On the one hand: If your culture needs a preservation movement, it's not a culture, but a relic. Culture is defined by people, not some sacred thing that needs to be preserved. How much of the Italian cuisine they're trying to protect would exist if they had the same attitude in the 1500s, when the tomato was introduced to Italy?
On the other hand: I think countries should resist global cultural homogenisation. No offence meant to the Americans here, but I detest the exportation of American culture to Europe. I don't mean music and films, but rather the way of thinking about the world. I suspect this is where things like these proposals are coming from; it's the pendulum swing reaching too far before it settles in the middle.
I don't think its necessarily about the culture itself here, its merely a cheap populist tactic to rabble-rouse among a nation that has a rich history and struggles to handle the fact that its present isn't at that zenith. France do a lot of this sort of thing too.
I would argue that belittling cultural preservation demonstrates deep Anglo-centric bias. While its fine for lulz, I worry that you're being sincere. Try asking _anyone_ who doesn't have English as their first language in a serious context how they feel about their language and you'll struggle to find someone without a genuine fondness for it.
On paper there is absolutely nothing wrong with cultures seeking to preserve the use of their own language, however it is fair for us to argue that restrictive and punitive measures such as this are not helpful.
Bear in mind one day English will no longer be the lingua franca as demonstrated by the word for lingua franca. ;). Would English then be a "relic" to you?
I'm Italian, living in Canada, the reason why I'm attached to my primary language is because I know the most vocabulary and language usage.
Aside from that, it's an unfortunate language, since you can't use to communicate anywhere else beside Italy.
We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication, when invoking cultural issues.
If you have to penalize usage of English words, you are doing something really wrong.
And when I talk about work it's really hard for me to do in my home language. Some words have no translation or incorrect translation (I work as software developer), which incidentally is the same situation my Italian teacher faced when trying to explain some concepts that had a translation in Italian, but the original latin word had a "wider meaning" that wasn't captured by the translation.
from my perspective given my English background, I like English spelling. Sensibility says I should just give it all up and adhere to the dominant language form (en-US) for the sake of clarity.... and yet.... I shall not.
> We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication
But also one might consider, or seek the word, that certain way of spitting, tells some peeps we fam.
Language isn't just about communicating meaning but also cultural content, identity and social markers. This is part of what drives its frequent development and also part of why some people want to preserve their way of speaking even if its merely a creole or a "dying" language.
I grew up in the UK and prefer British-English to American-English, both in terms of spelling and pronunciation.
That said English has terrible spelling compared to other languages, it's impossible to know how to pronounce a word just looking at the spelling.
I don't need to give examples, as it is well-known already. I benefit from the fact that many people I've met around the world speak English, but it's almost unfortunate that one of the harder/more inconsistent languages "won".
If you are interested, there's a good reason why English spelling is so weird. The pronunciation of vowels shifted between 1400-1700 and depending on when a specific word's spelling was "standardised" decides which version of the pronunciation was used. If it's the old vowel pronunciation the spelling will make no sense, whereas the new vowel are mostly ok.
> I benefit from the fact that many people I've met around the world speak English, but it's almost unfortunate that one of the harder/more inconsistent languages "won".
English is not one of the harder or more inconsistent languages in the world. It's one of the simpler and more consistent ones.
This is a general pattern with languages that go through a phase where they are learned by large numbers of adults.
English is very inconsistent, not that this necessarily makes it harder of course, compared to languages such as Finnish which has very regular grammar and no ambiguity with pronounciation.
("I could have read the red book, because I like to read." is just one example of inconsistent pronounciation. Spelling is non-obvious to people learning the language, again as a result of unusual and inconsistent pronounciation.)
Comparing to Finnish is... a choice. Finnish is known to be one of the most difficult languages to learn because of the incredibly variation in cases.
Different languages have different features which make them harder to different populations. A better description of English would be: English is one of the languages to learn. English has no complex case system. We do not have grammatical gender. Our use of grammatical number is limited and consistent (except in certain loan words). There are exceptions to these, but they are largely words which are so common as to be part of the foundational learning -- pronouns, primarily, where we preserve gender and where case goes beyond "add an apostrophe-s." Because case is not especially important, word order is important, which can be challenging for people from cultures with a different standard word order. Spelling is challenging due to both the vowel shift and the number of languages which have acted as input to English (at a minimum: native Celtic languages in Britain; Anglo-Frisian and its antecedents; French, both Norman and more southern dialects; and Latin and Greek pulled in by the early natural philosophers of the early modern period).
English does have an unusually high number of irregular verbs, which, combined with the spelling and pronunciation, can make it seem inconsistent; but there are many other ways in which English is startlingly simple compared to highly-inflected languages.
I moved to Finland, which is why it comes to mind. Finnish is definitely difficult, for native English speakers due to the grammar.
But Finnish is easier than English in the sense that pronounciation is 100% regular and predictable - that's the metric I've been using in this thread to say "English is hard". (I understand the reasons behind that, the mixture of influences, loan-words, and voewl shifting.)
In a lot of ways English is easy, and even bad English is understandable.
Yeah but this stuff get pushed as a higher priority over communication, that's my problem with every argument about "preserving culture".
If everybody in Italy understands "computer", calling it "calcolatore" is outright against communication (that word in italian is closer to "device to do math operations", which is technically correct, but not what people imagine)
The root "comput-" comes from latin "computo" while "calcolatore" comes from the latin "calculo" which is a rough latin synonym of "computo". The form "comput-" transformed in Italian into "cont-" like in "conto" (English count), "contante" (cash) etc.
So perhaps "contatore" (counter) instead of "computer" would make more etymological sense.
We had this debate in France in 1955. We use the word "ordinateur" for "computer", which comes from the latin "ordinator" which means something that order things, it shares the same root as the word "order".
It was picked over the word "calculateur" which is the French equivalent of "calculatore" after IBM France shared a letter wondering if "calculateur" was too restrictive and didn't properly express the machine capabilities. To which Jacques Perret answered "why not ordinateur?"
The problem is the interpretation people give to the word. If I say computer, people think of something with keyboard + mouse and a screen, or maybe a laptop (funny enough, they will not think of their phone).
If I say "calcolatore", we envision one of those devices to do math operations, used in school (are those still a thing?)
I am always amused by those kinds of etymologies where a word "gets back" to the language it came from or its more direct heir (Italian for Latin) after living in a different language.
In Hebrew we have "tachless" that comes from yiddish "tachless", that comes from Hebrew "tachlit" but now tachless and tachlit have different meanings and different grammar roles
This only serves to form unnecessary barriers. If tomorrow, everyone spoke the same language (ignore which one it was), society would be better off.
History and historical culture, on their own, are a bad reason to do something (ie learning from history makes sense. Doing something for no other reason than the length of time its been does not)
The rest is just about which language and who chooses.
The only thing this sort of bill does is make it harder to get to a better state. At least here they are not pretending it's helpful to do it
I posited a world where flipping a switch was possible and the result was perfect.
All your complaints are about a world where that isn't true, and so are literally inapplicable.
You can argue this is unrealistic, but i'd simply point out the rest is a question of tradeoffs - how fast you do it, what language you pick, etc, there are no perfect answers.
That is no reason not to make progress.
As for practicallness:
In a world of 8 billion people, literally anything you do (something, nothing, whatever) will cause hardship for someone. It's not even an interesting goal to try.
Doing nothing causing hardship.
Moving forward causes hardship.
Combine this with the fact that the unfortunate reality of humans is that one of the main ways that change happens writ large is through seeing the suffering (and success!) of others. I don't think you will change that part of our psychology anytime soon.
The sad truth is we don't all get a perfect, or even good, life. You can't make progress on this, either, without causing hardship to some. Does that mean you should not try?
Because you will never make progress in steps that are only positive for everyone, or even often get the chance to choose who it gets to be negative for.
> If tomorrow, everyone spoke the same language (ignore which one it was), society would be better off.
It wouldn't last. Within years it would devolve into various creoles and with centuries; almost entirely different languages. Language is not merely functional but cultural and has purpose outside of meaning (e.g. identity).
That's not especially distinctive of Germanic languages. Chinese will do it exactly the same way, though the chains of nouns that are common in Germanic would be unusual to say the least in Chinese.
But gluing words together without explicit connections is common pretty much everywhere. Compare Greek, which freely forms adjectives that way, or Latin sanguisuga "bloodsuck[er]" (leech) or lucifer "light-bear[er]" (light-bearer).
Chinese has quite nearly the opposite problem: compounds are so pervasive that they'll think any disyllable is a compound, identifiable morphemes or no, even if it's a phonetic loan.
it can be done in romance languages such as italian, but it's way more frequent that one word has to be a verb and another a noun: sanguisuga (blood sucker), magiafuoco (fire eater), porta tagliafuoco (fire resistent door), apri-pista, or noun+adjective: cassaforte (strong box, safe) or preposition+noun: oltretomba (beyond the grave, after life)
There are cases like noun+noun but they are rare and they are not productive, i.e. I cannot make one up. Pescecane (fish dog, i.e. a shark) is ok, but you cannot "sferaneve" for a snowball
Probably the reason is that the two nouns have to have a special relation for it to work, i.e. one word has to act as an adjective, it has to qualify the first word somehow. The shark is a fish, but is a fish that bites like a dog, hence it's a fishdog a pescecane.
Similarly "casa madre", for headquarters, it's not a house of the mother ("case della madre") but it's a special kind of house that has the quality of "gatherhing the whole family together like if in the case of a real family"
I don't think that's quite fair. I have had Italian-Spanish conversations which were slow but not painful. With Dutch I can often guess what something means when I see it written down but understanding the spoken language is very hard and I can only pick out a few words here and there.
Sign languages are independent languages in their own right, with their own grammar, often very different to the grammar of the spoken language(s) used in the same region.
> We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication, when invoking cultural issues. If you have to penalize usage of English words, you are doing something really wrong.
The people pushing for this do, in fact remember that the primary purpose of language is communication.
Imagine being an aging Italian, or Quebecer, who has spoken Italian, or French all your life, do not have a good grasp of English, only to become unable to understand much of the discourse in your own mother country.
I, myself, am not super keen on seeing Spanish, Mandarin, or Esperanto become the lingua franca of my area.
The reason in the first place why there are English words in the day-to-day Italian is because a majority of the population _uses already these words_.
Given that, this goes against the "preserve communication" argument. After all, this is how Italian was born (at least that's what we studied in school), there was Greek, there was Latin, somewhere the language got distorted by common people all the way until it became Italian and got shared by many, many people.
The language was not defined, it evolved with how people used it.
This process has been going on forever, I don't see why it should change now with artificial constraints.
For what is worth, official documents should be allowed in English language for the entire country, given we are part of the EU, there is a whole money-sucking machine (and time-sucking!) to translate things in English when interacting with other EU countries.
The phrase lingua Franca is a great example of why English is the most international language in the world. It’s because of its ability to absorb from different languages.
That phrase is as English as the word tomato today.
The phrase lingua Franca shows why languages become dominant, because they’re the one spoken by the most powerful group of people. It’s not because English is uniquely good at absorbing from different languages. Japanese uses a ton of foreign loanwords for things. So does Hindu.
Lingua Franca is a phrase in the most dominant language 2000 years ago, about the most dominante language 1000 years ago, used in the dominant language now. All of those languages used tons of loanwords as well. Someday Mandarin or Hindu may become the most dominant and they will use loanwords, and phrases from those languages will slip into English speech.
But those changes won’t be because English in unique in some way, it will be because that’s how languages work.
Minor nitpick: lingua franca was not the language of the most dominant group like English is today. It was rather the name of a pidgin loosely named after the name of one of the people's on Europe but having almost no connection to it other than "franks" being the exonym for "western Europeans" as perceived by east Mediterranean people. Sabir was not the language used by the Franks.
>The phrase lingua Franca shows why languages become dominant, because they’re the one spoken by the most powerful group of people. It’s not because English is uniquely good at absorbing from different languages. Japanese uses a ton of foreign loanwords for things. So does Hindu.
This isn't true. English is easily the most-spoken 2nd language in the world, and it's not just because of Anglophone nation power, it's because English is an easily-learned language. I live in Japan, and while Japanese borrows a lot of foreign words (mostly from English), it's not ever going to become dominant because it's just too hard to learn. It's the same with Chinese. Any language that requires you to learn thousands of glyphs just to be fluent in the written version isn't going to go far worldwide compared to a language that uses 26 (and shares those with a large array of other languages).
English is a uniquely simple language to learn compared to the languages of other powerful nations (Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German); some of those have extremely baroque writing systems (or simply unique and different, for Cyrillic), and all of them have very complicated grammar rules. By contrast, any idiot can learn a little basic English quickly and speak it well enough to be understood, even if it's technically incorrect.
Grammar is really not that much of an impediment to picking up a 2nd language for business and trade purposes. Unlike in school, no one really cares that much about grammar if you can understand what the other is saying.
And English grammar is really not that simple - for example, few other languages have the distinction between continuous and perfect forms of a tense, but foreign speakers can simply avoid it in English ("I read the docs" instead of "I am reading the docs" for a really basic speaker).
One advantage you may mean by "grammar" is that English has relatively little variance for a verb or noun form - once you learn the root, there's not that many variations to account for tense, plurals etc. But Mandarin Chinese for example is much simpler from this point of view: there are basically 0 variations.
Phonetics are more of a problem. Chinese would be very hard to pick up in much of the world simply because tone is a very foreign phonetical feature, and people who haven't experienced it growing up are unlikely to even realize it is meaningful just by listening to speech.
However, even that doesn't matter too much. French is also a phonetically difficult language, with many very similar syllables being important for distinguishing words (for example the distinction between -n as a consonant vs a nasalized vowel). But, that didn't stop virtually all of Europe from adopting it as an international language at some point, not to mention much of north Africa.
> few other languages have the distinction between continuous and perfect forms of a tense, but foreign speakers can simply avoid it in English ("I read the docs" instead of "I am reading the docs" for a really basic speaker)
I can't really tell what you mean. "I am reading the docs" is an example of a form that is generally called "continuous", yes. "Continuous" is an aspect, not a tense.
The same is true of "perfect", but the larger problem is that you haven't provided a perfect form. (Finite) perfect constructions in English are marked by auxiliary have, "I have read the docs". "I read the docs" uses what is generally called the "plain form" (the name describes the form, not the meaning that calls for the form), and it expresses that the verb is stative[1], describing a fact about the subject ("I am the kind of person who reads the docs") rather than describing an event that takes place at a particular time.
> Chinese would be very hard to pick up in much of the world simply because tone is a very foreign phonetical feature
This is very commonly asserted, but I don't believe it's true. Here you can see a popular American sitcom making a series of jokes about tone, even though the same people who will tell you that Chinese is difficult because of its tones will also tell you that English doesn't have them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjpnslsuA2g
So the exotic phonetic phenomenon that makes it so difficult for English speakers to learn Chinese is... something that English speakers are natively aware enough of to make and appreciate jokes about. (Not to mention objecting to people who are doing it wrong - check out "uptalk", which people spontaneously punctuated with question marks because the phenomenon was so obvious to them that they felt obligated to indicate it in writing even though the writing system has no provision for it.)
> "I read the docs" uses what is generally called the "plain form" (the name describes the form, not the meaning that calls for the form), and it expresses that the verb is stative[1], describing a fact about the subject ("I am the kind of person who reads the docs") rather than describing an event that takes place at a particular time.
"Perfect" was the wrong word for what I meant, you're right. I was referring to the difference between the continuous form and the plain form, which doesn't exist in many other languages. For example, in French, "je lis les docs" can mean either "I am reading the docs" or "I read the docs (in general)". My point is, even though a native English speaker (or anyone past B1 or so) understands the difference between these two phrases, many foreign speakers actually don't, and would use them more or less interchangeably, relying on context.
Lots of grammar is like this: it helps reduce the amount of context necessary, but it's not critical to text comprehension. If you speak French while using the wrong genders for nouns, people will still understand exactly what you mean - it will just sound strange and maybe make certain complex phrases more confusing than they're used to. This happens very commonly when a language is picked up as a lingua franca by many foreign speakers.
> This is very commonly asserted, but I don't believe it's true. Here you can see a popular American sitcom making a series of jokes about tone, even though the same people who will tell you that Chinese is difficult because of its tones will also tell you that English doesn't have them
Tone exists in all human communication, but it is used very differently in tonal languages. In almost all non-tonal languages, a rising tone indicates a question, a flat tone indicates a statement, and certain other tones indicate the mood of the speaker.
But in a tonal language, particularly one with absolute tones like Mandarin Chinese, tones are more similar to vowels, consonants, or stress accent: they are an intrinsic part of words or syllables. The difference between "mā" (high tone) and "má" (rising tone) is not one of intention, they are simply two completely unrelated syllables/words (the first means "mother", the second means "numb"). There are three more words that use what would be the same syllable in a non-tonal language (transliterated as mà, falling tone, mǎ, falling then rising tone, and ma, neutral tone).
Even worse, moving from a neutral tone syllable to a high tone syllable may sound like, which to a Mandarin Chinese speaker would be equivalent to moving between a syalble using "a" to one using "e" would be interpreted as a rising tone (and thus a question) by a non-tonal language speaker.
> it's because English is an easily-learned language
The only way you could possibly believe that is because you are a native speaker and didn’t have to learn it as a second language. English is notorious for being difficult to learn. Especially the abomination of our written language. Try learning Spanish to see what a truly easily-learned language looks like.
Spanish has much more complexity: complicated verb conjugation, gendered nouns, etc. English has no gender at all, and very little conjugation, and what conjugation it has is simple, except for a handful of words that it inherited from German.
English isn't "notorious" for being difficult to learn at all. Citation needed. It's spoken all over the world. It's known for being difficult to become extremely proficient in, but it's very easy to learn to a basic level. It's much like learning to play guitar: any moron can learn to play some power chords on a guitar, and learning some more chords isn't that hard; playing decent-sounding songs with a handful of chords doesn't take long to learn. Playing at the level of a master like Malmsteen or Vai is something entirely different, and very few guitarists can reach that level of proficiency. It's much easier to learn enough on a guitar to play some simple song than on a piano, or worse something like a trombone for instance, but the guitar has a much greater range of ability (the difference between what a beginner can do and what a master can express with it) than most instruments.
The Indo-European gender difference still survives in the distinction between he, she, and it.
More interestingly, English is in the process of developing a gender distinction between people and non-people, reflected in the use of the relativizer who for people and which for non-people. (The words do not otherwise differ; this is a purely grammatical distinction!) This incipient gender distinction is absorbing the old one, leading to the feeling that it expresses that the referent is not a person.
No it doesn't. It's not even close. Spanish has rules and generally follows those rules. English has rules and almost as many exceptions to those rules.
All this tells me is that you haven’t learned either Spanish or English as a second language learner. Spanish is incredibly consistent. Unlike English, once you learn the alphabet, you can read everything in Spanish correctly.
> It's spoken all over the world.
That has zero to do with how hard or easy it is to learn. There is absolutely no correlation. It is spoken all over the world because of British colonialism, American cultural exports, and it being the lingua franca. Not because anyone actually would choose to learn it if they had any other choice.
Linguists categorize languages according to how hard they are for people to learn. Spanish is a category 1 language (the easiest to learn). English is a category 4-5 language (out of 5).
“Is English the hardest language to learn?
Given what we’ve already noted, you might be wondering if English is deserving of an equivalent ranking as one of the hardest languages to learn. Well, that too is a very subjective opinion. After all, people who are already fluent in languages that are related to English—particularly the Germanic and Romance language families—probably won’t find English to be that bad. However, English has a lot going on that could make it very frustrating to learn, even for a person fluent in one of these languages. Here are some of the commonly cited reasons that English is often considered to be a very hard language to learn:
English is an unusual mix of Germanic and Romance languages. Many English words are taken directly from Latin and Greek without changing their form or meaning at all.
The rules of grammar, pronunciation, and spelling in English are largely inconsistent and sometimes make no sense at all. For example, the past tense of ask is asked, but the past tense of take is took. Additionally, there are tons of exceptions to these rules that need to be memorized. For example, the beloved “I before E except after C” goes right out the window when we run into a word like weird.
English is full of homophones that are pronounced identically but have different spellings and meanings, such as the words way and weigh.
Often, English synonyms can’t be used interchangeably. For example, you often mean two different things when you say that someone is clever or when you say that someone is sly.
The order of adjectives is often based on what “sounds right” rather than a formal set of rules. Often, native English speakers know the “correct” order of adjectives without even actually learning it.
All of the above issues cause problems even for native English speakers when trying to use proper grammar and spelling. Needless to say, a new learner is likely to struggle quite a bit when trying to wrap their head around the ridiculous rules—or lack thereof—of English. We may not be able to say for certain that English is the hardest language to learn, but we think it definitely makes a serious claim for the title.”
English is the most international language because of war, expansion and domination. It could be any other language whose "countries" won.
The major currency is USD...
Most English speaking countries are of British origin...
Non-English speaking countries trade with the largest partner(s), which are of English origins...
I don't think it's the features of the language that are at play here.
> English is the most international language because of war, expansion and domination.
That's one perspective. Another is trade. Trade is what caused my parents to learn English in the 40's and the 50's because it made them more employable.
It goes back to the same origins. Why do you trade? There has to be something to gain. Often that is a result of this act of war, expansion and domination.
Sure we can assume we just want to trade peacefully. History has said otherwise. We want to trade with the biggest trading partners and a lot of them grew by raiding others.
The war came about through a trading inefficiency. The Chinese markets at the time (still holds relatively true today) was a selling market, not a buying market. They weren't interested in European goods. So European trading vessels would have to stock up on silver as currency, and sail to China to trade the silver for desirable goods such as porcelain and silks.
European merchants didn't like this because its far more efficient to profit on every leg and the first leg of hauling silver was a loss with a mostly empty hold, so were seeking a product to sell to the Chinese market that would have pull that they could fill cargo holds with. Due to their lack of scruples, they discovered that opium was such a product and set in motion the very events that still plague us to today of growing opium across Asia to sell to China.
As a flood of cheap opium entered the market through the criminal gangs at the time (who were buying the opium through profitable liaisons with the British) the Chinese authorities set about cracking down on the trade in the interests of its people. Eventually this brought them into conflict with the British and in interests of keeping the ports open to the opium trade the first of two opium wars was declared.
The wikipedia article probably puts it better than I have [1].
> They created this difficulty to find a chance to invade.
If they were seeking to invade then European possessions in China would have been significantly greater than Hong Kong given the weakness of the Qing dynasty over the course of the 19th century (although it would have still been a significant challenge given the might of China's manpower at the time). The British were a brutal force but in a similar fashion to today's US hegemony they were not always primarily motivated by conquest and annexation, wealth was more of a primary motivator. So its much like US foreign policy today which is typically flexed to promote interests relevant to American GDP. It remains ugly when its flexed but its arguably a kinder aim than that of a fully imperialistic force such as say: the Mongols of the 14th and 15th centuries.
Right, because we're going to believe Wikipedia + a recount of events that don't even include any insights into the actual plans of e.g. the British empire at the time.
Think about why the British even introduced Opium to China and who controlled most of the production. Do you really believe they weren't plotting anything here?
> If they were seeking to invade then European possessions in China would have been significantly greater than Hong Kong given the weakness of the Qing dynasty over the course of the 19th century
There are lots of ways to invade. It doesn't have to be via military might. It can be via the church, opium as we're discussing here or other factors before the actual fight.
> but in a similar fashion to today's US hegemony they were not always primarily motivated by conquest and annexation
Are we rewriting history here? What happened to Vietnam, Iraq, etc etc? More like the media tries to paint it another way. You're free to not believe in it. I doubt it's all for the GDP.
Please respect my language choices. What I wanted to impart is that the map of the world is not smeared with the word "USA" like Imperialism would otherwise desire. I feel like you're treating all war as conquest and I feel like there's more nuance.
> Right, because we're going to believe Wikipedia + a recount of events...
Well you're welcome to add your own sources to the discussion as opposed to idle speculation or axe grinding.
You believe what you want but its clear that trade _was_ an element that contributed to the opium war. Most conflicts have numerous competing interests and a wide variety of competing actors. The European age of colonialism made this all the more complex given the lack of effective telecommunications and travel distances. This resulted in more competing interests having more agency which makes conflict all the more complicated and introduces more opportunity for half-truths and subterfuge.
I would discourage this apparent idea you have that the entire British Empire was perfectly controlled by some entirely malicious, autocratic and bloodthirsty hand in some sort of 80's action film with an entirely clear distinction between good and evil. The British Empire _was_ brutish, callous and avaricious and its a better world now without it, but to paint it with the same hand as one might any historic conqueror is to render history into a black and white pastiche.
> Try asking _anyone_ who doesn't have English as their first language in a serious context how they feel about their language and you'll struggle to find someone without a genuine fondness for it.
Well. My first language is Polish, and there are some of us who call it "superpowers". If you go to a conference, you can be quite sure no-one understands you apart from your friend who you are talking to, and possibly that one passer by, who is also Polish or Ukrainian.
That is, unless we start to curse. Then we are probably well understood.
As a Slovenian … I don’t have this superpower because I’m usually the only Slovenian there. There was a conference in NYC once where at least 10 people tried to introduce me to the one other Slovenian there, it was pretty funny.
Slovenia being small, we had already met years ago at a local meetup or something.
> If you go to a conference, you can be quite sure no-one understands you apart from your friend who you are talking to
I'd be careful about that. I've overheard others making nasty remarks thinking I wouldn't know what they were saying. Seinfeld had a pretty funny episode about that.
I've watched Polish movies. It doesn't take long before one gets the hang of what others are saying.
There’s a bit in the American TV series Fresh Off The Boat where the parents start shouting very normal sentences in Chinese so that it looks like a fake heated argument, and the salesman offers them a discount to get them to stop scaring the customers.
I usually can grab a few things from tone alone for a lot of languages.
But I got a new greek buddy recently, and when she talks on the phone, my ears cannot lock on anything.
Edit: completely unrelated, but I saw your username on lobster on a dead man switch thread (I use Shamir’s Secret for treasure hunts to I thought the DMS idea was cool). Do you happen to have invites? I started to write again, and wanted to post something but I don't have any account.
> you'll struggle to find someone without a genuine fondness for it
I'm such a person. I realize that any kind of preference I have for the language that I grew up with is an accident of birth. It helps to be part of a country that is so small as to be irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. Life doesn't stop at the border and if you want to be active at all then you're going to have to interact with people speaking different languages. English, German and French to begin with, and maybe Spanish, Chinese and one of the Slavic languages after that.
I think English is here to stay in a way that Latin never was, the digital repository of English text is absolutely massive, unless you want to limit yourself you simply have to speak English. When there was no internet that meant books and once the printing press was invented and books were no longer in very limited circulation (and reading and writing became more common skills) written culture really took off. The Roman empire is what drove the spread of Latin and once the empire collapsed it took Latin with it, with the exception of some niche uses (science, mostly, and religious texts).
Genuine fondness? I suppose if I wasn't interested in languages per se I might as well have zero positive things to say about German. Being on the internet for 25 years, working in international teams, playing online games on international servers - there were weeks and months where I barely used any German on a given day, compared to English, and that's fine.
I also don't see a reason why you would support the region you were born at all, if you like something else better. Tons of people move away and have zero regrets. Does reverse nationalism exist? :P
There are many good reasons to learn from cultures, to understand them, etc.
But cultural preservation is a means and not an end, unlike you seem to be arguing. When made into its own end, Cultural preservation for the sake of cultural preservation simply exists to build barriers and differences between people.
That is literally the purpose when it is its own goal. To build a shared thing among a group that others do not have, so you can divide your group from them.
Cultural preservation only unites people by pitting them against an out group.
I'm honestly unsure how you can argue otherwise.
It has been the cause of many great atrocities precisely because it always creates an out group.
So yes, preserving culture for the sake of preserving culture is a net negative for society.
The rest simply becomes an argument that nobody should ever have change. Good luck with that. Change comes for us all. None of us live long enough that we should get to try to force future generations to abide our way of thinking.
> Try asking _anyone_ who doesn't have English as their first language in a serious context how they feel about their language
I asked myself, and I said; 'meh'. Admittedly I speak English better than my first language now, and I'm also being deliberately facetious, but it's also true that I don't much care about my first language.
> Bear in mind one day English will no longer be the lingua franca as demonstrated by the word for lingua franca. ;)
> I would argue that belittling cultural preservation demonstrates deep Anglo-centric bias.
Counter point: I’m German. We currently have a lot of discussions about gender-fication of the German language. This has nothing to do with an Anglo-centric bias and still, we have exactly the same talking points.
On the one hand, it’s preserving language how it is spoken and written for the last 100 years, on the other hand, it’s about the biases in the language and how to overcome them.
> how it is spoken and written for the last 100 years
make it more like 1 thousand years.
The point is culture and language evolve naturally and organically, so the language is not biased, people are. Discussing on how to remove biased from a language is the same think as to say "someone wants to put their biases in". It's true that it is happening, in the richest western countries only though, it is also true that it is because the Anglo-centric bias is predominant in the west when it's about social networks and influence on younger generations.
In China kids are restricted from using social networks and consequentially are not exposed to "content creators" that are just trying to ride the indignation wave to profit. it is also a well know fact that Chinese kids test scores on average are much better than the average western kids ones. this is another bias we are importing from Anglo-centric World, that we aren't discussing enough.
> Try asking _anyone_ who doesn't have English as their first language in a serious context how they feel about their language and you'll struggle to find someone without a genuine fondness for it.
I‘m German, and I don‘t care for that language. It‘s unnecessarily complex.
While not Europe, I can tell you my experience in Israel as someone who lived there in the 2000's, left in the 2010s, and returned in the 2020s(felt like a time machine).. within about 10-15 years so much of what I think was distinct about israeli culture seemed to vanish and it felt like American culture made a huge impact short of some older russian enclave communities(not including their children). Everything from television/music/movies/media, to slang and dating, politics and views, and just how people behaved in general (grew up in southern tel aviv surrounded by 'arsim' like a type of chav or something). There is still relics of it in behavior and style but it is almost always something I notice in people 40+ years.
I also saw it happen over the course of maybe 4-5 years when I lived in Mexico City in 2013-2017.
English too, is a mix of foreign languages. Only dead languages don't evolve.
Italian is a descendant of the Latin language, which itself borrowed extensively from Greek. What is so special about today's Italian language that it should by all means be preserved in it's current form without continuing to borrow from foreign languages?
European languages borrow from English because the US offers so much that we voluntarily adopt in Europe. If most good movies, music, streaming services, computer hardware, computer software, Internet, electric cars, smartphones, AI, business ideas etc. were Italian, the English language would adopt more Italian words.
The weirdest thing about this sensationalist proposal is that English was born out of Latin and there are a number of English words which are a letter removed from their Italian counterpart.
The example in the article (bru-shetta/bru-sketta) highlights the absurd pedantic nature of this proposal.
I truly weep for the world which we seem to have created.
Developing countries with their own culture also desire protection. Is it the law of the fittest or are some things actually sacred and worth preserving?
Some might say only non western or ex colonised countries should get protection and the ex colonisers culture should be left to rot (i.e. to be swallowed up by Disney). I think that's the neo liberal / left view. It's a bit biased in my opinion but it's certainly a common thing I've heard.
To be fair, American culture is not homogeneous either. There are multiple cultures throughout the country. Whatever version of thinking you're talking about is likely has both supporters and detractors here.
It's not a version of USA culture (not American), it's the propagation of Capitalism, of the "american" dream, of USA exceptionalism.
The idea that their army is the coolest and will save us from aliens, that their bilionaires (oligarchs) are secretly superheroes, that foreign leaders are crooks secretly plotting to conquer the world and so on.
>The idea that their army is the coolest and will save us from aliens, that their bilionaires are secretly superheroes, that foreign leaders are crooks secretly plotting to conquer the world and so on.
"The idea that their army is the coolest and will save us from aliens"
There have been occasional British TV shows/movies with this premise as well. That's not American culture, that's "what would happen if aliens invaded and we make a movie about that" culture.
The reason you think it's American is that only the Americans seem to make sci-fi these days. I don't know if that's budget or culture or what. On HN we talk a lot about how impoverished the Euro tech scene is vs the USA but it's not just tech. Italians use a lot of English words because the Euro movie/TV scene is also out to lunch. What was the last mega-franchise that came out of Europe? Probably Harry Potter? So, Europe but not EU. And Harry Potter was created in the UK but actually brought to worldwide attention thanks to investment by ... Americans.
My guess is it's due to the dominance of government funded media firms. What's the best known European sci-fi franchise? Dr Who? A relic that dates to the 50s. The BBC lost interest in sci fi and fantasy a long time ago. Too expensive, only popular with unpopular demographics. Far better to make yet another 1800s period drama.
> The idea that their army is the coolest and will save us from aliens, that their bilionaires (oligarchs) are secretly superheroes, that foreign leaders are crooks secretly plotting to conquer the world and so on.
Nothing more American than this example of how an oft-derided-in-the-rest-of-the-US bunch of coastal Hollywood elites constantly put out a bunch of movies glorifying guns, violence, capitalism, and the USA.
It doesn't matter how USAers see it, it's how it's propagated in the rest of the world that makes how we see them. Together with the news of course, but Hollywood is probably the most efficient propaganda machine ever created.
Also it's not just about this over-the-top movies that are completely out of touch with reality. Often the propaganda is subtle and even unintentional, made by victims of propaganda themselves.
Until you barely have one and Putin decides he wants to murder everyone in your country and take your now former land. Consult your nearest friendly Ukrainian regarding how cool strong armies are. Would also refer you to societies throughout the ages who decided that singing Kumbaya was all that was needed to stop humanity's endless progression of deranged assholes, but sadly, most of them are no longer around.
This is a pure Anglo view, there is such a thing as L'Académie française which has done its thing related to the preservation of the French language and it has done a pretty good job at it.
Also, language is different compared to cuisine. Not saying that cuisine isn't important in defining a nation's "character", because it is, but language is quintessential when it comes to nation-building.
I remember visiting a shopping mall in Stuttgart. From the parking garage, to the building architecture, to the layout, to the businesses, to the advertising signs, you could not tell you were in a country other than the US. It was kinda sad.
Serious question (not rhetorical). Do you think this a problem could be that large, international cities tend to copy US cities or do you think that they themselves
become homogenous with one another? Former West Germany is also a particularly egregious example of US influence due to our historical involvement there.
I don't know, but having lived in Germany for a while, I prefer the German way of shopping in the Alt Stadt. I've often thought that if I designed a planned community, I'd model it after an Alt Stadt. Complete with town wall and a moat, of course!
If I enter a shopping mall in my country I expect it to be American the same way I expect a McDonald’s to be American. I mean, the very concept is foreign.
I wish these relic of the RSI (Italian Social Republic) of fascist memory where really thinking of the culture, even though it's a culture many Italians, including my family, fought and gave their lives to defeat.
It is all smoke and mirrors to distract the public opinion from the government's failures.
OTOH the use of English words that have an equivalent in Italian has reached such high levels of stupidity that it has become a popular meme here, under the name "Milanese imbruttito" which roughly translates to "this is too much even for someone from Milan"
>No offence meant to the Americans here, but I detest the exportation of American culture to Europe. I don't mean music and films, but rather the way of thinking about the world.
I think music and film are actually the primary way that this American culture is exported. Think about the whole culture surrounding movies - much of it is controlled and inspired by Hollywood.
I agree that it would be nice if the rest of the world wouldn't become so Americanized, but I think that's only viable if the population doesn't learn English en masse.
At this point there are much worse American things.
In a small European country's facebook I can't have a day without a payed onlyfans advertisement hidden in a story about a poor teacher who became rich instantly after she started a side job.
It's the same phenomenon in the US as well, when trending Github repos became 80% in Chinese, Github added ... a language filter so that you can filter them out.
Pointing fingers is a bit hypocritical when most cultures will do it given the circumstances.
I watched a Dr. Huberman podcast on dance and language.
One of the key takeaways was that speaking and thinking are interrelated. When you are thinking, the same area of the vocal chords are activated but with a lower intensity compared to when you are speaking.
This means that what you cannot speak, you cannot think. By prioritising Italian, they are scientifically enabling the population to think more like Italians.
I don’t care about the ban though, it doesn’t affect me.
I would think it’s more that you think in abstract concepts, then automatically put that into words in the background, because sometimes you think of a concept but the words for it don’t come to you for a bit and also apparently some people don’t even have an internal monologue at all
Note that there is a distinction to be made between linguistic determination (language controls how one thinks) and linguistics relativity (language affects how one thinks). The former idea is largely discredited, the latter accepted with lots of caveats.
What the previous poster if describing is a strong, deterministic relationship between language and thought (the idea that, by banning certain uses of language, they can control how Italians think). This is essentially nonsense: Italians are Italian, regardless of whether they work in a company run by a CEO or an "amministratore delegato".
As an American who has lived in the US my whole life, it can be tough to see outside the box, so to speak. What parts of the US worldview are being exported? How does it differ with traditional attitudes?
Your far-right political movements, especially religious movements, are actively trying to export themselves to Europe, with varying success depending on the specific trend.
A large part of corporate culture, as people in EU management still long for an idealized version of what exists in the US.
Outside of a few pockets, EU entertainment has more or less completely been wiped out now, so any culture borne by entertainment is mostly US now.
A nit - it seems the US far-right is adopting tactics from European far-right history and not the other way around. Trump literally used the words "blood and soil" at some point and Fox is mastering the art of propaganda.
If the granularity of your analysis is the century, you may have a point. Otherwise, Europe has experienced a significant decrease of far-right activity and popularity between WW2 and the 2000's, approximately.
Why constrain to a weird length of 75-80 years? Despots can and do learn from history which can easily span a few hundred years, if not more. Heck, you have videos of 1930s fascists' speeches on Youtube.
But your original assertion is that American far-right movement is being exported to Europe. Now if you are going to stop precisely at the moment when European fascism (which has a big influence on American far right) died down, then obviously that's going to be tautological. So not sure that qualifies as American export to Europe.
You're making big semantic leaps here.You seem to be wanting to deny the claim that "the US are the origin of far-right ideology and pushing it to Europe", but that's not the point I'm making. My point is that, in recent times, the cultural flow goes this way. It's also one item in a list of other domains where the flow also goes this way.
>Your far-right political movements, especially religious movements, are actively trying to export themselves to Europe, with varying success depending on the specific trend.
Please explain, in detail, what part of Golden Dawn was actively exported from the US.
That's not a cultural export. Opposition to abortion is found around the world and European abortion laws were generally more tough than US laws before Roe v Wade was overturned. Opposition to abortion is largely associated with Catholicism which is far stronger in Europee and Latin America than North America.
> As an American who has lived in the US my whole life, it can be tough to see outside the box, so to speak. What parts of the US worldview are being exported? How does it differ with traditional attitudes?
Your evangelicals export homophobia and prosperity gospel to Africa. And other not so nice things that were kept in check by church-state separation on your soil, but developing nations don't have mechanism to defend themselves against.
Tobacco industry floods poor nations with cigarettes using marketing and legal threats.
Your puritanism shoved into everyones throat, can watch violence all day, but saw a nipple? End of the world. YouTube no swear rule was/is ridiculous. The land of the free, my ass.
And the idea that culture can be owned by corporations. Disney much?
Sounds funny on the surface, but it's more consequential than that.
A legit/legal Asian paid porn site that I used to visit was shut down because American credit card companies decided they didn't want to get involved in that business. It's the kind of things that drives people to crypto (disclaimer: I never owned any crypto), and it's not just because of ideological or scammy reasons, sometimes it's just to get away from American hegemony in the finance sector.
It's fine by me if America is just enforcing their morals within their own borders, but given that the USD is the de-facto world currency, these policies get exported everywhere.
For some reason you've got two replies talking about the "far right", missionaries in Africa and other weirdness that doesn't apply to Europe and never comes up anywhere.
The way most people experience this is partisan ideological fighting that spills out into the rest of the world, especially left wing social movements. This is how you get people yelling "hands up don't shoot" at unarmed British police, and BLM marches in central European cities where there's no history of slavery and famously civilized police. It makes no sense in the local cultural context but people are bored and copy what they see on TV and social media.
> I think countries should resist global cultural homogenisation.
The only way to achieve this is with illiberal, authoritarian measures -- I.E. a centralized government forcing people to think and behave in a certain way. And not because such thoughts or behavior is harmful in any way, it's only because it's aesthetically displeasing. Not good.
Also, not all cultural homogenisation is created equal. It's good that all cultures have evolved to say that murder is a bad thing. That was cultural homogenisation, and it was good.
> How much of the Italian cuisine they're trying to protect would exist if they had the same attitude in the 1500s, when the tomato was introduced to Italy?
Nitpick, but there was no such thing as "Italy" in the 1500s. There were several kingdoms and city states at war against one another. Modern Italy is a 19th century invention.
This is the French thing that I'm the most ashamed of. I'd rather defend Napoleon post 4th coalition or any king post Henry IV than the 'académie française'
If you ignore the Académie Française's overblown sense of self-importance and just treat is as publishing a style guide to be followed by official publications, you'll see it as fairly reasonable. Most countries have a style guide for official publications, don't they?
> On the one hand: If your culture needs a preservation movement, it's not a culture, but a relic.
Just because some aspect of the commons would be lost to the pressures of market economics doesn't mean it's not worth preserving. If left to the tyranny of markets, we'd cut down every tree, dam every stream, catch every fish in the ocean, and the only culture you'd have would be drip-fed to you for $120/month by a television syndicate.
Also, even Americans aren't interested in leaving their culture up to the markets. Remember all the hoopalah about Disney and the NBA kowtowing to China, and how incensed people were that their culture was being changed by foreign sensibilities? The rest of the world gets to wear this shoe, a lot.
All culture is a lie which persists only in the re-telling. There is no such thing as Italy or America, except when a few million people agree and re-tell the lie that is "Italy" and "America".
If more people realized this, they'd be less rigid to the idea of new - or indeed, old - culture being re-told - or not. The fact is, if you don't use a language - it dies.
Italians are merely trying to protect the lies that they prefer to be re-told..
What the world needs is more people willing to protect cultures which are not their own. There is no one culture more superior to any other - ALL cultures are subject to total loss when the natural fallacies that make up that culture stop being re-told as human truths ..
> suspect this is where things like these proposals are coming from; it's the pendulum swing reaching too far before it settles in the middle.
Current italian government is 100% USA's puppet with no shame.
The provision in the proposal to force every public meeting to be held in italian is crazy… it'd kill holding scientific conferences in italy.
To be honest I'd want them to push it as an internal memo for the national tv. There is this trend to insert english words (mostly wrongly, just like americans use italian words mostly incorrectly as well) to sound cool. If this was eliminated from TV, I'd imagine it would go a long way already.
This is coming from an increasingly right wing, nationalist, Italian government. This is the type of government that will disqualify a person or way of thinking just because of where it comes from, and this type of xenophobia is kinda dangerous. Plus, the emphasis on "correct use of the Italian language and its pronunciation" also seems to discriminate against people who speak southern dialects.
I would say many Southern dialects are (or were, more exactly) proper languages, it's only with the advent of the Unification of Italy that the "florentine language" got the upper hand.
For example just this evening I was listening to this Neapolitan (I think it's Neapolitan, definitely Southern) song Brigante se more [1] and I needed to see the written down lyrics to get a hold of it [2], as I couldn't understand almost anything at a first hearing. I know Italian pretty well, but I just couldn't parse the song when hearing it directly.
populism will always seek to implement inexpensive grandstanding like this, because its cheap and requires zero-competence and in return for spending zero effort and money you get to virtue signal to electors that are nationalists.
I wouldn't class this as anywhere on the pendulum as its not an economic policy and social issues are a bit of a fudge into the classical left/right spectrum.
German was largely influenced and modified by nazism. Proper German words and syntax were pushed. This is part of a trend that's far from virtue signaling. Year after year the initiatives of the far right get more extreme but don't feel like so because they're only a small increments above the previous one.
> This is part of a trend that's far from virtue signaling.
I would argue that signalling fascist virtues is still a form of virtue signalling. It just depends on what you consider to be a virtue. But yea, any attempts at cultural renaissance are vulnerable to nationalist and even fascist tendencies.
Agreed. I think people are missing the in point that the bill is to make Italian the focus that it is the primary language and that English has hijacked it in many ways.
> I suspect this is where things like these proposals are coming from
They're a mild form of isolationism and nationalism and they can but do not have to be the first stage of a country moving further away from the center rather than a pendulum swing. With a pendulum the assumption is that it will move back but this sort of thing can easily move a country to the right and then ultra right, of which history carries a fair number of examples.
The music and films are a big part of what conveys the American way of thinking about the world surely?
I'll only genuinely start worrying about the Americanisation of world if the US somehow starts successfully exporting its insane attitudes towards guns, women's bodies and universal healthcare. Oh, and imperial units...
The US has managed to export significant parts of its political discourse in places where it makes no sense to have those discussions, simply by controlling global news. I think you underestimate how much this is.
They don't control global news. How many people watch Fox or CNN outside the USA?
The actual way this gets exported is via the HR firms and executive picks of American corporations. That then affects the funding of movies, TV shows, video games and everything downstream of that.
It's hard for me to imagine guns or imperial units catching on any time soon (to be fair, we didn't invent imperial units!), but I would not be too surprised if some European nations start slowly privatizing bits of their healthcare systems. The profit motive is sneaky and creeps in slowly. Usually it starts by capturing the hearts and minds of those in power.
And regarding attitudes toward women's bodies, one only needs to visit any beach in southern Spain and count up the topless women to notice those values are already Americanizing.
Not sure I understand your last point at all - aside from the fact I was purely referring to women's rights to make medical decisions involving their own bodies (even life saving ones), I would have thought toplessness was typically considered far less acceptable in the US than in most of Europe...
I get you have two hands, but they just said exactly opposite things. If you don't need a preservation movement, then there's no need to worry about global cultural homogenisation. So which is it? Or did you just speak too soon on hand 1?
I'd vehemently disagree. There's a clear cultural divide between the average of the US and the average of Europe on many topics, albeit much of that is a cause of the large quantity of remaining traditionalists in the US skewing the American average.
For example there's clear differences on secularism, gun-rights, access to abortion, universal healthcare, labour laws, privacy and regulation.
> The silent death of europe occured somewhere in the 00s
Sorry, how are we measuring this exactly? It's a significant reach of a statement by almost every measure. For example; if the EU is so "dead" then why do US manufacturers respect its regulations?
There's no 'average european culture' as inter-european differences are bigger than US-europe divide. The US is basically our common cultural base now.
> secularism, gun-rights, access to abortion, universal healthcare, labour laws, privacy and regulation
At least 4 of those issues are american , not european. this just goes to show how much attention europeans pay to the US issues instead of our own issues (aging of population, demographic deficit, unaffordable housing, unemployment , lack of global competitiveness, old money, brain drain etc). And what about european tech? I only discuss about it on HN, a californian forum.
> privacy
While these are interesting issues, they are nowhere near the top of the mind of average european person. Nobody went out on the streets because they wanted cookie prompts. We are just letting bureaucrats run the show and tell us we should like it
> The US is basically our common cultural base now
This is wishful thinking. People pay a lot of attention to the US due to its cultural output and importance in geo-politics but when they open the door they still pay attention to their own locality which has its own context.
> At least 4 of those issues are american , not european.
I'm sorry, how are those issues not European? Do you think Europeans aren't human or something? They're social issues and its harmful to think the US has any sort of monopoly on them. I could easily pull concrete examples where those issues are relevant to European events that I might suggest you are unaware of.
> While these are interesting issues, they are nowhere near the top of the mind of average european.
I would argue that for an average European elector, privacy is a much greater expectation than it is for an American.
> because they are not contested in europe, only in the US
every single one of those issues gets discussed in Europe. The US does not have a monopoly on social issues, I fear you are just showing the limits of your perspective.
i dont think anyone seriously debates whether abortion should be outlawed in western europe. It's just not a political topic in almost all of europe. Some very conservative parties use the US hype to rally their own supporters but it's just not working as an issue, abortion is to a very large degree culturally acceptable.
Abortion is one of the few cultural topics which doesn't tend towards borad consensus. E.g. acceptance of gay rights has a tipping point and then drifts towards the 90s+%, but abortion does not.
It's still very limited in Ireland and it took the death of a pregnant woman to make this happen.
Her husband begged the doctors to terminate her pregnancy in order to save her life but he was told "this is a Catholic country".
I marched myself on this dark day in Galway but Ireland still has a long way to go to become truly independent from its Catholic stranglehold. That caused so much pain especially to the youth.
But they are on their way yes, I was especially happy when the gay marriage made it through.
Abortion ebbs and flows. As someone else mentioned, currently Poland has placed severe restrictions on it and Ireland only legalised it something like 20 years ago, N.Ireland only decriminalised it about 5 years ago.
I would also suggest that considering the miserable failure of the mid-terms that the US has a similar strong average relatively set against limiting access to abortion too. Although I do appreciate that some areas of the US are more traditionally religious areas and more similar to the conservatives in Poland.
Sorry, but that's bullshit. Does US discourse have impact on these topics in Europe: sure. But they are not solved topics that wouldn't be contentious otherwise.
It would be interesting to setup a sort of “quiz” about the US for Europeans and vice versa for Americans, I bet both would get those political points vastly wrong (eg, they’d think abortion laws way stricter or lax than they actually are, same with guns, etc). Most of what you know about other places comes from the media depicting it.
Similarly, there is no average American culture, as inter-state differences in attitude are large. America is as polarized as it's ever been, which is another way of saying the same thing.
Yeah, the Navajo and Lakota are very noticably culturally distinct from each other, maybe even more so than people from Swabia and people from North Frisia.
Where do you live? Are you not aware that there is a very active and ongoing war in Europe which was triggered by the desire of a certain country to be more "European", and opposition to that desire.
> Nobody went out on the streets because they wanted cookie prompts. We are just letting bureaucrats run the show and tell us we should like it
Umm I do advocate for privacy. And I know many people that do. Feelings about GDPR are generally very positive.
But nobody wanted cookie prompts. They are the result of a shortsighted compromise.
What the EU should have done is simply forbid user tracking or make the user take action if they want to be tracked, no not tracking should be the default. Pop-up questions should have been explicitly forbidden.
However the industry knows that nobody wants to be tracked. And feared a loss of income. So they campaigned to weaken the law. The EU officials in their stupidity agreed. Stupid yes because now the industry blames them for the abundant cookie walls.
Not stupid, sadly - corrupt. I bet most of the MEPs that voted on that directive are now retired with a fat pension, made even fatter by some "consulting gig" from the folks that wanted that law weakened.
Unfortunately this is nothing new. Democracy has its problems.
> There's a clear cultural divide between the average of the US and the average of Europe on many topics
This is very apparent to me reading HN late at night my time, which is mid-morning Europe time. It's like there are two totally different groups here. (We don't all think alike, of course, but there are prevailing views that tend to get upvoted. What's interesting to me is how it shifts with time!)
> secularism, gun-rights, access to abortion, universal healthcare, labour laws, privacy and regulation
I think most of these things are political rather than cultural. Specific laws take a variable amount of time to change/evolve, but are generally downstream of culture. Listing these kinds of political issues also tends to create a weird bias as you’re generally paying attention to the most extreme takes on all sides (e.g. you’ve listed access to abortion, but I would hardly consider this to be an indicator that the US was more culturally liberal than most of Europe pre-2022, just as I wouldn’t consider it an indicator that it is less culturally liberal post-2022,… it is more a political artifact than a genuine measure of culture).
Use of language does not necessarily result in entirely changing the culture. Take South East Asia for example where they simply have their own spin on the English language. I fear that what the Anglosphere sees in this case is what it wants to see, its own victory, where in practice the actual outcome is more complex and doesn't necessarily result (in the long term) to the expectation.
> most of the examples you give have a near 50/50 (+/-10%) split here in the US.
That's what I mean. Many of those issues don't have anywhere near a 50/50 split in Europe, which is part of the definition of social norms, expectations and cultural values.
My bad, not average person, but average of the population. I got it. Although my statement still applies. You can look at voter breakdown by county to see a picture of how this 50/50 split is actually more homogeneous by locale. So there are cultural values, but they are at a more local level.
> For example; if the EU is so "dead" then why do US manufacturers respect its regulations?
I don't want to take a side on this one, but is your argument here really that US capitalists have high philosophical standards on what market they'll enter?
> For example there's clear differences on secularism, gun-rights, access to abortion, universal healthcare, labour laws, privacy and regulation.
I think this is a common Anglo-American outlook that thinks that generic European is the ultimate expression of Democrat (or Blairite Labour/LibDem). There are plenty of reactionary Europeans, and since they're not completely bound to US right-left ideologies there are plenty of examples of e.g. race-realist environmentalists, or anti-abortion socialists.
edit: I mean, you've offered a literal list of US wedge issues, and assumed that Europe takes the Democratic Party position on them.
The 'outside world' is worse. Europe is aging, it's looking backwards and has very little interest in the future. The left side of the spectrum is stuck in '70s social democracy and believes it can still work despite the demographic collapse (french protests). It is not forward-looking nor has it made a post-boomer vision. The right is stuck in awe of its old glory and tries to revive nationalism (like Mrs Meloni, Brexit, Orban etc etc). People are (rightly) not very excited by those old minds. There is more interesting stuff happening in the US and Asia
I'd say the french protests are a good testament to the french culture being alive and kicking when basically every other country accept slaving their lives away until 67+
France also is the cradle of liberal economic ideas, its culture did not start in 1968. And let's face it, the protesters demand are not realistic, they are about kicking the can down the road a bit more before it explodes
It feels like a natural outcome of liberalism, social democratic band aids are kicking the can down the road before it explodes into the working class rioting on the streets. Can only do so much austerity and wealth redistribution to the wealthy, i.e. "IMF-approved, sound economic policies without alternative" before that happens.
The real problems are the unfortunate contradictions in end of politics style liberalism: growing wealth inequality, wage stagnation, increased worker efficiency and record profits, the media can only do so much to hide it. So protesters are under the impression that their demands are realistic, of course thats at the root of the argument and your outlook on it depends on your degree of faith in liberalism.
How do you call the working class defending longer working hours/lives ? They're literally proles, by definition, and are pushing for things which aren't in their own interests
It reminds me of "socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires"
I’m a big fan of french culture a wish other countries would do the same to establish where is the line of what they want to preserve, and really do the investiment for it.
> '70s social democracy and believes it can still work
and it can. Bear in mind that these were hard fought social structures that Europe sacrificed generations for in the war, which toppled the greatest empires and ravaged our lands, they came at great expense. It might be easy for a modern American to scoff at the concept of "70's style social democracy", but it is our version of "liberty" which we would protect as much as any American might the bits of the constitution that they like.
Remember that the totality of European GDP rivals US GDP (its in the big top 3 with the US and China), we will make social democracy work because to us, its the lowest acceptable bar. While one half of American news reels will continue to peddle the concept that its impossible because its within their vested interest to do so, it remains a stalwart part of European social expectations.
Perhaps when the US suffers a crippling loss on its lands once more and is forced to face the worst outcomes of the human experience, it might consider building a kinder social state too.
>Europe is aging, it's looking backwards and has very interest in the future.
Really curious of what you call "future" here. I could be wrong, but this concept usually hides some very dogmatic opinions.
I’ve been online for 17 years and so I’ve been very aware of the trend of “wokeism” and other things like that. I also live in the country known as Europe. Yet in “real life” I have never, ever encountered a woke, virtue-signalling stereotype. The closest I came was some other guy’s experience that he relayed to me.
And that goes for other American (or not) things that also are “online”: those things might be something that I can read about every day while online, but I might never hear it come up in “real life”.
> The media is generally importing american anxieties and US domestic issues are even adopted as local
Aside from some fringe people who are immediately made fun of by us normal baguette-eaters, no.
In fact this is absurd on its face: high speed internet (thanks America?) made it clear to all of us too-online citizens of the country of Europe that Americans have concerns and opinions that are completely alien to us:
- Trigger-happy police
- Dying because lack of health insurance
- Circumcision
- Individualism of the type “I’m against taxes because it’s involuntary; people should give out of their own free will”, and yet also when they are facing hardships themselves: “I’m not gonna accept no charity!” (…makes sense)
- Opinions on abortion
- Etc.
And people argue a lot about that. (In my experience English message boards are often split 50% between the US and 50% the rest of the world, so there are a fair few Europeans to argue with). That’s what happens 95% of the time; the other 5% is your version: “Oh wow, those things are so cool; I’m gonna adopt and argue for them here in the country of Europe.”
Sorry yes I should have been more specific, I did mean compared to rich nations.
When me and my wife where choosing where to live, given we were planning to have kids, the idea of school shootings really scared us, so we had to pass on the U.S. entirely.
>There is little 'european culture' left ...
That's your opinion, and it strikes me. I don't understand the difference between what you call "fossilized cultural artifacts" and "alive culture and thought". In france, there are a lot of linguistic communities that still talks local tongues, and there are some events in which people reunite themselves in order to perform some folkloric dances (not related to age). Is this a fossilized cultural artifact ?
A lot of the good films I saw the past years were from europe. I really enjoyed the contemporary scandinavian scene recently, you could try to enlarge your vision and watch different things (recommendation [0])
There's a crazy amount of artistic domains, and I can't believe that someone (as you just did) can think of having scanned successfully the whole Europe cultural practices to be allowed to say " european culture is gone".
Music, dance and visual arts are being created everyday : does it constitutes a part of what you call "culture" ?
Concerning the public intellectuals you talk about, well, they were only a diffusion channel for one part of the european culture , and I don't think their death implies the death of culture, but rather the lowering of the signal amplitude perception from USA.
It sounds like you don't have first hand experience living a European life (and I don't mean just living in Europe, it's all too easy to get sucked into a bubble).
While homogenization is at work, the cultural divide is blatant to the point of being highly visible here.
Having a foot in both worlds, I don't see it. If anything national cultures are giving way to European culture (which does have some inherited traits from the US) more than anything else.
Honest question in good faith, as even some individual EU countries don't have a consistent culture (think e.g. Germany) and at least for my very tiny slice of Europe, the culture and regional customs are still very much alive! :D
It’s the aggregate of culture(s) in Europe. Delineate them as you wish, or not. It’s irrelevant to their point.
I sympathize with concerns of mythologizing culture into existence, as is usually done in the process of nation state formation, but that only succeeds because culture is such a crucial component of human life. This sort of pedantry can get in the way of engaging with its importance.
Europe has tons of intellectuals. It doesn't need the US to defend it. There is tons of culture that is incredibly different in Europe compared to the US, just look at Urbanism and Public Transit for example. And the political issues are imported because they are issues here to and young people in the West generally point in the same direction, but even then many of the issues are quite individual as well.
Emigration to the US is not that common, and immigration to places like Germany is very common. Its mostly Eastern Europe that are emigrating both to Western Europe and the US.
American culture is very different to local European cultures, which are all distinct from one another, and are usually as different from one another as they are from American culture.
Who do you socialise with in Europe?! I’m a dual national and regularly spend time in 3 European cities and 8+ US cities. To be honest, it’s the US that’s devoid of culture and European culture is very much there and deep rooted.
The way the US generally does housing and land use planning leads to a lot of vanishing of culture, specially in urban areas.
The same 8 lane stroads with the same super box stores and fast food chains. All connected with the same type of highway to a bunch of single family homes with little low level commercial or cultural activity.
> How much of the Italian cuisine they're trying to protect would exist if they had the same attitude in the 1500s, when the tomato was introduced to Italy?
This is a funny example to use, because while the first tomato reached Europe in the early 16th century, it was not widely eaten in Italy until the mid-to-end of the nineteenth century. For a number of reasons, people (incorrectly) believed them to be poisonous.
In 1994 France passed a law banning the use of English words in official documents.
There followed a highly entertaining (if you like that sort of thing) debate in the UK House of Commons as to whether to retaliate by banning French words[1][2]. The difference being, they were only joking while the French were deadly serious.
It's a pity that France does this because it diminishes them and makes the French act in ways that make zero sense. Once I got called to France for an in person meeting regarding some work for a French company. They insisted on having the meeting in French. I ended up sitting in on a meeting that went absolutely nowhere until they finally switched to English after me pointing out that English isn't my first language either and that if they wanted to have the meeting in Dutch in stead it would be fine by me but I'm not going to have a meeting where I'm at a serious disadvantage in understanding and speaking.
One elderly gentleman left the meeting, it turned out that he didn't speak English and was the one that had insisted the meeting be in French and after that we got along just fine.
It's maybe not even possible to expel all the loanwords from Norman and more recent French, as well as Latin, from the language. But things like Anglish[0] exist.
I think we (Americans and Europeans alike) wholly underestimate how Americanised European culture is becoming.
This is an observation rather than a criticism as I don't know whether this is 'good' or 'bad' but it is noticeable phenomena manifest through language, and probably an unintended consequence of the dependency of Europe on US communication technology, leading to the import of US communication styles, political priorities and cultural values.
France have always been conscious of this, no doubt as a result of their centuries old conflict with England, but it is interesting now to see Italian nationalists responding similarly. It's futile of course, as neither Italians, French nor any combination of European countries can or will make an internet independent of the US
They awarded Obama a Nobel before he ever had a chance to do anything. There is a whole magic negro thing going on with Europeans intent on demonstrating that they aren't bigots. Right until the point they have brown immigrants entering their own country.
> Obama got a reception like he was the Pope on his first European trip. It spans more than just the Nobel committee.
First not being Bush wrote a lot of checks he couldn't cash. People believed for some reason that he was leftist, and later discovered how much to the right, American "left" is. And American media also distorted a bit what was actually happening. Neither democratic nor republican media would show their beloved leaders(you can guess which media support which president) in bad light.
> People believed for some reason that he was leftist, and later discovered how much to the right, American "left" is.
What nonsense. That US Democratic Party politics often leans more right than many popular European parties on the left is not some modern post-Obama discovery, and was widely understood long before Obama's presidency. Literally read any political memoir or history by a left-leaning European politician who interacted with the US and Democratic party leadership prior to Obama and you will pick up a sense of this.
I can accept arguments Obama may have been treated with much more interest and excitement than perhaps he warranted in European media at that time, but I see little evidence this was because his politics were misunderstood - Obama's policy positions were generally easy to articulate. I think a simpler explanation might well lie in the obvious historic nature of the event; he was the first black man to hold the office, and the first Democratic president after two terms of Bush. These facts alone are "newsworthy" by the standards of modern media.
"leftist" is an absolutely terrible classification to use in any debate about politics, given its generally only ever used reductively and is almost devoid of any actual meaning.
But even here in the US, on both the left and the right, Obama was frequently painted as much more leftist than he ever ever actually was or claimed to be. Wishful thinking on both sides, I guess. Europeans that weren't following US politics exceedingly closely could be forgiven for being surprised at Obama's more-centre-right-than-expected policies even if they knew in general that the US Dems would be comfortable among the centre-right parties of Europe.
I dunno, have you been to any of the major western European cities in the last 15 years? They're pretty brown now. At least these cities seem to greatly favor immigration.
Those policies aren't actually popular though. They were were forced by the EU, other pan-European NGOs and a political class that has things nicely sewn up (i.e. if the major parties agree then you have nobody to vote for). Europe has a democratic deficit that gets airbrushed out a lot of the time.
The UK had to leave the entire thing to try and get immigration under control and have still totally failed - they can't even deport illegal immigrants because the EU Court of Human Rights decided that deportation is against human rights. So now maybe the UK has to leave that too except, ah ha, supporters of that system wrote membership into various other agreements and so on. Same way it's always done in Europe. Everything is made to depend on everything else as a way to disempower the electorate.
It's a common problem amongst anyone who isn't an EU superfan because these organizations all have confusingly similar names. Council of Europe being different to the European Council is a popular source of thinkos, and none of it is helped by the way the EU routinely uses "Europe" to mean the EU institutions, not the continent.
no one is forced by the EU. look at Hungary as an example of how far you can go before the EU does anything. (and the worst is that they don't send you money. and since rich countries pay more toward than they receive from the EU budget they cannot really be forced.)
Brexit is the headliner of populism fest, of course the whole thing is sponsored by Dunning-Kruger. everyone with more than a fistful of minimally calibrated brain cells have saw through the "wages are bad because immigrants, EU bad, must leave EU"
> Everything is made to depend on everything else as a way to disempower the electorate.
Yes, the electorate. The famously well represented electorate. In the so well empowered UK elections.
Please.
There are plenty of completely valid and important problems of integration of various migrant groups, similarly there is a literal endless list of problems with the EU, as it's big complex and there's always going to be problems. And it's true of borders, inequality, elections and so on.
By gesturing at the problems and then loudly proclaiming the UK has to leave the ECHR, and that it can't really, and that everything is forced on the poor powerless groups "same way it's always done in Europe" is silly and just muddies the waters.
The UK and any other groups can as sovereign states can exit those agreements. Maybe other states will be disappointed, as no one welcomes complexity and paperwork, but those exact states are the ones that are going to respect the sovereignty that makes this possible.
And just as a small datapoint for anyone else reading. The EU typically goes very great lengths to make sure all members are represented, their needs heard, and as possible taken care of. Usually it's a shitshow, because how do you make a fair judgement between two members? Usually you don't, but make sure the weaker, smaller ones are not trampled by the bigger ones, and hope for the best. But then look at the border issue between Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The EU put its foot down because it's the whole point that there cannot be a border between its members. So the UK wanted out, they had to give. It's the same thing with those pesky agreements and courts and rights.
There was a protest march in Mumbai against gun violence in the US. That was the only time I ever wanted to punch someone for expressing a political opinion in person.
I don't understand this sentiment. People in various countries often protest against or in support for politics in other countries they have no relationship to. Practically anything of note that happens in the world causes public campaigns somewhere else, this is neither new nor exclusive to US politics.
I think you are underestimating how many people in the upper middle class in Mumbai have some form of family here and are thus impacted by American gun violence.
Indian and American societies are link way deeper than political relations show.
> There was a protest march in Mumbai against gun violence in the US. That was the only time I ever wanted to punch someone for expressing a political opinion in person.
Let me get this correct, because your comment is baffling to me. People often protest the actions of other countries, usually by protesting in their home country at the embassy of the other country that is doing something they want to protest. For example, people in countries around the world routinely protest against the Chinese government's treatment of Uyghurs by protesting in their country at the local Chinese embassy. Their goal is ostensibly to get the Chinese government to change their policies, or at least generate media coverage to raise awareness about the issue.
The protesters assembled at the US Consulate in Mumbai to protest policies by the US government that are directly leading to innocent people in the US being murdered almost every day in mass shootings. In the same way that Chinese government treatment of Uyghurs is not an issue outside of China, US government policies around guns is not an issue outside of the US (even though it actually is, because the US is a major supplier of guns around the world). How is this any different than protesting at the Chinese embassy over internal Chinese government policy?
I'll also say that if you felt an urge to use physical violence to respond to someone expressing a political opinion, then you need to get mental health treatment immediately.
Wow. I knew it was bad, but this angers me on a whole new level. FWIW, if working class Americans (the kind liberals hate) realized this was happening, I think you would have their sympathy. Unfortunately, however, they will probably never realize it.
yes indeed. Probably everyone in Stockholm knows 'George Floyd' but would be entirely unaware of the names of locals who have suffered police brutality right there at home
Oh I remember that. I found it hilarious when so many of my Swedish (female) friends posted angrily about the racism in USA and that we are better than this.
The same people went to the same engineering uni as me, which had a lot of middle eastern and east Asian classmates that they couldn't give a single fuck about how they subtly mistreated them.
US focus also serves as a convenient denial of our own daily misdeeds here. I'm still to this day shocked to meet a lot of (continental) Europeans that think (systematic) racism is a US thing, and can't possibly be happening here.
Did you have to read books about Slovenian history in school? There's not enough time to include everything about everyone. The history of the descendants of US slaves might be more interesting to people because of our cultural reach, but it's not necessary for Slovenian kids to learn except as an example of a well documented protest movement.
Serious question: does Slovenia have civil rights events in its history comparable to those in the USA? Because, try as I might, I can't think of another country with as serious a history of civil rights (abuses and promotion) than the USA - I'd love to hear of an underrated civil rights movement in Slovenia.
You see, that's the whole issue right there. Slovenia has its own history, its own problems, and its own heroes. Those things are important for the Slovenian people, not the problems created and sort of solved by the US.
In my country (Brazil if you must know) the cultural avalanche that comes from the US is such that some people genuinely admire the US civil rights movement and its leaders, but will not tolerate anything similar locally. Such is the power of propaganda: you get tied up in the problems of the US and ignore your own.
Very good point, and I agree. But I don't see how it'll ever change for as long as the Slovenian people who know about the countrys' history never speak up and let the rest of the world know about it.
America is good at one thing: being very loud, when everyone else isn't. It's a pity that we therefore associate being loud as being American...
> Did you have to read books about Slovenian history in school?
I read about the histories of many countries. Didn't you? England in particular, all of Europe, China .... How can you understand the world without knowing about more than your own corner? Why would you limit yourself?
maybe they are studying racism ? racism can't be studied on the local level alone. it looks like you're from Brazil. Brazil has a common history with US with regards to enslavement and import of africans, for example.
I remember being really surprised that a guy from the Netherlands was talking to me about American governors. I didn't even really care about his opinion, I was more interested in why we knew something like a foreign countries states governors.
I couldn't even tell you what kind of government the Netherlands has lol could be a monarchy for all is know hah
I notice that foreign media tends to focus a lot of things that happen in US. In some countries its even used to distract for what is happening locally. Another thing is Europeans like to blame US for their own problems. For example the British complain that the NHS is getting privatized because of the US. The reality is they picked terrible politicians to run the country and they keep reelecting them.
The European left does like to engage in US bashing, but you won't find many British conservatives making claims like that about the USA. And it's the conservatives who tend to win elections. So, don't generalize too far.
But BLM is targeting a very specific type of racism, that is almost not applicable in Sweden.
It would be like them protesting Asians being treated unfairly on University acceptance, another American form of racism, that is also not applicable to Sweden.
Protesting your government on issues that don’t exist and they therefore cannot address is odd, and unless I’m missing something, extremely stupid
If you ever want to suddenly hear a lot of racism, ask any European about the Romani. I've literally heard many people, after stridently arguing against racism and discrimination, say "oh well gypsies are different, they actually are that bad".
Some European countries are behind the states on accepting that racism exists there, yes. E.g. in Germany there's still a very common attitude of, "well, we're not racist here" even as anyone with a non-German name and especially anyone not white struggles to rent an apartment. At this point in the US, acting like racism isn't a big deal or isn't common at all has become somewhat of a far-right position.
Now, in some ways the impact of racism is lesser in Europe, because there's less police violence generally and typically a much stronger social safety net.
Yes, many Europeans think that because they don’t talk about it and refuse to collect statistics to show it that racism doesn’t exist within their borders. Europe is just as, if not more, racist than the US. Just ask them what they think of the Roma people.
It doesn’t elude us. Anyone that looks outside of the country knows that but hate is hate. You don’t choose the color of your skin any more than you choose where you are born.
People probably don't mix up BLM (which was a movement protesting police brutality against black Americans) with some vague claims for racism ("Europe is much more racist than America").
Racism is global problem. Killing black people by white police is a US specific problem. I feel weird to see BLM outside of US, rather than other anti-racism campaign.
Racism is at least as prevalent - and far more out-in-the-open - in Europe than in the US. There should be BLM or equivalent protests all over Europe, frankly. It's shocking how openly racist Europeans are (whether eg Italians about Africans, Germans about anyone, or Europeans routinely about gypsies).
Ever gone on Reddit and looked at what Swedes say about refugees and immigrants (post ~2014 or so; in 2015 they were burning refugee camps)? The racist, anti-non-Swede, nationalism type is only going to get a lot worse there. The integration of refugees into Swedish society has been a complete failure, which you can see in the crime and employment outcomes. If it were the US, the blame would be squarely placed on racist behavior / dominant culture preventing the refugees from thriving.
I live in Sweden, but I think Europe is much less race-oriented (although classism is still a massive issue).
Like in the UK the Prime Minister, Home Secretary, and Scottish First Minister are all from immigrant family backgrounds.
As for the refugees, it's not so much racism as just a very difficult situation - a nation can't accept literally millions of young men with no language skills or qualifications and expect things to work out well.
The real question is why Europe has to deal with it when it was the USA which started the wars.
>Like in the UK the Prime Minister, Home Secretary, and Scottish First Minister are all from immigrant family backgrounds.
The UK is also closer to having an open conversation around race than many other European countries, and tends to be more directly influenced by US political movements.
As the sibling comment says, it is extraordinary how many Europeans seem to think that racism is a problem that exists only in the USA. Gary Younge wrote an excellent article touching on this topic in the Guardian recently. Key point:
>This ability to unsee what is before our eyes is not confined to the past. The latter-day version of this selective myopia is the repeated insistence that Britain must not “import American race politics” – as if racism is an artisanal product of the US, like French champagne or Italian parmigiano reggiano. When protests erupted on the streets of British cities in 2020 under the banner of Black Lives Matter, many commentators smugly declared that this was an imitation of American fashions – even as the statue of a very English slave trader, Edward Colston, was dumped into Bristol’s harbour.
> I live in Sweden, but I think Europe is much less race-oriented (although classism is still a massive issue).
Europe is not less racist than the US. However, Europeans are much less used to reflecting on and taking about racism in their own countries than Americans are.
That reluctance to talk about race is exacerbated by the fact that, in many European counties (Sweden being one of them), it is either difficult or impossible to legally collect meaningful data about race, making it impossible to actually report on objective racial disparities and issues.
> The real question is why Europe has to deal with it when it was the USA which started the wars.
I see Europeans express sentiments like this quite often, and it's quite amusing. Racism isn't something foreign to Europe - Europe is literally the birthplace of white supremacist ideology, and racism has been ingrained in European society for centuries. It's quite ludicrous to pretend that it somehow evaporated overnight without cause, and even more absurd to make that assertion when there's copious evidence of direct and overt racism in across Europe literally every day.
While this might be true to some extent, a huge difference between the US and Europe is that in the EU the concept of identity revolves more around nationality than ethnicity/race.
It's 'nationality' under an implicitly racialized understanding. If you are not white, having a German passport will not be enough for many Germans to consider you fully German.
That's not to deny that American racial categories are either inapplicable or less central to personal identity in most European countries; but let's also not pretend that the roughly equivalent concept is some kind of bloodless bureaucratic idea of 'nationality'.
> but let's also not pretend that the roughly equivalent concept is some kind of bloodless bureaucratic idea of 'nationality'.
An apt choice of words, given that almost all European countries practice jus sanguinis - literally "right of the blood". In contrast to how citizenship works in most of North and South America, people who are born in European countries do not automatically get citizenship (nationality) of the country of birth. Instead, citizenship is inherited.
This system became popular in many European countries in part because it provided a way to avoid automatically granting citizenship to immigrants from the now-former colonies, instead creating an extra barrier.
I'm born and raised in Sweden, and have a lot of non white friends and I can firmly say Europeans are about as(or more) race oriented than Americans. We simply banned asking the question. Statistiskmyndigheten explicitly banned taking any stats about ethnicities, while we all know well how middle eastern people are treated (middle eastern telephone salesman need to fake their name for the sake of sales).
Europeans are less race oriented in the same way Russia is a peaceful country and Russian invasion of Ukraine is not an invasion but "special military operation" to majority of Russians living there; we simply don't hear, or want to hear it, and shun people who talk about it.
Everytime I hear someone from my dear Bulgaria claiming pure aryan race, and I roll my eyes. Of all the countries in Europe we must be one of the most mixed (lol, for good reasons) - as we are one of the connection points between Europe & Asia... but no ... pure Bulgarian race.... WAT?! (Actually our (10%) predecessors came somewhere from Bactria in Afghanistan... so really...)
> Racism is at least as prevalent - and far more out-in-the-open - in Europe than in the US. There should be BLM or equivalent protests all over Europe, frankly. It's shocking how openly racist Europeans are (whether eg Italians about Africans, Germans about anyone, or Europeans routinely about gypsies).
You're, unsurprisingly, getting downvoted for this comment, but you are entirely correct. Racism is actually far more overt in Europe than it is in the US - the difference is that it's so widely accepted that people literally do not recognize it as racism even when it's plain as day.
Perhaps the most obvious example of this is Zwarte Piete, the annual Dutch blackface tradition, which as of 2011 was supported by 93% of Dutch people. 2020, unsurprisingly, marked the first year when "only" 47% people (less than a majority) supported the practice, but even then it's an incredible contradiction between collective self-perception and actual practice.
Ahistorical excuses for it vary ("it's not racist", "Blackface is an American thing; we don't have that in the Netherlands", or my personal favorite "it's not blackface, because it's just soot"). All are incorrect: blackface is always racist, and blackface/minstrelry as a form of entertainment was actually popular in Europe longer than it was in the US, and portraying Black people as "dirty" from soot is a common minstrel trope.
If you want an interesting trip, dig up some Dutch news reports from 2019 when Trudeau and Northam were caught in their blackface scandals. Dutch-language international media actually had a hard time covering it, because the average Dutch person at the time literally could not understand why it was even an issue in the first place. They had to dedicate extra time/space to very elaborate explanations of why blackface is considered offensive, whereas most American media could just report it as-is, leaving any explanation for the final filler paragraphs (if at all).
I grew up with blackface (zwarte piet), sung about him/her, even was one on occasion. Never thought anything about it. Until out of nowhere I get called a racist and people show up screaming "Racist!" at a, what was always, just a fun time for kids.
Sure, I, and many people in my country, had a reaction against it, very conservative in nature. But now, over a few years and seeing some reasonable people explain to me that zwarte piet hurts them and that the hair, the lips, the earrings, the slave-like behavior in songs is really quite racist. I, and many others changed their mind. It also helped when I talked to people that held the opinion that I am/was not a despicable person for taking part in this old tradition, there was no "original sin" that I should feel for the rest of my life.
And so a lot of people in my country changed their mind. Sinterklaas is a kids party/holiday and it should be inclusive. Kids couldn't care less about the color of zwarte piet of course. I and everybody I now know is glad we changed course, or rather are still changing course. Mostly smaller villages defiantly keep the old black face, but it will rot away, as it should, over time. It takes time to convince those people, or perhaps they are too stuck in their ways. My grandma lived through WW2 and still always said horribly racist things (i.e. a common saying was that if a river was dirty, "the Turkish people swim in there."). You really couldn't change her anymore. She also lived in constant fear that Islamic people will come to our country and, "since they all live together in small houses, they will come and live with us in our houses if we don't protect our country".
I also cringe at children's books like Pinkeltje (first part published 1939) that I have lying around from my own youth and read to my children until I hit parts that I really couldn't read anymore. Parts are pure racism, i.e. in Africa Pinkeltje is basically battling small black devils, really portayed as sub-human. It takes time for people to see it, to see it as people of other races experience these texts.
I'm 100% on your side now, and I reason with people that aren't and I try not to judge. Easy for me to do of course, when you are at the receiving end I can imagine screaming "Racist!" at a kids party feels, and perhaps is, the only way towards change.
Btw, I also cringe at our still very popular "Jip and Janneke", Jip is the boy, always dirty and mischievous. Janneke the girl: Always clean and vacuuming with her mother and doing the laundry. They also get candy for anything they do well. I tell my daughter she can be a knight, does not have to be the princess. But these things run deep in our culture, and we should get rid of them.
I know it does not really make sense, but I apologize to you and to people that felt hurt. I didn't see it. Thank you for your sustained effort to make me see it as it is and how you experienced it. The world our kids grow up in will be better because of it.
As a white British male I was never a victim in this so I know the apology is not for me, but I greatly appreciate the message you convey. It felt wrong seeing no replies to your post; this is deserving of a response and so: thank you for your time and your honesty.
Sad part is that we as Europeans worked/working really really hard to make it impossible for them to find a place in our communities/societies. And before that we did similar things with Jews. There is one word that explains it all "pogrom". How such short word can contain so much...
Weird; you'd think the protesters would have been more concerned with the rise of SD than police practices in another country. Not only that, everything I've heard about Swedish police is they're generally chill compared to US police.
On one hand there seems to be a strong sentiment of what swedish culture is and is not, on the other there is also an unusual higher permeability to american culture compared to other EU countries.
But their national politics are fine. I personally wouldn’t particularly mind any of the parties in the Netherlands getting elected, they’re all variations of the same (aside from some ultra right/left wing wankers, but they have no serious chance).
Do protests ever actually happen organically? I guess I always just assumed people organized protests on purpose. How else would everyone know where to show up?
I presume they mean organic as in "organized by a local person because they care about the political cause they're protesting about" vs. "organized by someone who is trying to stir shit on behalf of a foreign nation-state".
I guess driven by significant emigration from Italy to USA. Here in Portugal, we also have some... Issues... With France emigrants who return to the country.
I live in the Basque Country, where there is considerable effort put by the government to preserve Basque language and culture.
It has always seemed like a losing battle to me. Basque people might speak more Basque, but they still see Netflix, listen to international bands via Spotify and immerse themselves in international trends via Instagram and Tiktok.
My conclusion is that the government does this because language is the one part of culture the government can legislate around.
I'm Basque but have lived outside the Basque Country for a long time. I actually now find the cultural efforts of the Basque government to have been beneficial, even if most people I know would call them onerous. I think it has played out well for the Basque Country to emphasize Basqueness (whatever that can mean) as a way to distinguish a place that may otherwise have stood out even less on a global stage.
If you can read French, I highly recommend “Civilisation : comment nous sommes devenus américains” by Régis Debray. One of the most lucid analyses of the cultural situation we’re in I’ve found.
Thanks for the recommendation. I can read French, and that seems an interesting read.
However, there's already an English translation of that book. It's published under the ttitle _Civilization: How we All Became American_, and was translated by David Fernbach.
Anyway, thanks again for pointing out this book. I'll be looking into it thanks to your suggestion.
Well you'd need a lot more than an Internet independent of the US. The same US cultural influence was prominent before the Internet became popular. You'd either need a new super popular language apart from the globally popular English, and or you'd need English to decline substantially (this would decimate the US cultural output/reach/influence).
It's worth noting that a variation of language collapse may be occurring. The English speaking part of the US is imploding (aging demographics, fentynal, Covid, mediocre healthcare for the bottom 1/2, etc), the Spanish speaking part of the US is rapidly taking marketshare (immigration being the only thing keeping the US population afloat). You can expect some decline in US cultural power accordingly, as Spanish is less popular globally than English (and far less potent as an entertainment, media force).
The EU will indeed end up more or less making their own Internet. That's happening gradually. Their own rules, laws, beliefs are increasingly governing their slice of cyberspace (and anything in tech broadly). That separation will only get wider. Over time, the laws governing the EU Internet end up making it quite distinct from the US Internet, from the Chinese Internet, from the Russian Internet, and so on (as different as the physical spaces are today, at least).
very good point - I think EU bureaucracy may well create a version of the US internet which is at least a different flavour to that which the US citizens use have access to. Italy banning ChatGPT on GDPR grounds for example - surely there will be a (very bad) local replacement which Italians can then use. However rather than a different internet altogether, it might just be a washed out version of what the US uses
It's been happening in Russia for decades, too. The status symbols among the upper leadership of the Soviet Union during the Cold War were all products of Western capitalism. For example, luxury cars. That continues today, and Putin, due to being a Russian nationalist, is actively fighting against it (even though he himself wears luxury Western clothing). You could even argue it was one of his motivations for invading Ukraine. He saw the decreasing influence of Russian culture inside Ukraine, and he responded with force.
The only way to effectively fight this homogenisation is to use authoritarian measures that force people into compliance. And that's when you are bordering on literal fascism, using force on your own people to ensure conformity to cultural and national norms. Cultural homogenisation is a natural process that will happen when you integrate people with trade, the internet, transport, and communications. You can't fight these processes without significant and unreasonable amounts of force applied to people.
> For example, South Tyrol has a large German speaking population. The Italian government has historically encouraged adoption of Italian.
They stopped doing that decades ago, before I was born. The language of the German minority is protected and their representation in Parliament is guaranteed by the constitution. The Autonomous Province of Bolzano has a high level of self-government and a special fiscal regime.
I don't think you've paid much attention to the last 25 years of Italian politics. Italian nationalists are definitely a thing, and they are winning. The current government is led by openly-avowed post-fascists. The last time fascists were in power, Superman became "Nembo Kid", Internazionale Milano became "Ambrosiana Inter", and people with foreign surnames had to italianize them or risk ostracism (how do I know? My great-grandmother was one of them). One of the reasons Italian national identity is so traditionally weak in the postwar period is that its period of unabashed strength was so clearly associated with an unpresentable regime; the latest move by this government is an explicit bridge to that period, a dog whistling exercise that will work very well with their electorate.
I think it's great if local languages and identifies can continue to thrive, but I don't think it can be said that Italian nationalism isn't a thing though - it has explicitly been a thing as the suppression of regional dialects and the 'making of Italians' was a stated objective of Italian nationalists immediately after the unification of Italy.
btw this does not make Italy exceptional in any way, the way modern 'nation states' were built followed exactly this pattern - suppression of regional languages - 'cultural genocide' - and the creation a new national identity to replace them
> The “making of Italians” has usually meant imposing northern Italian norms and language upon Southerners.
Italian is not a northern but rather a central Italian language.
> Can you give me the names of some Italian nationalist parties?
Movimento Sociale Italiano, was a nationalist neofascist party that became Fratelli d’Italia, the current governing party. FdI gets more votes in the south than in the north. Lega is a weird beast, sometimes anti-southern now nationalist and anti-immigration.
> I was told by my Sicilian family the only reason Sicily is a part of Italy is Garibaldis ship was blown off course during a storm.
Was Garibaldi trying to annex Algeria and went off course? Your Sicilian family is not well versed in Italian history.
Same with modern French, which is basically Parisian, modern Spanish essentially Castillian. There is never an neutral language, it is linguistic supremacism one over the other. I absolutely respect Sicilians (and other regional groups) for resisting 'Florentine cultural imperialism'
It's considerably different in Italy since Florence never had any sort of political dominance over Italy. Even though it was very briefly formidable during the Renaissance, its influence has otherwise been mostly cultural only. Because of this, authors and scientists settled on a Koinè based on Florentine during the Renaissance. Until the 19th century, it was barely spoken, even in Tuscany.
I'm not sure that's quite correct given the banking sector (Medici) originates in Florence (Tuscany generally) who had considered political power over the pope (Rome), and hence across the kingdoms/country.
I was actually referring to precisely that. And sponsoring Renaissance artists and scientist contributed to the eminence of Florentin.
Control over the Church was rarely as useful within Italy as outside of it. The papacy always had strong enemies on the peninsula. Much of its policy was dedicated to keep them divided and to ensure that those didn't ally with outside powers.
very interesting. So perhaps Florentine was an example of a 'neutral' (or at least acceptable compromise) language to be used as the national language.
Kinda yes, in addition it was the language in which 3 of the most important Italian poets (Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio) wrote. To be honest, even if Florentine became the official Italian language soon after Italy was unified in 1861, it wasn't until 1960s that Italians started to speak it everyday thanks to radio and TV. In addition, I would argue that the use of dialects is still a thing here (and these dialects not only are very different languages from Florentine, but they drastically differ within a range of 10 km from one town to another)
> Same with modern French, which is basically Parisian
French was normalized as a written language around the great feudal courts of Northern France, at the time Paris wasn't particularly influential culturally.
Parisian French was itself quite distinct from "government French" until recently.
Modern Spanish is not Castillian. The Spanish Royal Academy recognizes and acknowledges all varieties and dialects of Spanish. Castillian is only one of them.
While the RAE recommends calling the language Spanish, it recognizes that Castilian is a synonym of Spanish. [1]
My personal experience also corroborates this. In common usage, Castilian is the same language as Spanish and in fact I hear people from Spain refer to the language as Castilian, even when talking about the language as spoken in Latin America, regardless of the Academy's prescription.
Calling the language “Castilian” or “Spanish” would depend on what region are you based on. In mine, “Spanish” is more used, and in most parts of the Americas.
The current Italian government has introduced the "ministry of industry and made in Italy". That's what's it called, made in Italy, in English in the official name. I guess they're going to fine themselves.
I suggest they also forbid every cultural aspect of the Italian culture that came from America/England: Italian Rock & Pop, Spaghetti Western, Il Calcio (invented by the British),...
And, btw, the food historian Alberto Grandi has been claiming that even pasta Carbonara is an American born dish...
The "made in" monikers are a concept that has genuinely arisen in the anglosphere though. It's over of the cases where it would be fully justified to keep using the English term. It would be like translating "mafia" or "pasta".
It would feel weird to Italians too. Made in Italy is a sentence that has a long history and is widely used. Fatto in Italia would be laughed at. Then, if it becomes a law, it will be fatto in Italia. I bet against it.
Please, don't think Italians are like that. It's just this stupid government. For instance in Italian, unlike Spanish, French, ..., there are no italianized words for all the computer science words, we just use English. In general there is not a big sentiment of culture self-defence. But this government is trying to do things that will appeal the dumb people voting for it.
There's a bit of a contradiction in your comment. You say Italians aren't like that, but Italians voted the "stupid government" into power and the government is doing these things to appeal to those Italians.
The fact is that the government reached power mostly because votes not happy with the populists (five starts) and the failure of the left in recent years. Only a small percentage of the voters really care about the other right-shit of the government. However, premier Meloni, to satisfy their allies during the elections, promoted many Lega Padana party crazy people into minister roles... and that's the result.
It's the same story everywhere. Every population has a sizeable minority that's far-right, and these people value culture/nation/race, and do not value individuals/freedom. Sometimes they win an election, and then these kind of policies get passed that try to force the people around them to conform to their aesthetic preferences.
It's not only the far right that value tradition and culture. And it's not only the right that tries to force the people around them to conform to their ideas of how the world should be.
it’s not just the far right, but that is a hallmark of the far right. conservatives want to conserve the idealized snapshot of the present or a gilded past.
Thinking about a standard computer, accessories and concepts, there are no common Italian words for computer, mouse, touchpad, touchscreen, scanner, web, link, app, database, word processor, bit, byte and the defunct floppy disk. Everything else is commonly named in Italian. Keyboard, memory, disk (in general, but hard disk is in English), screen, pen drives, power unit, mother board (this is maybe 50-50), folders, icons, programs, processes, windows, buttons, sort, filter, search, rows, columns, cells, sheets.
Calcolatore (my university teacher told me that. Nobody in Italy would use that), mouse, touchpad, schermo touch, scanner, web depends on how you use it: internet or "rete", collegamento, applicazione, base di dati (university course was named like that. Most people call it database professionally), no idea about word processor (I rarely use that in English too), bit, byte, floppy, hard disk is "disco rigido", schermo, chiavetta usb, not sure about power unit, scheda madre, cartelle, icone, programmi, processi, finestre, bottoni, ordinare, filtrare, ricerca, righe, colonne, celle, fogli
Are the english words spoken in a way that follows italian phonic patterns(vowel sounds and consonant vowel pairs)? How does grammatical gender work for loan words, or newly made up words?
They are spoken with an Italian accent that fits into the Italian sentence they are used in. I think this is common to all languages, they import foreign words and adapt them at least to the accent of the language. I don't think that the tt in spaghetti has the same sound in English and Italian.
Italian words must have a gender, there is no neutral. Computer, mouse, touchscreen and touchpad are male. Power unit is female even if its Italian counterpart alimentatore is male: il power unit sounds bad, la power unit sounds good. Motherboard is female and its translation scheda madre is also female. Bug, bit and byte are male.
The rule is that loan words enter Italian with their singular form and they don't change at the plural. This might have funny consequences.
Medium / media (radio, TV, etc) entered Italian from English which got them from Latin. The plural of medium in Italian is still medium and pluralizing it as media as in English and Latin is a grammatical error. Media is becoming more common as more people read them in English sentences, not because they are studying Latin :-)
Gender is decided case by case as the word fits better in Italian. Medium is male (il / i, un)
In a country where the ignorant bureaucrats call computers "il cervellone" (big brain) this law has, as secondary goal, the task of hiding their stupidity!
The majority of folks don't really think people from any country are "like" their governments, except when it comes to other countries' perceptions of Americans, for some weird reason. But in reality, there's not very many governments left that represent their citizens, including the US. The citizens of the world have collectively lost control of their governments in the last couple of decades.
Not much lost control as just given up. The post-1989 alignment with the US on any substantial topic (economy, foreign policy...) has basically neutered the European political process.
More of them who were against this presumed sentiment of culture self defence, as you claim that in general there is no such thing (i.e. the majority of Italians don't care about it), should have voted the side they truly wanted, or should have gone and cast their vote instead of abstaining. But you may equally assume that they expressed their opinion in doing what they did well knowing what the outcome would be.
As far as preferring the use of local words - or made up words based on the current language - it's something you find in many other countries/languages other than the ones you mention. Or tell you more, some of their languages did not change for centuries thanks to or because of their prolific written tradition. Everything proves that English doesn't have to be present within every language.
I agree they could have just made a silent transition without making a bill and imposing fines, but in the end the decision doesn't sound very controversial to me.
Yes! I'm looking forward this great return of fascist idiocy, like when Mussolini forbid some foreign words and cocktail became "bevanda arlecchina", sandwich "tramezzino" and parquet "tassellato"...
Whether the UK is part of the EU or not is irrelevant to using english as a mean of communication between europeans. I remember a study from the French ministry of education which estimated for each language, what was the percentage of the EU population, to which it is not a native language, that studied it as a foreign language either in high school or university.
German and italian are in the 15-20% range, french and spanish in the 30% area, english north of 90%.
When you have 27 different EU nationals in a room, there is just one language they can practically speak among themselves. The EU will not go anywhere if its countries resist adopting english.
I don’t care which language it is, but pick one as the official one. English makes sense economically. German cannot happen because the past. Spanish or German or French are all fine, but of course it cannot be agreed on. So English makes it easier as well for that reasons maybe.
Pick Italian. Beautiful language, lots of common words with most languages and I don’t think any non-EU countries use it. And if everything else fails, you start using your hands to communicate.
Mid 40s here and wouldn’t mind at all to start learning Italian if it was the common language of EU.
Not sure why we have this bad reputation in the Anglo world, but we are the third economy in Europe, and the second manufacturing power after Germany. Huge differences between north (closer to Germany) and south (closer to Spain).
Huge private wealth despite indebted government.
Wouldn’t call this weak.
> think the example of Switzerland shows that there is no problem if spoken language is different from official language.
Most Swiss speak at least two of their four official languages. It's actually an example of how having multiple official languages isn't expensive nor hard to achieve (and the country is on top of most human index charts).
But the EU should make Latin it's official language.
I can understands some of the merits of adopting Latin, but maybe forking English would be enough. The EU is already publishing guidelines about correct English usage[0]. Dropping these and formalizing something else, as the Americans have done thanks to Noah Webster's efforts[1], would be enough to complete the split.
Edit: since most English speakers in the EU speak it as a second language, it would be an opportunity to adopt a radical, pronunciation-based spelling system. It would massively simplify efforts to learn it, and if it works well enough, it could spread outside the EU as well. It would be ironic if the deliverance of English from its broken ortography would come from the EU.
What I found was that they often did but wouldn't claim to speak it. As in couldn't discuss literature or hold a job in language X but fluent enough that they had no issues reading directions or interacting with locals.
It feels like a random non-educated person in the city speaks at least German and French. Any person working is services like a supermarket cashier normally speaks 3+ languages (which you know as they usually are indicated on their badges).
I like this because the nice trait English has is it’s a mishmash of whatever words it can get from many languages. Other nations may want to avoid imported words.
Hm I’m not sure this is a good example, it’s really just a dialect. Any German speaker can usually understand most of it when concentrating a bit. And Wikipedia seems to agree. [1]
The official written language is German, albeit a different standard than non-Swiss German. The difference is not that big, it's like between written American and British English. But I can assure you that most non-Swiss German speakers can't casually understand Swiss German dialects.
Edit: these dialect are commonly used in court, public offices, and often on TV. They have a vastly stronger role in public life than in other German-speaking countries.
That's dialects though. The same could be said for most regions in the UK from people living in the UK or abroad, e.g., a Scouse understanding a Glaswegian. This is similar in Italia across regions.
They are dialects. Swiss German isn't a language but a group of dialects, but they aren't closer to high German than Czech is to Polish.
I think my point stands that it's a distinct language from the official one. It definitely feels like that in practice where a lot swiss people feel like they have to wear their official hat when speaking regular German and they prefer to have casual beer conversation in English rather than high German.
Indeed. Every good European should speak two languages - the language of their European country, and English.
Note that this is British English as much or perhaps more than US English - many Europeans have studied or worked in the UK, and their native English speaking contacts are likely to be British.
Especially since the advent of Erasmus, a lot of Europeans have learned to use English when communicating with other second-language speakers though. And beyond Brexut and americanized media contributes to British English becoming less present and relevant with every passing year.
Good. Americans are usually not aware of the extent of american cultural imperialism which is basically everywhere, not just in Europe but you can see it very strong here
I'm not saying it's bad or good. But I wish we have less Hollywood, less Netflix, less american music, less american videogames, less imported american culture topics etc when actual local music, movies, books, games exist.
I enjoy local music, books and games a lot, but legally enforcing "less American culture" seems like a really strange/indirect way of supporting local productions. Why shouldn’t people be allowed to choose what they spend their money and time on?
And if you think that there should be more support for their producers to compete with Hollywood budgets: Have you watched the credits of any European film or TV production recently? There are lots of government funds (EU and national/local) being spent on just that.
Also, Netflix has probably done more for both the funding and international distribution of European TV shows than all European streaming services combined.
> Also, Netflix has probably done more for both the funding and international distribution of European TV shows than all European streaming services combined.
Note that they also get a lot of subsidies from the local governments to film in their location. They are not doing it for charity.
Absolutely, Netflix is not a non-profit by any means.
Still, I think in this case it's a synergy. I don't think something like "Dark" would have existed without Netflix, for example, nor would I be able to watch Belgian, Spanish, Turkish, Japanese and many other productions in Europe or the US that easily.
Fair points. I'm definitely a fan of Netflix, and their european productions are very shiny visually although sometimes the the quality of the script is kinda bad. But some of their european productions are really great. But in those productions, at least if they play in the current day, they are using paypal, google, tinder, etc all the time. But yeah at least sth like Dark would probably not have gotten funding by either the public or private broadcasters in Germany.
>Why shouldn’t people be allowed to choose what they spend their money and time on?
this marketiziation and individualism is as much a product of Anglosphere culture as the English language itself. It's kind of hilarious to demand that the only legitimate way for Italy to defend its culture is in the most American way possible, through the ideology of 'the customer is king'.
There's nothing strange about a society collectively, through governance, deciding how a nation's culture should be shaped, what an appropriate way of life is. It's how most societies on this planet operate.
Do you think nations play by rules? Whatever works, works, and the anglophone world is certainly up its elbows in dirty tricks. They're historically known as the perfidious albion for good bloody reason.
Don't forget that Mercantilism and strict control of trade and information exchange was the rule until America forced "free trade" upon the world as a condition of entry into WW2.
We live in what is mathematically the exception, not the rule. The world didn't begin in 1945.
Shouldn't the onus be on local music/movies/books to compete on their own merits?
If you go to Brazil, for example, there's zero worry about American music. Brazilian music holds its own, and then some. If you go to India, their domestic cinema is obviously thriving.
Nobody's "pushing" American media on consumers around the world. Cultural imperialism is ultimately a false narrative -- consumers pick the things they like, as they should because that's their free choice. Switching the TV channel or the radio dial is the easiest thing ever.
Things like TV shows and movies and music are precisely where people people tend to consume the stuff they actually like, regardless of what is being "pushed". Word of mouth from friends travels fast.
I can't think of any industry that is more merit-driven than entertainment, and never more so than today -- both in terms of creation and distribution. A good movie is a good movie period. No amount of advertising and promotion can make people go watch a flop.
> Good. Americans are usually not aware of the extent of american cultural imperialism
Cultural exports and cultural homogenisation isn't imperialism. There is nothing in common between this, and when a country actually colonised another country and forced it to adopt its language (or indirectly forced it via neocolonial measures). One is voluntary adoption, the other is colonisation. So stop using concept creep in order to push a rhetorical point.
What we're seeing is largely the natural outcome of having a superpower economy, having communications technology, flight technology, free trade, etc. All this openness and integration coalesce to cause smaller countries to want to voluntarily adopt the status symbols, norms and entertainment of bigger countries that are culturally adjacent to them already.
Your argument structure is basically "this thing is really bad because I'm going to label it as really bad via concept creep, therefore it's good when far-right authoritarian measure X is implemented, even though X won't work at stopping really bad thing and much more extreme measures will be needed".
Oddly, I do not consider HN to be an „American forum“ at all. I think of it rather as a global community of nerds of all shades and colors, using the language that is used most widely in technology/engineering/science.
I mean that is a large part of what HN is, but not exclusively. As a non-american I frequently see posts that are obviously only on the front page because most people on this site are from Silicon Valley or USA in general. Some examples:
- San Francisco housing crisis: This has been a frequent topic of discussion on HN but I don't think many people outside of San Francisco, let alone outside of USA care a lot about this
- The collapse of silicon valley bank was a huge topic on HN but it was more or less non-existent in the news in my country
- Posts about US politics, such as anything related to Trump or the American Supreme Court
- When a post is specific to a particular country, it's usually indicated in the title, except in the case of the USA
It is funny seeing (presumably west) coastal americans take a very milquetoast pro-imperial view of "their country" (insofar as english is a representative weapon of america, despite it having originated ostensibly somewhere else centuries ago) to fight "the europeans"
Actually, they did, and this is the reason why people are commenting on this 'American' forum:
In my country, immediately after the last US backed coup, the new 'democratic' government literally ditched French and German for foreign language education from all education institutions and pushed English in every level of education. As a result, I, like millions of youth in my generation, had to learn English as a foreign language. At this point it must be noted that a decent amount of the coup leaders were military men who received additional training in the US, 'School of Americas' style.
In addition to that, the US-backed government first jailed or banned all the artists who used to create content in national, traditional formats, and instead promoted literally American music - one reason for this was the majority of those artists were left-wing, pro-people artists who opposed US corporate interests so they were detrimental to the 'new order'. Those who were not banned refused to appear in state-run channels in protest. Naturally private channels also excluded them because they were seen as 'hostile' to privatization and other US-backed policies. What was left of the creative space was wiped out by private TV and radio channels who were founded by US-friendly capital or direct US-connected investments, run by those who were educated in Angloamerican institutions, pushing either directly American artists or their imitators. It was a literal takeover of an entire country's culture.
Result? Literally a decade of uncontested American movies, series, songs in tv and radio and recorded medium, culturally imperializing around two generations and slapping a weird layer of 'American' on top of their actual cultural identity. These generations still did not recover from this cultural rape, and they are unable to fit in in their own society, leave aside anywhere abroad.
This is what happened in every other US-backed regime. Even in Europe, US-backed parties and capital literally Americanized their societies methodically by either through the local friendly capital or literally US-linked interests buying out local channels. Even in the country that I now live in, the biggest media group is still owned by a corporation that is owned by an American-German dual citizen. Leaving aside it pushes entirely American content with a few national ones sprinkled in, the news that it shoves into its programming is literally US corporate news, pushing literally the policies of the US itself.
You would think that this would be something related to the US foreign policy, mostly affecting people abroad. It was not. It was a concerted, persistent policy that targeted Americans at home as well as it targeted foreigners.
The 1971 US Chamber of Commerce Lewis-Powell memo said that the then-existing popular movements like the antiwar movement etc were pushing Americans away from the 'American way of life'. And the rich who own the media and education corporations should use their corporations to condition the people back into 'the American way'. The result is the concentrated, lying corporate propaganda machine that not only pushed wars like 2003 Iraq War, but also destroyed all the humane behaviors and traditions in the US to maximize corporate profit.
...
Then there is this thing about the monetization of entire world's resources that was started by Nixon, forcing everyone to trade in dollars and providing unending capital that was created from zero-interest money inflating everything in the US economy, leading to the corporate takeover of everything abroad by US interests as well as creating phenonenon like Silicon Valley and allowing business-model-free companies that ran on endless investor cash cornering all angles of the Internet and killing off their competition including the domestic independent players, forcing everything to revolve around Silicon Valley.
Which is precisely why many non-Americans here not only speak English aside from the above cultural imperialism reasons, but also post in this forum.
But no worries - as the zero-interest economy goes away, things will change.
You've been downvoted for offending Americans by rejecting America's cultural imperialism. I challenge anybody who downvoted this post to provide any other explanation for their decision.
> I challenge anybody who downvoted this post to provide any other explanation for their decision.
Let me provide one:
A lot of Americans dont think that anyone could do a concerted, systematic sociopathy like the one I told in my post. Simply because they themselves wouldnt do such a thing, they think that those with whom they identify also wouldnt do that. Anything bad that happened to others or anything bad that is done by their establishment must be some 'coincidence' or a mistake.
This mentality is strengthened by two things: The Just World Theory and lingering Christian behavior patterns that still dominate the American public.
The just world theory is utilized by people who need to escape reality to avoid cognitive dissonance. Because not doing so and acknowledging the evil and the evildoers in their own society would make living in that society very demoralizing and kill hopes for the future. So, any bad deed must have an explanation, any victim must have 'deserved' it, and everything must be alright with the world.
And lingering religious behavior patterns, because in Christianity, the Christian god and the faithful can do no wrong. They are the good ones. Whereas all evil is done by the unbelievers, heretics and other gods. This belief is translated to modern culture as 'being on the good side' whereas anyone else that is not 'with them' are evil. And so, Americans can do no evil whereas any evil can only be done by others. The manifestations of this can be seen in how every incident like the 2003 Iraq war is interpreted as 'a mistake', or 'an ill advised war', and in things like every US enemy being Hitler.
And these behavior patterns poison the minds of the well-intentioned Americans. Additionally a lot of Americans just flat-out keep the late 19th century manifest destiny white supremacist belief patterns - like how 'brown people' etc not being 'that important' and any bad thing happening in such countries being something unimportant even if it is done by their own establishment, hence it can be ignored.
But mainly, the obsession with being 'on the good side' and projecting every evil and ill to outside to escape cognitive dissonance totally poison the American mind and cause them to ignore even the biggest evils that are being committed in their own society - like how their country kills its own people if they cant pay for healthcare and so on....
I think a big part of the puzzle is the fact that American children are taught from a very young age that they are extremely fortunate to be born in America, and by implicit extension, everybody else is unfortunate to not be born in America. These narratives often start with immigrants teaching their first generation American children this way, who in turn teach the same to their children. So well-meaning Americans earnestly believe they are doing everybody else a favor when endeavor to Americanize other cultures.
This of course is caught up in the American conflation of religion and patriotism. It is taught that America is god's preferred country, evidenced by American global hegemony proving god is on America's side. One day of the week American children might pray in church, but five days a week American children swear their allegiance to the flag in a group ritual run by government schools, very often with the "one nation, under god" clause taught to them by their teachers. The few children who resist this group ritual will often be mocked by their peers and chewed out by their teachers.
>> Americans are usually not aware of the extent of american cultural imperialism which is basically everywhere, not just in Europe but you can see it very strong here
I would argue that the US (and perhaps some other English-speaking countries) need more cultural diversity imported from other parts of the world.
Many Americans are unaware because they have not traveled outside of the US nor have they studied other languages, cultures, music, etc.
The Internet and the growth of global media has helped, but it's not the same as going to another place and meeting the people there.
That might not help that much. The US is already one of the most popular destination for immigration. Immigrants either assimilate into the wider culture or stay restricted to their enclaves, either social or location-based ones. I can't recall any event in history where immigrants have been able to significantly change the culture of the destination country unless they began to assert political dominance as well.
The assimilation goes both ways. American culture is heavily influenced by our immigrants. Looking at food, we Americanize practically any culture’s food, which may just mean changing the seasonings a bit (like making it less hot-spicy), swapping ingredients (Americanized Asian food in the US doesn’t commonly include organ meat), or branching out in tons of directions like we’ve done with pizza.
Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants have shaped a lot of our urban culture. Before Irish and German immigration exploded, the US was a whisky country, then it switched to beer. Germans introduced social institutions like kindergarten and fraternal societies that included the working classes (which eventually evolved into things like the American Legion) and of course workers’ unions. The three cultures greatly changed the religious makeup of the US from one dominated by British Protestantism to a pluralistic mix of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. The US is the primary home of the world’s Jewish people (we have more Jewish people than Israel and the rest of the world combined, if you include mixed/secular Jews), and Jewish immigrants kickstarted the US’ involvement in industries like international banking and some kinds of manufacturing. Plus Jewish people have been hugely important in making US tertiary education and research some of the best in the world. Before these three groups immigrated, the US was agrarian and pretty homogenous, and these groups pushed the US towards cultural pluralism and assimilation.
In the modern day, Asian and Hispanic immigration are mixing things up too. I don’t have statistics but anecdotally I think Asian women are much more likely than other women to pursue careers in STEM, which has done a lot to make formerly male dominated jobs more gender inclusive. Spanish is basically a de facto co-official language in many areas. Americans outside these cultures are beginning to adopt multigenerational living (also because of cost of living) which is likely influenced by both of these. In almost all Asian countries, savings habits are very different than the default in the US, and I think you can see the effects of this in US areas with high numbers of Asian immigrants in things like property prices or a focus on value (like stores with lower margins and less marketing).
Basically none of these groups have been large enough to subsume American culture, but they’ve all contributed pieces on top of the base of Anglo Protestantism and culturally/actually genocided West Africans. And the sheer number of disparate immigrant groups have made the US the pluralistic society it is today, which is likely a big factor into why American culture easily exports to the rest of the world.
While these things are quite influential and continue to the appeal of American culture, they are unable to affect many core attitudes like capitalism, Manifest destiny, and other hallmarks of American navel-gazing.
They can and do influence internal politics and foreign policy quite heavily, for example Cuban immigrants are a large voting bloc in Florida, a swing state, which is a major reason that Democrats don’t just end the embargo on Cuba. Also one of the reasons Israel is so supported by the US is that a lot of Jewish US citizens lobby for it and care about it a lot.
It’s a high bar to put capitalism (plus an obsolete concept and handwavy other things) as what immigrants need to overturn to have been considered influential to US culture, since in a lot of cases that is precisely what brings them to the country to begin with, and is like the main thing the US is known for.
Mussolini actually did the same thing. This led the fascist to come up with a bunch of new words to replace the ones that they had forbidden, often to absurd degrees.
Edit #1 with examples:
mescita = cafè/bar
acquavite = brandy/whisky.
tramezzino = sandwich
bevanda arlecchina = cocktail
torpedone = bus
Pellicola = film
And a bunch football terms
I personally like instead of “gangster” you say “malfattore”, which just sounds very funny.
> The move to safeguard the Italian language joins an
> existing bid by the government to protect the country’s
> cuisine.
> It has introduced legislation to ban so-called synthetic
> or cell-based cuisine due to the lack of scientific
> studies on the effects of synthetic food, as well as “to
> safeguard our nation’s heritage and our agriculture based
> on the Mediterranean diet,” Meloni’s Health Minister
> Orazio Schillaci said in a press conference.
I hope they plan to do something about the "tomatomania" that
has gripped Italian cuisine in recent centuries. It must have
been crushing for their cuisine be corrupted by an invasive
new-world fruit.
As an Italian now living abroad, every time I go back I am horrified by the way Italians mis-use all sorts of English words in many contexts of life...
One example: "smart-working". At the beginning of the pandemic, when we all started to "work remotely" or "work from home", Italians decided to call it "Smart Working". The first time I heard this term from a relative I was very confused, I thought it was just young people trying to "be fancy" as usual, with their fancy english words, but no, it actually had become the official way to refer to "working from home"... people had it in their contracts.
IMO this usage of the English language doesn't benefit anybody. Italians are not getting any better at English in general, language purists keep getting angrier and it's just adding a lot of confusion.
They needed a word for this new thing so they took it from english. English itself steals words from all languages should it need a new word for thing. There's no governing body for language, people just use the words they think work best. You say this type of word use doesn't benefit anybody, but it does, it benefits the people who needed a word for a new thing and now have one. Words are just mouth noises after all, it doesn't really matter what it is, only that everyone agree what it means.
It happens in all languages, I’ve never heard people talking about eating “al fresco” before moving to the UK.
In theory “smart working” doesn’t mean just working remotely, but it implies flexible working patterns as well. Also, it has been used in British English (even though it didn’t become very popular): https://civilservice.blog.gov.uk/2016/01/21/smart-working-th...
It sounds like this isn't so much a misuse of English as it is a perfectly decent Italian phrase built on borrowed English words.
One of English's greatest strengths as a language is its willingness to borrow wholesale from other languages when it comes up short. It would be pretty ironic for English to take issue with the way in which other languages adapt and use its words.
In the US we call first course appetizers and the main course “entree”. We usually use “sushi” to refer to raw fish rather than rice dish style itself. And we invented the term “Latinx”
Aside from that last one, people don’t generally seem to care
I love the world adopting English b/c it makes it easier for everyone to communicate with each other no matter where they're from. If we could achieve a global default language and adopt metric units everywhere I think that'd be a huge boost in communication and efficiency and a plus for the world.
There are also laws/government initiatives about the use of Welsh in Wales, so the theory that it's some sort of neo-fascism doesn't fit well there (Wales is run by Labour).
And that’s coming from a language shares a lot with English language. I personally encourage that, I think English right now is taken for granted, when you are having an online discussion or writing a piece of article, you will be discouraged if you have some spelling errors or grammatical mistakes, even if obviously English isn’t your first, same with real life interactions, you will be discriminated against if you have an accent, either in meetings or public speaking. On the other hand, if you’re only trying to speak other languages while in their countries, even only some words let alone just an accent, you will get a lot encouraging responses and appreciation gestures.
Context: "Prisencolinensinainciusol" is a song by Italian singer Adriano Celentano, released in 1972. The song's lyrics are intentionally gibberish, meant to sound like American English to an Italian audience. The song is a commentary on the globalisation of language and culture, and the ways in which language can be manipulated and distorted for commercial purposes. It became a hit in Italy and later gained popularity worldwide, and has been seen as a precursor to modern forms of global pop culture.
The fine amount seems oddly high, even for a law like this.
I don't think Italian is in any danger of replacing it's vocabulary with English though - most speakers can't pronounce very common english sounds, like "h" in "hit".
As an Italian I have really mixed feelings about this. When you hear people speaking on TV they mix-in so may English words that at times it becomes difficult to understand what they are saying.
People forget or don't ever learn the Italian words for simple things like `spelling` and `to set`.
> requires anyone who holds an office in public administration to have “written and oral knowledge and mastery of the Italian language.”
This might be useful, but it will be applied badly (as they do) so you get people that don't intermingle English words but the speak only in the local dialect or with an accent so thick that they might as well be speaking another language.
> It also prohibits use of English in official documentation, including “acronyms and names” of job roles in companies operating in the country.
I don't have great feeling about this as we have words that are correctly taken from another language because they did not had a counter part (mouse for example) so this will breed horrible new Italian versions of the English words: we will have to work with a "computatore" (remember nobody will remember that "calcolatore" already exists) and a "topo".
> Under the proposed law, the Culture Ministry would establish a committee whose remit would include “correct use of the Italian language and its pronunciation” in schools, media, commerce and advertising.
The sentiment is good, the Italian language is a beautiful language, we need to learn to speak it correctly and help it evolve naturally, but I feel the approach is wrong and reminds me of a similar thing that the goverment did during the fascist regime where people where forced to even change their name because it sounded too foreign...
Perhaps this is going to be the first step in Italy becoming real world Anathem.
Jokes aside, I understand the fear of your own language erroding in front of you.
I see how this plays into the sentiment of "these goddamn young people, polluting the language of my youth with words I don't understand!"
Yet, after calming down my own emotions, I realise that I cherish the Polish and German words in my own accent of Czech.
I value immensely the work of Czech intellectuals fighting for my language against German "overlords" in the 19th century.
However, I wouldn't want to give up the trace influence of German on own language.
I hope future Italians feel the same way.
I think about this general problematic often. My girlfriend and I are both Czech. Yet, considerable chunk of our conversation happens in English. We both intellectually grew and continue to grow with English, making it typically a more effective modus of discussion.
But Czech has its unassailable place in our relationship.
The fact that we use both languages and associated idioms, cultural baggage, ..., makes for a richer life.
Good luck to other non native speakers who have to ponder and navigate the same concerns about their identity.
Good. I hate reading Italian newspapers and seeing how many English words are used when perfectly well known Italian words exist.
How is it that I, an "Italian as a Third language" speaker, who only lived there for four years can immediately come up with the suitable, precise, and everyday Italian equivalent of an English word?
These folks are showing off that they speak [1] English to lord it over regular folk.
[1] typically very poorly. Italians are some of the worst English speakers in Europe.
Those clowns we have at government are so stupid they don't remember the Art.11 of Italian Constitution, guarantee of freedom of speech and opinion: that law is explicitly unconstitutional and will be abrogated by the "Corte Costituzionale" , the tribunal competent in constitutional questions, at first appeal. Good job ! With all the urgent problem in Italy, lets waste public resources with this nationalist bullshit !
Ironically, Italy's remote work visa has some of the most lax requirements in the world, and speaking Italian isn't one of them.
> While the legislation encompasses all foreign languages, it is particularly geared at “Anglomania” or use of English words, which the draft states “demeans and mortifies” the Italian language, adding that it is even worse because the UK is no longer part of the EU.
This law IMHO is a expression of manifest incompetence because the ART.11 of Italian Constitution guarantee freedom of speech of opinion, so the "Corte Costituzionale" , the Italian tribunal competent in matter of constitutional question will abrogate this law at first instance. This is a sterile expression of blind nationalism and an offence to our constitutional values.
I don’t believe that this is populism, as others said. No one cares about English words in bureaucracy and probably few of their voters knew or cared about synthetic meat. I think that these people are nostalgic of the good old times and they can’t believe that after 100 years they are in power again. After staying put for few months they are revealing themselves for what they are.
As few of them have experience as leaders, all they can do is mimic fascism. I believe that many of these initiatives are personal, but no one is stopping them as these behaviors are praised in their environment. In the meantime they will lose money from the recovery and resiliency plan from Europe because of their incompetency, and they will fail to promote an European plan for immigration. They’ll probably even get more votes because of this as they master the art of choosing an enemy (Europe, immigrants) and ride people’s anger.
I stood behind some German-speaking people at the hotel check-in recently (I think they were Swiss), and I noticed they would sprinkle English phases into their conversation in a sort of jovial way. “Up in the room.” At breakfast I saw the same group, probably recovering from a night of partying, one said to the other on sight, “under the weather?”
Goodness, have mercy. I do not understand the point of clinging to a language as if it were an essential part of life. Although Sanskrit is considered a god-given language by Hindus, it is barely used today. Similarly, many other languages are in decline. If even a god-given language cannot prevent its own disappearance, why waste time on such nonsense?
If a language, in whatever form it may take, can communicate your thoughts and ideas to the listener, that should be sufficient.
It is often said that history is taught in schools to help people avoid repeating past mistakes. However, while people may learn to avoid certain mistakes, they often do not learn about the natural decay of things.
English won because it was the language of the winners. Like Spanish, Russian, French, Portuguese and others won regionally along the History. So it’s not a matter of the language itself even if it certainly helped being a simple language.
The Italians and the French are exactly like the Quebécois: they hate English but they just can't avoid it.
For nationalists, English is one of those pests that just grows out of control. And the more they try to destroy it the more the young people flock to it.
The funny thing is that most people in the current Italian gov, and their followers, don’t even speak proper Italian!
They mostly speak “italianized” versions of their dialects, incidentally more detrimental than any foreign word lacking a proper translation.
They constantly butcher both grammar and syntax and if you correct them they get all mad and worked up.
I always found ridiculous their pointless attachment to a language they don't even speak.
It's just shortaighted propaganda without any real vision behind it if not the systematic, pointless, and toxic opposition to any kind of change and moving forward.
Languages evolve, they're living things. Isolation creates new languages, that why Europe has a gazillion of them, people of different valleys developed different languages, on the other hand communication mixes them and blends them, for example after wars and invasions, immigration waves, tourism, or even introduction of technology such as TV or the internet.
It's a pointless exercise to try to preserve the status-quo, and it could be counter productive and isolationist. The language will change anyway.
Also, when do you freeze the language? Which words are you nostalgic about? The ones that were in common use when the legislators were young? Their grandparents? Current usage?
Italy already went through this when it took its current form as a state over 150 years ago, producing Standard Italian in the process also known as "most widely spoken second language in Italy" - due to the plethora of dialects and accents spoken to this day.
Back to Latin for everyone in Italy, I say. Anyone who refuses to write public documents in Latin in the style of Ovid (43 B.C.- 17 A.D.) will pay a hefty fine.
I don't know Italian law, but it seems to set a very dangeorus precedent for freedom. What will they decide censor next? Are Italians now subject to the preferences of their government?
Regardless of the different (usually bad faith) arguments on whether elected Italian officials are allowed to pass legislation on the Italian language, I would like to point out that this article contains a brazen lie:
'This would mean that saying “bru-shetta” instead of “bru-sketta” could be a punishable offense.'
What is CNN's or the author's incentive to deliberately insert mud-slinging into an article about a country's politicians drafting laws?
Is there some cultural difference I'm not understanding? Because this looks like a huge sign of weakness. How can you believe your culture is superior while also thinking it needs protection from the government? How pathetic would we think the American government was if it tried to pass a law saying "no use of AAVE" or "no Spanish words".
Languages evolve. Just like Italian words are used in English-speaking countries, English words or derivations of them become part of the spoken and written language in Italy. I think Government enforcing culture should be unconstitutional. The Government has to adapt to the culture. Government should work for the population and not vice versa. I find this Government idiotic.
I feel I have the duty to express my protest with the following comment that, I'm sorry is difficult to translate, in the spirit more then in the form, not only in English but also in Italian for people don't live in Rome: "A Melo' ma vattela a pijar 'under cool' !!! ". My kind regards to al the Italians following Hacker News.
Italian here. This law is a copy of what the French already do, but unfortunately there's a staggeringly large population of 60 to 70 year olds who did not learn English at school and feel powerless and cut out when foreign words are used. This law is to cater specifically to the older population.
As an Italian i really feel the shame. There is no such a thing as "pure language". We have words from a number of languages, from Sumerian, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic and also from French, German. And from English. So what?
I really hope that law won't pass the parliament scrutiny!
It would be best to promote Italian rather than penalizing English but this sounds good. We are already losing all the local dialects, and English words are now everywhere. Talking/reading is starting to feel like esperanto.
Don't fall for this, it's just a smokescreen while they try to sneak by a depenalisation of tax evasion hidden inside a completely unrelated law (why, oh dear reader? Because it serves their voter base, of course)
Look at the Irish language. Almost dead. I can see a desire to keep alive the Irish language, because a lot of English imperialism has pushed out the languages of where they have gone.
As someone who regularly encounters American companies trying to skimp on hiring professional translators when they REALLY should, with disastrous outcomes:
This is very good. Europeans need to be proud of their customs and traditions while also having an eye on the future. We have all been demoralized for years and taught to believe European history is evil and reduced to colonialism (as if Europe was the only colonialist of that time) and very little more.
Europe is beautiful and its diversity in such a small area is beautiful. Be a bit chauvinist I say and conserve the things that define you. Don’t be tricked into becoming globalist, homogenized, generic culture.
Nah, propaganda. Write a stupid bill, do nothing to make it progress in Parliament, you nevertheless gain airtime and visibility for yourself and your party. By the time of the next election everyone will have forgotten.
I don't consider it a problem, language alone is an extremely superficial indicator of culture - see my other comment.
But japan is a good example- maybe that's what you're driving at - because the language is full of english loan words. That's a big part of what the katakana characters are for - fitting predominantly English words into the japanese syllables.
I worked on the Metal Gear Solid from PS1 to PC. This was back in 2000, and my first real gamedev job. Fresh from Bulgaria, haven't played any consoles, and just using a WordStar program I've exracted all japanese comments from the source code, "translated" them - well word by word I think with the WordStar (I don't recall the exact name) then put them back. Some things were just too funny...
At the point where the game was supposed to handle CONTINUE, the comment was CONTINEKU. Another one was METARU GERU SORIDU (or GIRU, don't remember). and more than that... all in all though even with word-by-word translation I was able to get through (we were only 3 "interns" working on the project + our boss (lead)).
I came to say this, the Japanese have the solution, they use a different alphabet for imported foreign words although less so for Chinese. Even better they change the pronunciation and drop syllables to make the imports easy to say. Maybe other languages can invent some kind of stylizing like italics to indicate words are foreign.
It is a very poor argument and ignores the fact that the lives of people, institutions and countries are not just about (the very important) jobs and economics.
I, who have lived in the United States for decades, cringe when English words are used instead of those of my native language to give a sense of respectability to those words.
A global culture and a world homogenized in ways of living is a much less interesting world.
Culture can still thrive without being nationalist or traditionalist or whatever you call it.
What would people think if there was an american movement to stop using foreign loan words in English because they're diluting our culture?
I live in Quebec, Canada, where there is extreme policing of the French language, including various unconstitutional legislation to "preserve" French (the Canadian constitution has an override clause). It's a purely populist measure that does nothing for culture. I find it ironic but typical how much Quebec focuses on superficial cultural aspects (language) while hardly engaging at all with real questions of celebrating heritage - and other than the language, the culture is way closer to english canada than anything European.
Anyway, these language things are shallow populist measures to whip up a base, they're not about serious stewardship of cultural identity.
> What would people think if there was an american movement to stop using foreign loan words in English because they're diluting our culture?
The difference is that English is THE dominant global language, pushed by two global empires (first the British empire and now the American empire). It does not need protection, as it essentially like an invasive species at this point. It’s reasonable for counties to want to protect their native language(s). We’re already rapidly trending towards a global, American-flavored monoculture. Why make it worse?
According to this comment, we should (just) accept that English, in a generation or two, will become some sort of world language with no interest in the preservation of other languages and cultures associated with those cultures.
This is a bit provocative, but while we are there, we could also tear down the Colosseum, the Forum too since it is all rubbish, and build instead offices, or residential communities because who cares about those old buildings and "nationalists" and "traditionalists" or "whatever you want to call it".
There is often this idea that if you do one thing, you cannot do another, like there is some trade-offs between the use of the local language on official documents and the management of museums. But most of the time, there are no trade-offs, and the two actions are independent.
>> "What would people think if there was an american movement to stop using foreign loan words in English because they're diluting our culture?"
I am generally in favor. I mean, better to hear "ham" than "proskiuto" anyway.
If words come from another language and mean different things, let those words exist as they are. If a new native word is created from the foreign word, that is okay. That is how languages grow and evolve.
The law in question just says official documents and communications must be in Italian which makes perfect sense in Italy.
We have many French cultures in Canada besides Quebecois. There are Acadian people in The Maritimes they are not Quebecois many forced to flee to Louisiana and are called Cajuns. Non-Quebecois French people in Ontario and the prairies, plus Metis (French+First Nations) on the prairies too.
Other distinct cultures in Canada would be Newfoundland a separate nation for years. Plus all the First Nations across Canada and Inuit in the northern territories and Labrador goes without saying.
You could even add the 500,000 Ukrainians on the prairies a culture going back probably 150 years.
Chinese culture too first starting in the province of BC since probably 1800 older than my own Irish culture the majority who only came here in the mid 1800s to 1870s.
"global cultural brand" is a terrible way of measuring "strength" of a culture. (I'd hope for the people of Quebec that there is more to their culture than the brand, which is approximately "the weird Canadians that try to out-french the French")
There have been many North American cultures imported from Europe. In the US and Canada, they all tend to die out after a certain amount of time. E.g. the Spanish had a colony in Florida. The Dutch had a claims to the Hudson valley in NY/NJ. Lots of Scandinavian settled the frontier. Italians in the NYC area. The list goes on.
Quebec is one of the oldest cultures in the former British NA colonies. Say whatever you want about the Quebecois, they know how ti preserve their culture.
> Some data suggest there are perhaps 120,000 French speakers in the state, down from about 1 million just 60 years ago. Of those, perhaps 20,000 speak Cajun French, others traditional French.
Yes, and if you actually read the bill (I'm not Italian, just trying to translate it online), it just bans other languages in official documentation, which every country does. I'm surprised Italy has not done it until now.
From the article i understood it goes deeper. It includes all official communication like job offers - not limited to public institutions.
So you could be fined for having a position for "Product Manager" or "Test Engineer", etc.
No, its probably broader than that, but it’s not written very clearly. And it doesn’t matter because every year some new idiot emerges to propose laws like this, that are never approved and often not even discussed in Parliament.
In college, I took an English/linguistics class called "History of the English Language." One big takeaway from it was that prescriptive languages never work, and pragmatism always wins over purity. You say you "cringe" when hearing English words in the context of your native language. English, too, is packed with loanwords. Espresso (I see you, Italian), taco, kimchi, sauna, schadenfreude, not to mention phrases lifted directly from other languages like "c'est la vie" or "et cetera."
I don't disagree that a homogeneous world is less interesting, but in a world where you can travel between every major city in less than 24 hours, and communication is unified and instantaneous, this is the natural outcome, and government word policing is a losing fight.
I don't see any inevitability in the development of human culture (and technology), which is instead often perceived as such when looking backwards and not forward.
History could have been taken a million different trajectories and we, looking back at its course, would always be tempted to say that what's going on today was, overall, inevitable. If not for a very harsh winter decades ago, maybe German would be the lingua franca of today's Europe: "it was inevitable", many would say, "it all started with Bismarck".
And I don't see why the fact that we use the word "espresso" (or expresso :)) in the US should mean that, in the US, Italian, Greek, or French words should be used in official documents as liberally as English words are in other non-English speaking countries' official documents.
Why should it be acceptable to use "governance" instead of the Italian words "governo" or "amministrazione"? Why "fiscal compact" instead of "patto di bilancio" where both combinations of words express the same concept but one in a foreign language and the other in the official language of the country?
Using "espresso" and not another (equivalent) English word makes sense, because the Italian word also denotes the origin of the product. Using "hip hop" makes sense in non-English speaking countries, like "rock" for the music (but not the stone). "Schadenfreude", on the other hand, still sounds quite ridiculous when said by non-German speaking people, a bit like using "I went to the Ville Lumière" instead of "I went to Paris, oh those croissants, mon dieu!".
That language should not be regulated by any government, the ridiculousness of its use should just be common sense, which is unfortunately as scarce today as it was in the past. But a woman can dream.
Which brings me to the another component: concepts expressed in English tend to appear, in non-English speaking countries, as more respectable, more serious. "That's how they do in the US, the wealthiest countries in the world!".
I'm sure it is very important that the government make it a punishable offense to say "bru-shetta" instead of "brus-ketta" for the word bruschetta. This is the kind of important government regulation that makes for a productive use of parliament time and the votes of the people
"This is the kind of important government regulation that makes for a productive use of parliament time and the votes of the people"
What is a "productive" use of the votes of the people is up for debate. I am not ashamed to say that I am all for strong regulations that preserve the use and dignity of local customs and traditions (when those customs and traditions don't affect the life and freedom of others, cruelty etc.).
> This would mean that saying “bru-shetta” instead of “bru-sketta” could be a punishable offense.
Maybe you missed the world "could" in this phrase. Actually, with a bit a critical thinking, you would realize this is a complete invention by the CNN author...
Just because there are other problems that are more pressing or severe doesn't mean that the proposed solution to a particular problem is not worth pursuing.
I guess it depends on whether the amount of effort applied to solving the problems is proportional to the severity of the problems.
On this side of the Atlantic, we have a catastrophic opioid epidemic, crumbling infrastructure, inflation and recession, failing national and state-level institutions, mass shootings, growing income inequality, race- and class-warfare, and out-of-control policing. But what are ~50% of our politicians currently focusing on? What genitals people have and what bathroom they should be allowed to go in.
I would rather that all of your politicians focus on genitals. Maybe that would stop them from agitating for war on the other side of the planet. But thank God that 'America is back,' am I right?
Anyway, the subject was Italy's policies. As for your guess, there is actually a group of people whose role, among others, is to assess the correct amount of effort applied to solving a problem: they're called Italian voters.
Like many of the things that were said ironically in the past, this one has aged badly. Yes, Italians could be very passionate about the results of football matches.
However, Churchill did not have to see how the English interpreted soccer matches in the 1970s and 1980s. Hooligans, for those too young, interpreted football games as wars. But not in the sense of passion for the sport, as they were killing fans of other teams in ways similar to wars.
Fortunately, things change over time.
It is also interesting how some ethnic groups or nations can be the object of ridicule without anyone protesting (all of Southern Europe, for example), while for other ethnic groups or nations there would be protests all over the world at the slightest hint of an attempt to ridicule them.
Probably never said it [0]. Those kinds of quotes are unlikely to be understood in today's cultural lense, because people don't see the world in national identities and the meaning those identities carried, like they used to 1800-1940.
Churchill suggested that chemical weapons should be used “against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment.” He added “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes to spread a lively terror” in Iraq.
It's important to remember that just because the press may highlight certain topics more frequently, it doesn't necessarily mean that the government is not putting enough effort into other essential issues.
On the other hand: I think countries should resist global cultural homogenisation. No offence meant to the Americans here, but I detest the exportation of American culture to Europe. I don't mean music and films, but rather the way of thinking about the world. I suspect this is where things like these proposals are coming from; it's the pendulum swing reaching too far before it settles in the middle.