few hundred years, displaced local geographically-specific cultures, and then competed with each other for political power or cultural hegemony as they expanded to take land the previous occupants were displaced from, also sometimes forming communities together (in which they were all newcomers to the land). Just two very different situations; although i tried to say there were some commonalities in the way cultures are homogenized/unified, I am sympathetic to the idea that "why are you even looking for commonalities these are such different situations".
I think we often over-simplify the diversity of historical paths with this stuff, assuming that the way we now look at "culture" or "nationality" or "race" has always been the way people did, and/or was inevitable. But these things were built, in the not too recent past, and didn't work the same way they work now even in recent history, and worked differently in different places.
I’m not trying to “gotcha” you, but “pressure to assimilate in order to grow someone’s political power” doesn’t sound like an accurate characterization of American history as I understand it.
As I understand it, the history is more diverse and complicated than you understand it. I shared one source to that end, you dismissed it because it didn't match your preferred narrative.
But again, my main point was not that one sentance.
> In 1927, Wood was commissioned to create a stained glass window in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Unhappy with the quality of domestic glass sources, he used glass made in Germany. The local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) complained about the use of a German source for a World War I memorial, as Germany had been an enemy of the US in that war. They expressed a lingering anti-German sentiment in society, and other people in Cedar Rapids also protested the German source. As a result, the window was not dedicated until 1955.[2]
> Wood was said to have described the DAR as "those Tory gals" and "people who are trying to set up an aristocracy of birth in a Republic."[3] Five years later Wood painted Daughters of Revolution, which he described as his only satire. He emphasized the contrast of three aged women in faded dresses framed against the heroic painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware, which, ironically, was painted in Germany by the German-American artist Emanuel Leutze.[1] Wood depicted his mother's clothing on the models, including a lace collar and amber pin he bought for her in Germany.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughters_of_Revolution
German names became anglicised, German newspapers disappeared, and German stopped being taught in schools.
Whether German would have survived without this sort of persecution is not really knowable, but it did happen.
As for how widespread this was, some examples at the time included a lynching of a German seeking naturalisation:
> One such death of note was that of Robert Prager, a German seeking naturalization in St. Louis, Missouri who was accused on the night of April 14, 1914, of being a German spy by a mob of 300 "men and boys" after he had allegedly shared words at a socialist meeting earlier that evening. The jail where he had taken refuge from the crowds was quickly overrun and being stripped of his clothes, he was led down Main Street with a rope tied around his neck, and was forced to walk the route, and with shattered glass bottles being thrown down in his walking path, he was forced to sing patriotic songs. He was forced during this walk to kiss an American flag which had been wrapped around him. He was walked to a hanging tree at the edge of town where he was lynched. In an article from The St. Louis Global-Democrat, it was reported that there had been multiple incidences of mobs tarring and feathering individuals.
Note that this was prior to US entry into World War I.
Language bans:
> Language use had also been the primary focus of legislation at state and local levels. Some of these regulations included the publication of charters banning speaking German within city limits. A total ban on the teaching of German in both public and private education could be found in at minimum 14 states including ome states would extend this to ban the teaching of all languages except for english, although the majority who would ban non-english languages typically only banned German. A total ban on teaching German in both public and private schools was imposed for a time in at least 14 states, including California, Indiana,[11] Wisconsin,[12] Ohio, Iowa and Nebraska. California's ban lasted into the mid-1920s. The Supreme Court case in Meyer v. Nebraska ruled in 1923 that these laws were unconstitutional.[13]In October 1918, a bill intended to restrict federal funds towards states that enforced English-only education was created. On April 9, 1919, Nebraska enacted a statute called "An act relating to the teaching of foreign languages in the state of Nebraska," commonly known as the Siman Act. It provided that "No person, individually or as a teacher, shall, in any private, denominational, parochial or public school, teach any subject to any person in any language other than the English language." It forbade foreign instruction to children who had not completed the eighth grade.I n Montana, speaking German was banned in public for two years during World War I.[14] Pennsylvania's legislature passed a German-language ban, but it was vetoed by the governor. Churches during this period such as the Lutheran Church became internally divided over services and religious instruction in German and English.[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language_in_the_United_...
In Iowa in particular:
> Harding's proclamation codified four rules for the state. First, Iowa schools - public, parochial and private - could only teach in English. Second, public conversations, including on trains and over the telephone, must be in English. Third, speeches or public addresses could only be given in English. Fourth, churches cannot conduct public worship services in any language other than English. We know this proclamation today as the Babel Proclamation.
https://www.thegazette.com/guest-columnists/a-century-ago-io...
What about cultural imperialism? A language shapes your identity because it literally gives the grammar to your thoughts. But other cultural goods like music, netflix, youtube, tv, you name it, do shape our cultural grammar just as much. This is a point I don't expect anyone already embedded in the dominant culture to find salient, because the culture we are in is as transparent as sea is to fish.
> People are begging to come to wealthy countries
If people had comparable prospects at home, so few would actually leave. If you look at the non-asylum-seeking immigration reasons (i.e. the "beggars" in your words), it is primarily about economic hardship, with persecution, violence, war, human rights added on top. Guess what, in an interconnected international arena, wealthy countries have more culpability about those conditions than we care to admit.
That has been talked about ad nauseam for the past 10 years. Maybe it's time to remember that non-wealthy countries have more culpability for their own conditions than anyone dares to mention?
Imperialism goes way more back than 10 years. It probably has been nauseating for some for at least a century.
> Maybe it's time to remember that non-wealthy countries have more culpability for their own conditions than anyone dares to mention?
Sounds like you've made the exact calculus to rank order culpability. I'm very interested to hear how we all can objectively arrive at this conclusion.
Alternatively, you could tell us a state that haven't been at the receiving end of a war, coup, resource exploitation, economic warfare etc. and still managed to screw up their quest for self-determination.
Argentina was already out of the rich-countries-club by the time the 70's had come around, and the bloody military coup you reference is likely the inevitable political instability that comes surely after sustained economic instability.
And as for Zimbabwe, the "civil-war" was hardly a destabilising event for the country, and the international isolation was easily evaded, this is well documented. I think Zimbabwe, once the bread basket of Africa as Rhodesia, is a great example of how self-determination might undermine an improperly equipped nation.
So what happens when you learn a second, or third, or fourth language fluently? [Like, say me?]
Do you suddenly have multiple-personalities?
Complete bollocks.
So does your 'identity' (whatever that is) change half way through the sentence. In you head?
Are you literally a different person at either end of your sentence?
SMH.
Thanks for your sophisticated analysis.[1]
Psycho-activeness of language has an incredible depth of account from philosophy to semiotics. But a simple enough paper I found for you that exemplifies (not exhaustively proves) my claim is Holtgraves & Kashima, 2008. It is freely accessible.
Additionally equivocating personality, identity and pathologies like dissociative personality is going to mislead us, because they are strawman arguments.
Think of yourself growing up. Turning to an adult was a change in identity. Do you remember the day you switched from being a child to being an adult? Was it a psychopathology to become an adult? Are you completely dissociated from childhood memories, and seemingly, your childhood ego-states?
Finally I will pull another comment of yours in this thread;
> No here is the thing: none of this has affected my identify at all, not even in the slightest.
The thing with identity is that it is not entirely transparent to us. You don't know who you are as much as you think you do. Not only that, if language is the ground on which our identities form, by definition you wouldn't realize a change in identity due to change in grounding. By these accounts you wouldn't be the most reliable witness to assess your identity change.
[1] I know sarcasm is frowned up in this forum but I wanted to give an example of how we use language to emotionally regulate ourselves. We can sublimate our anger by creating a contradictory perspective to salience the unfairness of the opposing perspective. It gives us a strategy out of merely attacking back in kind. Collect thousands of tools like this together and you bet it significantly contributes to your identity.
Neither then would anyone else, including the OP.
Learning new languages does add different layers to your personality.
I am native-level fluent in three languages, and have some level of fluency in three more.
Learning a new language opens a complete new door to a new culture, and way of thoughts through books, movies, songs, and so much more.
Even if you don't spend time to learn a culture well, i.e. don't listen to music or read literature, learning a new grammar, and very importantly, new words, do reshape you, and gives you new perspectives and ways of thoughts.
Some of these a polysynthetic languages, others are agglutinative. Two are tonal, and one doesn't have an alphabet.
No here is the thing: none of this has affected my identify at all, not even in the slightest. Same person: just different sounds for things.
Presumably my testimony counts as well.
It's happening in india today. It's very sad.
That is exactly how it happens today. The process your parent describes is a currently ongoing one in France.
In the case of Sweden, which is already a small population, it must be difficult to keep having used for a very minority language in a modern world. In order for a language to survive, nowadays, you need the language to also be very present on the internet. That means having a big community of native speakers and creators, media, literature, art, cinema, education, work... That's expensive and makes little sense for populations that are quite small I would reckon.
If this is the pathway we choose/are forced down, will the term ‘culture’ be needed? We will all be the same.
I bring up these counterpoints only to say that while language is a major factor in culture, there are still many other factors.
For example, Catholics are the largest religious group in Ireland and France. Oklahoma is only 4.9% Catholics with Baptist being it’s largest religious group.