Re: Anyone conversant in English (was: Tagalog) here?

phogl...@xxxxxx:

Jens S. Larsen:
phogl...@xxxxxx:
Padraic Brown wrote:
Could be -- but the misuses of ESL users won't become Standard. They
will always be the subject of how _not_ to use the language.
You are being very unrealistic now, my friend. The language will
become increasingly tolerant of irrelevant solecisms which do not
That looks like an instance of "language" used in the sense of "speech
community".

Make it speech community then. The point is, that the speech community
which will matter will be the Internet community.

It's not monolingual.

"Bad" English has
been the most widely spoken language of the world, and now that there
is the Internet, that sort of bad English will also be the kind of
English that most people will encounter in written form.

Why would any great number of native English-speakers go to
international forums? Most of them live in big countries anyway, and
they have to be influenced before puberty in order to make any
considerable impact.

As long as large numbers of people speak non-auxiliary English outside
the net, chances are that those will continue to set the standards
within the writing community of the Internet. Tolerance to those who
can't or won't comply with all details of the standard won't
necessarily change the standard. In the case of English, _ex_change of
standards is actually more likely to happen some time.

I wouldn't be that sure. The continuous exposure will inevitable
influence usage among those non-auxiliary speakers too.

_When_ they finally put themselves under that influence, won't that
raise their linguistic awareness too?


It's really the English-speakers, not the abstraction of English
language, that are globally dominant. We can be rather sure the
dominance won't last forever, but it's difficult, maybe impossible in
principle, to predict when and how the demise will happen.

I would say that it is quite thinkable that the dominance of English
will "last forever" in the sense that English might oust national
languages in several countries where it is strictly a foreign language
now and become the most widely spoken native language for generations
to come - i.e. that the dominance of English will only end when
English breaks apart into several distinct standard languages. And
with all these communication technologies connecting people in
English, it does not look very probable that that would ever happen.

You don't think the examples of Hebrew and Irish are forerunners of
the future standard of global language planning?

I would not personally be terribly surprised if, for instance, Germany
would turn into an Anglophone country in the end. Nobody here will
live to see the day that the last native speaker of German passes
away, but my point is that English will probably last as THE dominant
language long enough to oust even a language such as German. Even in
Finland, the prevailing linguistic attitudes do suggest that a shift
from Finnish to English as community language is not entirely
unthinkable.

You know, sociolinguistic surveys have been conducted on this. At
least in Denmark, it's characteristic that monolinguals are much more
prone to agree to a statement like "It would be better if we all spoke
only English" than ESL-speakers are. When the goal is within reach,
people begin to hesitate.

I don't say it is a very happy or promising possibility, because
nationalistic strife, resentment, and wars will certainly survive the
global shift to English, and nationalisms will if anything become even
more repulsive and barbaric, because there will be no native languages
and literatures to provide an outlet for national sentiment more
civilised than skin-colourism and ethnic cleansing. The survival of
violent "physical-force nationalism" in Ireland despite (or because
of) the demise of Irish as well as the recent wars between the Serbo-
Croatian-speaking peoples of ex-Yugoslavia are cases in point.

I don't think Basque fits well into that model... nor Luxembourgish,
for that matter. Peter was right, you really are a misanthrope, though
not for the reasons he indicated.

Jens S. Larsen

.

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