You're probably aware of this and it was just a brain fart, but I figured I should mention it since this is specifically a post talking about language and cultural differences: In the last paragraph, "seeked" should be "sought".
Interestingly, what you say about linguistic assimilation has (according to my very unscientific, anecdotal experience) actually lessened in recent years. For instance: My great-grandparents emigrated from Italy to New York in the early 1900s. My grandfather was born in the US, but never really spoke Italian fluently, because my great-grandparents apparently made a concerted effort to assimilate _themselves_ into American culture by e.g. refusing to speak primarily Italian, even in their own home.
This seems different from how cultural assimilation is treated by many of today's immigrants. It's most visible to me in Spanish speakers, probably just because Spanish-speaking immigrants are the largest group of immigrants in the US today. The children of these immigrants seem by and large to be fluent in both languages, which strikes me as a bit less cultural assimilation than what I've been told about my own family.
I remember reading a similar sentiment somewhere else online a while back - I thought it was a Slate Star Codex post, but I can't find it now. But it talked about the shift from talking about the US as a "melting pot" of cultures (many different cultures all "melting down" and turning into a homogenous mix with elements of each) to a more politically-correct "salad bowl" (still mixed, but retaining their individual identities.)
I guess this is all pretty tangential to your point (the US has a cultural hegemony, and its effects are widespread and significant), but it does make me wonder what it will look like in another 50-100 years.
That was indeed just a brain fart, frozen and preserved since January 2022. Fixed, thanks!
There's indeed a great debate between the melting pot (assimilation) and the salad bowl (multiculturalism). Canada in particular has gone far into the multiculturalism route; I think the US a bit less so, but the trend is still clear. On the other hand — and this is a major point in the political debates of Quebec — multiculturalism tends, ironically, to favor the current lingua franca even more, since all those cultural groups living together need a language to communicate between them. So yes, they might keep their mother language in the home a bit more than they used to, as well as their cultural identity, but within a generation or two the pressure to mostly use English is just too overwhelming.
In Quebec, this leads to concerns about immigrants: if a Mandarin or Russian or Punjabi speaker moves here and needs to learn a new language, which of French and English will they want to focus their efforts on? In a perfectly multiculturalist society, English, which is why multiculturalism is somewhat unpopular here compared to the rest of Canada.
I really agree with this. This effect of being on an empire's cultural border is very strong even on personal scales - I grew up bilingual (non-English language & French), and the fact that so much of cultural activity happens in English often leaves me in a situation where 1. certain ideas I am concerned with just don't show up in a lot of discussion (because they originate from the periphery, and not the anglophone world, combined with there being just less output in my non-French primary-language), and 2. personally I found myself in a situation where the language I now read best is no longer the one I write the best in (honestly pretty annoying).
I actually started following your blog at a point when much of the archive was still in French, among other reasons to have some French in my rss feed... That didn't work out but I do like the blog a lot anyway.
> a situation where the language I now read best is no longer the one I write the best in (honestly pretty annoying).
Honestly, yeah.
As for your point 1, it's part of why I decided to write in English; there's value in bringing in discussion from the non-anglo world to the anglo, which will remain the main stage for big conversations for a long time. Although... I may not have been doing a great job at this. I write about Quebec and franco stuff occasionally but maybe I should do it more.
Glad to see you've been reading for a long time! I haven't blogged in French for years...
Hm, as a Swiss, and that spent some of his childhood in the US, I can relate. The Swiss cultures (German-, French-, and Italian-speaking) are under pressure by their big neighbors, as well as the international English-speaking culture. Having reached retirement age, I've also seen quite a shift in Swiss (German-speaking) culture over my lifetime. This said, I'm not sure if the loss of some cultural traits, or the change to foreign ones is that bad. Technological progress and changes in society had a big impact on culture, as did immigration, but this also led to a high standard of living. On the other hand, Swiss culture that has changed little over the last 150 years can be found with the Amish, who still speak the Swiss German dialect (Pennsylvania Dutch). Is there a trade-off between benefiting from progress and keeping your cultural identity?
There are definitely tradeoffs, yes. And it's obvious that cultures should evolve, not remain stagnant, as the world changes. The compromise position that I would endorse, I think, is that a culture can change such that the difference it has with other cultures remains roughly constant. All cultures should evolve more or less in parallel, neither trying to resist global cultural change nor surrender completely to it.
Switzerland is interesting — it might be the most successful clearly multinational country. To what extent do you think it has managed to remain its own thing, culturally, rather than becoming essentially parts of Germany, France, and Italy? And how has it managed to do that?
Switzerland hasn't been multinational that long. Before Napoleon and the congress of Vienna, Switzerland consisted of 13 sovereign German-speaking states (which did occupy territories from the duchies of Savoy, Burgundy and Milan). The congress of Vienna kept Switzerland as buffer state between France and Austria, but reorganized it and added new states (now called "cantons"), including some half-dozen French-speaking ones, one Italian-speaking one, to the confederation. The architect of the new Switzerland was the Russian vice foreign minister Ioannis Kapodistrias (the first governor of Greece some ten years later, honorary citizen of the states of Geneva and Vaud).
As to how the cultural regions succeeded to remain within one political state (the cantons gave up their sovereignty with the constitution of 1848), it probably is a combination of the autonomy of the regions that was provided by the federal constitution, but also that joining the big neighbors as peripheral regions was unattractive, and finally that Switzerland was a poor country until the 20th century (but with a mercenary reputation) so as not to attract too much attention by said neighbors.
This said, there were tendencies in the German part to join the Reich in the 1930s, and the state of Jura, created in the late 1970s, which was split off from Berne, weighed the option to join France. In short, the vagaries of history, with a large dose of luck.
Thanks! It's interesting that you identity being poor (in the past) as a possible reason. I would have guessed that being wealthy (in the present) might be another reason — it wouldn't be very attractive for Francophone or Italian Swiss people to join poorer France or Italy now.
I think what I'm most curious about is, what makes the Swiss identify more with Switzerland than with Germany/France/Italy. I would imagine that especially for the French and Italian parts, the cultural pull of France and Italy might be greater than the cultural pull of mostly German-speaking Switzerland. How has Switzerland managed to create what seems (from the outside at least) like a coherent national identity? Other Western multinational countries like Belgium, Canada, or Spain seem to struggle with it at varying degrees.
Thanks for asking back. I'm struggling to answer, and, of course, these are just my opinions. Maybe the Swiss identity can be brought down to compromise, practicality and letting others live their lives, as well as with the creation of myths regarding the national identity (William Tell, or more recently, Heidi, etc.). Compromise and live and let live were probably important for a country in which one of the main business models for 300 years was to export mercenaries (the last set still guarding the pope). Peaceful Switzerland also had frequent internal wars, the last civil war ending in the 1840s. Much of the violence has been glossed over and Switzerland called neutral and peaceful since the last battle they lost in their own name at Marignano 1545.
If you'd scratch at what looks like a coherent identity, I'm afraid some ugly things might appear more or less quickly, and minorities will resent decisions against them by the majority. Avoiding decisions helps (live and let live), and the governments (municipal/cantonal/federal) are good a that, but it gets klutzy. And as you mentioned, now being rich helps, as nobody wants to lose out.
Note, by the way, that Canada also seems to have a coherent national identity from an external view. I do know a few Quebecois that have a (strong) different opinion on that. Let's hope compromise and live and let live win out, and that all can benefit and prosper. Wherever there is conflict.
I wonder if the ease of translation provided by deep learning tools (recently notably LLMs) will change or even reverse this trend.
Like many others, I learned English because it was the only way to access so many things: movies, books, video games, comics... Many of these weren't translated into French (despite French being a major language with quite a tendency to translate almost everything).
For others, English is useful to gain access to new audiences or markets. Like you, I create my intellectual works (small degenerate video games in my case) in English, even though this makes some of my friends unable to access them. But if I weren't doing that, nobody would play them. Even French people would have less chance to discover them (algorithms reward success, and you will have more success in English).
But new tools are changing that. Already, it is incredibly easy to get immediate high-quality translations of text. Even audio can now be easily translated: the audio is automatically transcribed and this transcription is automatically translated. There are even tools to directly translate audio feeds if you don't feel like reading (though these are less accessible and more expensive). In the coming years, these tools will probably be integrated everywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if, very soon, language differences stop being a barrier (even if just by creating friction) between people.
What this means is that the calculations behind learning the dominant language will drastically change. Learning a language is very challenging, it takes a long time, and it can even be humiliating (I feel so dumb speaking English, and I am - it's so cognitively demanding that I'm far less smart and witty while speaking it). For you and me, learning English still made sense; it was the only way to access so many good stuff. But for the young people of 2028, I'm not so sure: automatic translation means you will have access to everything written in English (or other languages) if you don't understand a lick of it. If you create a video in French, that won't prevent you from having an international audience, since it will be translated immediately. Under these conditions, why learn English? Why learn Chinese?
Yeah it's a great question! My hunch is the changes automatic translation will bring are very non-obvious and I really don't feel that I can make a competent prediction :)
Such an interesting comparison between Quebec and Rome!
And it's an good question — why we intrinsically care about preserving cultures.
On one hand, there are purely pragmatic reasons. Different cultures will have different strengths, and it's good to have a variety of cultures to get the advantages of each. It's like a farmer planting many different crops to get a fair variety of nutrients and avoid monocultural blight. If there is a bad cultural meme, it's best that there's some variation so that some cultures avoid it.
But it seems there's also a further appeal than pragmatism. Preserving different cultures just preserves different kinds of experience. While many of aspects of culture are pretty boilerplate, cultures aren't perfectly translatable among one another. Words and phrases carry different connotations in different languages — there are certain jokes and stories that only fully make sense in their original tongue. Holidays and traditions of different cultures aren't usually interchangeable, at least in their original form, because they were built for different purposes to handle different problems. And then, being in any given culture creates a sense of cohesion that's difficult to imitate from scratch.
It's like wanting to preserve a culture is like wanting to preserve a set of experiences and solutions that are delivered within that whole cultural package, even if that ends up meaning simple things like recipes, buildings, or novels. At least that's my impression from the American hegemonic stronghold :)
You get it. There is certainly an instrumental part and a terminal part to the value of cultural diversity. The interplay between them is complex, too. And then there's the opposite force of optimization (towards what seems to be the "best" culture for any given thing) that cultural diversity has to contend with.
Growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s in St Louis included at least mention of the city’s French roots (the Spanish slightly less slow) and languages other than English could be heard but usually in the context of grandparents in immigrant families who never fully assimilated. The Italians were the most noticeable with their St Augustine’s Hill neighborhood and its popular restaurants (and woe be upon anyone heard calling that neighborhood by its pejorative variant). The Germans and Poles were more dispersed as the city’s other neighborhoods scattered in the white flight. With a diplomatic career in mind I studied French at university, struggling so much I actually took it twice! It finally took two runs through the diplomatic service language school and 4 years in Francophone Africa to be comfortably fluent though by no means native. During that time in Africa we were friendly with our Canadian colleagues, 5 young men. One from Newfoundland was comfortably bilingual with an English Canadian father and French Canadian mother. There others from Quebec seemed shy about speaking English so we almost always spoke French with them. The last was clearly from Montreal and I regret to say we spoke of how hard he was to understand in either language. I eventually added Russian (in a feeble version) and smatterings of Vietnamese, Irish, and German to my list.
You're probably aware of this and it was just a brain fart, but I figured I should mention it since this is specifically a post talking about language and cultural differences: In the last paragraph, "seeked" should be "sought".
Interestingly, what you say about linguistic assimilation has (according to my very unscientific, anecdotal experience) actually lessened in recent years. For instance: My great-grandparents emigrated from Italy to New York in the early 1900s. My grandfather was born in the US, but never really spoke Italian fluently, because my great-grandparents apparently made a concerted effort to assimilate _themselves_ into American culture by e.g. refusing to speak primarily Italian, even in their own home.
This seems different from how cultural assimilation is treated by many of today's immigrants. It's most visible to me in Spanish speakers, probably just because Spanish-speaking immigrants are the largest group of immigrants in the US today. The children of these immigrants seem by and large to be fluent in both languages, which strikes me as a bit less cultural assimilation than what I've been told about my own family.
I remember reading a similar sentiment somewhere else online a while back - I thought it was a Slate Star Codex post, but I can't find it now. But it talked about the shift from talking about the US as a "melting pot" of cultures (many different cultures all "melting down" and turning into a homogenous mix with elements of each) to a more politically-correct "salad bowl" (still mixed, but retaining their individual identities.)
I guess this is all pretty tangential to your point (the US has a cultural hegemony, and its effects are widespread and significant), but it does make me wonder what it will look like in another 50-100 years.
That was indeed just a brain fart, frozen and preserved since January 2022. Fixed, thanks!
There's indeed a great debate between the melting pot (assimilation) and the salad bowl (multiculturalism). Canada in particular has gone far into the multiculturalism route; I think the US a bit less so, but the trend is still clear. On the other hand — and this is a major point in the political debates of Quebec — multiculturalism tends, ironically, to favor the current lingua franca even more, since all those cultural groups living together need a language to communicate between them. So yes, they might keep their mother language in the home a bit more than they used to, as well as their cultural identity, but within a generation or two the pressure to mostly use English is just too overwhelming.
In Quebec, this leads to concerns about immigrants: if a Mandarin or Russian or Punjabi speaker moves here and needs to learn a new language, which of French and English will they want to focus their efforts on? In a perfectly multiculturalist society, English, which is why multiculturalism is somewhat unpopular here compared to the rest of Canada.
I really agree with this. This effect of being on an empire's cultural border is very strong even on personal scales - I grew up bilingual (non-English language & French), and the fact that so much of cultural activity happens in English often leaves me in a situation where 1. certain ideas I am concerned with just don't show up in a lot of discussion (because they originate from the periphery, and not the anglophone world, combined with there being just less output in my non-French primary-language), and 2. personally I found myself in a situation where the language I now read best is no longer the one I write the best in (honestly pretty annoying).
I actually started following your blog at a point when much of the archive was still in French, among other reasons to have some French in my rss feed... That didn't work out but I do like the blog a lot anyway.
> a situation where the language I now read best is no longer the one I write the best in (honestly pretty annoying).
Honestly, yeah.
As for your point 1, it's part of why I decided to write in English; there's value in bringing in discussion from the non-anglo world to the anglo, which will remain the main stage for big conversations for a long time. Although... I may not have been doing a great job at this. I write about Quebec and franco stuff occasionally but maybe I should do it more.
Glad to see you've been reading for a long time! I haven't blogged in French for years...
Hm, as a Swiss, and that spent some of his childhood in the US, I can relate. The Swiss cultures (German-, French-, and Italian-speaking) are under pressure by their big neighbors, as well as the international English-speaking culture. Having reached retirement age, I've also seen quite a shift in Swiss (German-speaking) culture over my lifetime. This said, I'm not sure if the loss of some cultural traits, or the change to foreign ones is that bad. Technological progress and changes in society had a big impact on culture, as did immigration, but this also led to a high standard of living. On the other hand, Swiss culture that has changed little over the last 150 years can be found with the Amish, who still speak the Swiss German dialect (Pennsylvania Dutch). Is there a trade-off between benefiting from progress and keeping your cultural identity?
There are definitely tradeoffs, yes. And it's obvious that cultures should evolve, not remain stagnant, as the world changes. The compromise position that I would endorse, I think, is that a culture can change such that the difference it has with other cultures remains roughly constant. All cultures should evolve more or less in parallel, neither trying to resist global cultural change nor surrender completely to it.
Switzerland is interesting — it might be the most successful clearly multinational country. To what extent do you think it has managed to remain its own thing, culturally, rather than becoming essentially parts of Germany, France, and Italy? And how has it managed to do that?
Switzerland hasn't been multinational that long. Before Napoleon and the congress of Vienna, Switzerland consisted of 13 sovereign German-speaking states (which did occupy territories from the duchies of Savoy, Burgundy and Milan). The congress of Vienna kept Switzerland as buffer state between France and Austria, but reorganized it and added new states (now called "cantons"), including some half-dozen French-speaking ones, one Italian-speaking one, to the confederation. The architect of the new Switzerland was the Russian vice foreign minister Ioannis Kapodistrias (the first governor of Greece some ten years later, honorary citizen of the states of Geneva and Vaud).
As to how the cultural regions succeeded to remain within one political state (the cantons gave up their sovereignty with the constitution of 1848), it probably is a combination of the autonomy of the regions that was provided by the federal constitution, but also that joining the big neighbors as peripheral regions was unattractive, and finally that Switzerland was a poor country until the 20th century (but with a mercenary reputation) so as not to attract too much attention by said neighbors.
This said, there were tendencies in the German part to join the Reich in the 1930s, and the state of Jura, created in the late 1970s, which was split off from Berne, weighed the option to join France. In short, the vagaries of history, with a large dose of luck.
Thanks! It's interesting that you identity being poor (in the past) as a possible reason. I would have guessed that being wealthy (in the present) might be another reason — it wouldn't be very attractive for Francophone or Italian Swiss people to join poorer France or Italy now.
I think what I'm most curious about is, what makes the Swiss identify more with Switzerland than with Germany/France/Italy. I would imagine that especially for the French and Italian parts, the cultural pull of France and Italy might be greater than the cultural pull of mostly German-speaking Switzerland. How has Switzerland managed to create what seems (from the outside at least) like a coherent national identity? Other Western multinational countries like Belgium, Canada, or Spain seem to struggle with it at varying degrees.
Thanks for asking back. I'm struggling to answer, and, of course, these are just my opinions. Maybe the Swiss identity can be brought down to compromise, practicality and letting others live their lives, as well as with the creation of myths regarding the national identity (William Tell, or more recently, Heidi, etc.). Compromise and live and let live were probably important for a country in which one of the main business models for 300 years was to export mercenaries (the last set still guarding the pope). Peaceful Switzerland also had frequent internal wars, the last civil war ending in the 1840s. Much of the violence has been glossed over and Switzerland called neutral and peaceful since the last battle they lost in their own name at Marignano 1545.
If you'd scratch at what looks like a coherent identity, I'm afraid some ugly things might appear more or less quickly, and minorities will resent decisions against them by the majority. Avoiding decisions helps (live and let live), and the governments (municipal/cantonal/federal) are good a that, but it gets klutzy. And as you mentioned, now being rich helps, as nobody wants to lose out.
Note, by the way, that Canada also seems to have a coherent national identity from an external view. I do know a few Quebecois that have a (strong) different opinion on that. Let's hope compromise and live and let live win out, and that all can benefit and prosper. Wherever there is conflict.
I wonder if the ease of translation provided by deep learning tools (recently notably LLMs) will change or even reverse this trend.
Like many others, I learned English because it was the only way to access so many things: movies, books, video games, comics... Many of these weren't translated into French (despite French being a major language with quite a tendency to translate almost everything).
For others, English is useful to gain access to new audiences or markets. Like you, I create my intellectual works (small degenerate video games in my case) in English, even though this makes some of my friends unable to access them. But if I weren't doing that, nobody would play them. Even French people would have less chance to discover them (algorithms reward success, and you will have more success in English).
But new tools are changing that. Already, it is incredibly easy to get immediate high-quality translations of text. Even audio can now be easily translated: the audio is automatically transcribed and this transcription is automatically translated. There are even tools to directly translate audio feeds if you don't feel like reading (though these are less accessible and more expensive). In the coming years, these tools will probably be integrated everywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if, very soon, language differences stop being a barrier (even if just by creating friction) between people.
What this means is that the calculations behind learning the dominant language will drastically change. Learning a language is very challenging, it takes a long time, and it can even be humiliating (I feel so dumb speaking English, and I am - it's so cognitively demanding that I'm far less smart and witty while speaking it). For you and me, learning English still made sense; it was the only way to access so many good stuff. But for the young people of 2028, I'm not so sure: automatic translation means you will have access to everything written in English (or other languages) if you don't understand a lick of it. If you create a video in French, that won't prevent you from having an international audience, since it will be translated immediately. Under these conditions, why learn English? Why learn Chinese?
Yeah it's a great question! My hunch is the changes automatic translation will bring are very non-obvious and I really don't feel that I can make a competent prediction :)
Such an interesting comparison between Quebec and Rome!
And it's an good question — why we intrinsically care about preserving cultures.
On one hand, there are purely pragmatic reasons. Different cultures will have different strengths, and it's good to have a variety of cultures to get the advantages of each. It's like a farmer planting many different crops to get a fair variety of nutrients and avoid monocultural blight. If there is a bad cultural meme, it's best that there's some variation so that some cultures avoid it.
But it seems there's also a further appeal than pragmatism. Preserving different cultures just preserves different kinds of experience. While many of aspects of culture are pretty boilerplate, cultures aren't perfectly translatable among one another. Words and phrases carry different connotations in different languages — there are certain jokes and stories that only fully make sense in their original tongue. Holidays and traditions of different cultures aren't usually interchangeable, at least in their original form, because they were built for different purposes to handle different problems. And then, being in any given culture creates a sense of cohesion that's difficult to imitate from scratch.
It's like wanting to preserve a culture is like wanting to preserve a set of experiences and solutions that are delivered within that whole cultural package, even if that ends up meaning simple things like recipes, buildings, or novels. At least that's my impression from the American hegemonic stronghold :)
You get it. There is certainly an instrumental part and a terminal part to the value of cultural diversity. The interplay between them is complex, too. And then there's the opposite force of optimization (towards what seems to be the "best" culture for any given thing) that cultural diversity has to contend with.
i found that sentence to be soo important -and 100% true: "It’s all tradeoffs, based on what we value."
Timely, Etieenr given that American cuttite is on a hinge point with this election
Growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s in St Louis included at least mention of the city’s French roots (the Spanish slightly less slow) and languages other than English could be heard but usually in the context of grandparents in immigrant families who never fully assimilated. The Italians were the most noticeable with their St Augustine’s Hill neighborhood and its popular restaurants (and woe be upon anyone heard calling that neighborhood by its pejorative variant). The Germans and Poles were more dispersed as the city’s other neighborhoods scattered in the white flight. With a diplomatic career in mind I studied French at university, struggling so much I actually took it twice! It finally took two runs through the diplomatic service language school and 4 years in Francophone Africa to be comfortably fluent though by no means native. During that time in Africa we were friendly with our Canadian colleagues, 5 young men. One from Newfoundland was comfortably bilingual with an English Canadian father and French Canadian mother. There others from Quebec seemed shy about speaking English so we almost always spoke French with them. The last was clearly from Montreal and I regret to say we spoke of how hard he was to understand in either language. I eventually added Russian (in a feeble version) and smatterings of Vietnamese, Irish, and German to my list.
Nice, thanks for sharing this!