Lots of cultures, one language

Discussion of natural languages, or language in general.
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Gareth3
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Lots of cultures, one language

Post by Gareth3 »

I don't like the SF "universal translator" idea, so I'm working on a setting where all the cultures speak the same language. Or at least similar enough languages for mutual comprehension. So I'm wondering what's the broadest range of cultures, across time and space, that could have understood each other. An example is English. You have Elizabethan England, the Commonwealth of England, colonial Virginia, antebellum Georgia, 1960s Israel, 1960s Nigeria, 1980s South Africa, and 2015 Canada. Yes, I'm glossing over the actual popularity of English in those cultures, but you could easily find someone who understands it. Any other candidates? I suppose Dutch is up there too, if you count Afrikaans.

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Re: Lots of cultures, one language

Post by Zaarin »

Latin was spoken natively across most of the Western Empire and was certainly a universal L2 where it wasn't an L1; it continued to be the language of scholarship and literature through the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment (alongside vernacular languages, in the later periods, of course). In the Roman east, Greek served as universal L2. Some form of Arabic is spoken across the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, and portions of Subsaharan Africa as either L1 or L2. Spanish is spoken by a huge variety of cultures in Mexico, Central and South America, Spain, and the Spanish Mediterranean and Macaronesian islands--as well as in North Africa and the Philippines.
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Re: Lots of cultures, one language

Post by Copperknickers »

Obviously European colonial languages are the most widespread. It almost defies belief to see the great-grandsons, even grandchildren of cannibal tribesmen from New Guinea speaking English, but there is pretty much no culture in the world that doesn't have or in the recent past had a community of native or bilingual-from-birth English speakers somewhere: India, Latin America (Guyana, Nicaragua), Inuits, Pacific islanders, Chinese (Hong Kong), Burmese, all over Africa... the only missing parts are the Arab Muslim world and Southern Europe (unless you count Gibraltar).

Before the colonial period: Malay was rather widespread throughout the Indonesian archipelago. Lingua Franca spoken all around the Mediterranean. Other than that, Latin has already been mentioned: apparently Latin was used in WW1 and even 2, since it was often the only language shared between an Englishman or Frenchman who found himself in a prisoner of war camp with a Pole.

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Re: Lots of cultures, one language

Post by zompist »

Wherever there's Islam there's Arabic, as the Qur'an must be studied in the original. And Islam encompasses an impressive variety of cultures: the Arabs themselves; Persia; Turkey and Central Asia extending into China; a good deal of the Indian subcontinent; Indonesia; East Africa; West Africa; the Huì Chinese; the Muslim diaspora in Europe and America.

Chinese doesn't have the geographical spread, but should be mentioned for being the most-spoken language(s) on the planet for millennia, and for its cultural continuity, going back three thousand years. (Of course no one today would understand Old Chinese spoken aloud!)

French is almost as widespread as English, and around 1800 was the lingua franca of Europe, spoken even by the Russian aristocrats then at war with Napoleon. In the early 20C it was spoken in Europe, Canada, the Caribbean, a large part of Africa, Syria and Lebanon, southeast Asia, many Pacific islands, and even an enclave in India.

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Re: Lots of cultures, one language

Post by Gareth3 »

Thanks for the replies, plenty to think about. I hadn't thought of Latin, but you could get hold of a Latin speaker fairly easily in a wide variety of cultures. What resources should I look for if I'm interested in mutual intelligibility? Questions like how far back would a modern French speaker understand French people, or whether most Jamaicans can communicate with monolingual English speakers?

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Yiuel Raumbesrairc
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Re: Lots of cultures, one language

Post by Yiuel Raumbesrairc »

Gareth3 wrote:Questions like how far back would a modern French speaker understand French people(...)?
Within the French world, the issue is mostly about how much education we receive. North American French is quite divergent from European French, and their mutual intelligibility is sometimes downplayed, sometimes overestimated. On a personal level, an uneducated French speaker from France and from Quebec would not understand each other at all :

- The phonological system diverged : European French has reduced the number of vowels, where North American French has added some. (North American French also distinguishes vowel length, unknown in current European French.)
- Vocabulary has diverged a lot.
- Some grammar points have changed in both dialects.

Education usually bridges the differences, but the effects are unequal : most people from North America would understand an educated European, but the converse is not necessarily true. However, at one point, mutual intelligibility occurs anyway, but only after much bridging (and, therefore, education).

As for how far... Let's just say that, in writing, Rabelais (16th century) is pretty much my limit. (North American French; Modern Quebec Koiné French) I have been told by my French teacher that Quebeckers (and probably more generally North American French speakers) have quite an advantage there. Jacques Cartier (first French in North America) is also understandable but quite weird to read. Anything older is not-quite readable, and Old French is downright a nightmare.

Where, in speaking, would it lead? Unsure, but I believe that it would be likely that I could understand Louis XIV, but not much older. But this is just a wild, uneducated guess.

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As a corollary, I must add that if you plan to have a world where all cultures share the same language (or close enough for quick mutual intelligibility), this would mean that they are deeply involved with one another, as in maintaining continual contact. This means convenient transport/communication between all your communities (cities), and constant cultural exchange. To give some perspective, Canada and the United States are the closest States sharing English, and yet the differences are noticeable. (And within the US... let's not go there.)

You'd probably need a transportation and communication infrastructure that leads to convenience at least as good as what the US has.
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Re: Lots of cultures, one language

Post by Copperknickers »

Gareth3 wrote:Thanks for the replies, plenty to think about. I hadn't thought of Latin, but you could get hold of a Latin speaker fairly easily in a wide variety of cultures. What resources should I look for if I'm interested in mutual intelligibility? Questions like how far back would a modern French speaker understand French people, or whether most Jamaicans can communicate with monolingual English speakers?
I don't know about resources, but as mentioned above, education is the key to mutual intelligibility between dialects. Most Jamaicans will have been educated in standard Jamaican English and so they'll be able to understand anyone speaking a prestige dialect of English (RP British, General American) perfectly. Obviously, most non-Jamaicans are not well educated in Jamaican Patois, so the difficulty lies in the non-Jamaican's comprehension of the Jamaican, especially if the Jamaican is of a lower social class and is not used to speaking in standard English. This is what happens when non-native prestige dialects are imposed on people whose local vernacular is vastly different to the standard: assymetric intelligibility, where one side understands 90% and the other side understands about 40% of what the other is saying.

Afterall, it's pretty common for completely different languages to be imposed on people in unfavoured regions, for example French in Belgium being imposed on Flemish speakers, which shows the power of education when combined with social and cultural prestige.

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Re: Lots of cultures, one language

Post by Gareth3 »

That is interesting. North American French sounds like it qualifies as separate language. As for writing, I can see English orthography staying the same for centuries in the future, even while the spoken language evolves so much that most of the phonetic correspondences are gone. You'd just see the word "strength", and have to remember to read that symbol as however you pronounced the word:/cheng/, or whatever. Amusingly enough, this is how most English-language schools already teach reading.

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Re: Lots of cultures, one language

Post by Travis B. »

Gareth3 wrote:That is interesting. North American French sounds like it qualifies as separate language. As for writing, I can see English orthography staying the same for centuries in the future, even while the spoken language evolves so much that most of the phonetic correspondences are gone. You'd just see the word "strength", and have to remember to read that symbol as however you pronounced the word:/cheng/, or whatever. Amusingly enough, this is how most English-language schools already teach reading.
Actually, the phonics approach seems to be most popular in teaching English today, as opposed to the whole language approach you refer to, which has shown itself to be inferior in teaching people to actually spell; i.e. the English orthography still contains a great deal of phonemic content relevant to modern varieties despite the sound change that has occurred over the years.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: Lots of cultures, one language

Post by cntrational »

A possible alternative is to simply say that there's some universal language a la English, and simply not talk about the other languages except to mention that they exist. Easier to justify this compared to an actual literal one language.

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