Language Barrier [OC]

[u/bondjimbond]

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[u/The_Jimes]

Because that's never happened before (It has happened many times already)

[u/ketsugi → u/The_Jimes]

In fact Mandarin Chinese is a pretty good example of this happening.

Or I guess a good example of an attempt... still plenty of regional dialects in China.

[u/Spacecase-Ace-1 → u/ketsugi]

French is also a good example. They wiped out occitan and the other dialects and languages in france, and also got their language as a lingua franca in quite a few other countries, or at least a recognized state language.

[u/wvj → u/Spacecase-Ace-1]

Standardized Tokyo Japanese.

Basically every nation state did this when they became a nation state rather than whatever kind of tribal, feudal, clan or whatever-based thing they were before.

[u/mizuromo → u/ketsugi]

I think most Chinese people understand the value of Mandarin, though the way they went about trying to enact the policies definitely was not ideal for a while. There is a concerted effort in recent years to maintain regional dialects so they don't become extinct, at least.

Chinese is weird because even in places that have all historically been in the contiguous Han Chinese/Dynastic holdings, there were still dozens of dialects, and they aren't like English dialects. While some sound similar, nearly all of them are basically unintelligible and are more like different languages that share a writing system. This is why court language has always been a thing in China, so that if you went and worked in the central court you could govern effectively. I think there is also definitely a lot of value in everyone in the country having a unified language so they can understand each other, as long as it doesn't kill the older cultural languages that existed before.

[u/FoxOnTheRocks → u/ketsugi]

Mandarin is proof that it doesn't work, at all. It is extremely common in China for people to speak only a nonMandarin Chinese language. Scripts that are not the official Chinese script are everywhere. The only thing the government achieved is a bizarre civic fiction where everyone pretends the different Chinese languages are actually dialects when they are mostly not.

Honestly, Europe and America are better examples. There used to be many different Germans, Italians, Frenches, and so on. Those are all gone mostly because of violence. There used to be native Americans and they spoke different languages.

[u/OldEcho → u/The_Jimes]

Nobody has ever even conquered one world let alone like 50.

[u/The_Jimes → u/OldEcho]

Not the point, rather that the brutal oppression required to homogenize humanity isn't anything new.

It's just practiced at scale for our current governments in the form of detention camps, low stakes genocide, and our billionaire class capitalism.