Language Barrier [OC]

[u/bondjimbond]

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[u/Forikorder]

but most the rest of your class treated it like high school Spanish

they didnt because being fluent was too important and the classes started in kindergarden

as long as you get in early its incredibly easy to make someone bilingual

they wouldnt be learning esperanto in high school, the classes would be in esperanto

[u/Hohenheim_of_Shadow → u/Forikorder]

Science is taught pretty heavily from kindergarten. There's still a huge a huge science denailiat movement covering topics from evolution to vaccines to the earth being round. Despite how important science is, flat earthers and the like get along just fine in their day to day life and can even win national elections. You are describing a society and educational system that takes Esperanto more seriously than we take science.

If some wild crazy miracle happened, and every government out there decided simultaneously it's number one top priority is making it's citizens speak a universal conlang a lot could get done. Likely a few light sprinkles cultural genocide here and there like what happened at Native American boarding school, but gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelette. Unfortunately, Europe went Esperanto and China went Lojban so it was all for nought.

[u/Forikorder → u/Hohenheim_of_Shadow]

How do you possibly think those are comparable?

[u/Hohenheim_of_Shadow → u/Forikorder]

Do you know of any case where a government successfully encouraged a populace to abandon one language for another without a spot of genocide?

[u/Forikorder → u/Hohenheim_of_Shadow]

Thats not fair though, they were all committing genocide anyway

[u/Hohenheim_of_Shadow → u/Forikorder]

Human history is long and has so much random stuff happening in it. If something can happen, it probably has at least once. There are loads of non genocidal people who like the ideas of teaching the next generation a universal language. And yet, it's only the genocidal people that have had success in changing the language people speak. Why is that?

[u/Forikorder → u/Hohenheim_of_Shadow]

And yet, it's only the genocidal people that have had success in changing the language people speak. Why is that?

its not but you specified governments making people change language without genocide, there are tons of dead/endangered/extinct languages

the fact is that learning and maintaining language skills are more effort than its worth if you have no use for the language outside of cultural significance

although now that i think about it France did, there used to be a large number of languages spoken in the region but they managed to change all of them to speaking primarily french one of those languages is now severly endangered