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

phoglund@xxxxxx:

Jens S. Larsen wrote:
It's not monolingual.

Internet is certainly plurilingual, but de facto, the Anglophone part
of it is more "international" than the rest of it.

If you call it imperial in stead of international, you can drop the
quotation marks.

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.

English-language forums as such are widely perceived as "international
forums" and tend to be "invaded" by international visitors such as you
and me.

Why wouldn't that standardize our English rather than de-standardize
that of the natives? After all, different people have different ways
of abusing English. Besides, visitors from other speech communities
normally invade English language forums only if there are no
comparable forums in their own language -- either because their
language has a weak internet presence for demographic or economical
reasons, or because there's a tradition of censorship in their
country.

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?

Why should they? They will doubtlessly find many of the non-native
solecisms and malapropisms amusing and adopt them into their own
English - to start with as jokes, but eventually many such "jokes"
will persist and become mainstream usage.

How many jokes of that kind are common enough across languages to make
an lasting impact on English?


You don't think the examples of Hebrew and Irish are forerunners of
the future standard of global language planning?
I don't think global language planning is enforceable. Which aspects
of the "examples of Hebrew and Irish" do you refer to actually? Would
you mind to elaborate?

Well, mostly their existence. Language has the forms its speakers want
it to have. It's well known that words are arbitrary: There is no
relation between word form and word meaning. But language change is
arbitrary too. It has to work with what's there beforehand, but apart
from that, people are free to do with it what they want. So, if they
want to sound cool, who do they imitate? Non-Americans imitate
American English, but who do the Americans imitate? Hint: Where does
"cool" in that sense come from?


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.

In my experience, people proficient only in English in addition to
their native language are the most enthusiastic about the possibility
of an exclusively Anglophone world. But I readily admit that I don't
have any data. Have you incidentally got a link to that survey?

This is a poster that presents it, made for the occasion of the "open
day" of Copenhagen University two years ago:
<humaniorafestival.dk/phd-2005/jacobthoegersen.pdf>.
(I assume you read Danish.)


I don't say it explains everything, but I do think that one language
for everybody is not a miracle solution. Latin American countries have
fought great, often destructive wars among themselves despite the fact
that they all speak the same language (with the exception of Brazil,
of course).

Sure, but how many of them speak a language _they feel they own_? I
believe that's the important aspect in this connection.

Peter was right, you really are a misanthrope, though
not for the reasons he indicated.

Why? I don't think a little geopolitical realism is misanthropy.

You're foreseeing both that English takes over and that it destroys
itself in the process -- you really have to pick your pessimism about
the human race, you can't have it both ways!

Jens S. Larsen

.

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