gsandi wrote:
Sentimentality, whatever you mean by the term, is not the only factor in the issue. The main factor is what people do - whom they vote for, where they send their kids for school (assuming they have a choice), what language they speak at home, and do they vote with their feet - if they don't like what's going on, they can leave.
Read the first page of this thread and you will understand what sentimentality is.
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At this point I think we better agree to disagree. Once people start using terms like "eventually", there is no counterproof possible. Suppose I go to Barcelona in 30 years' time, and I find that Spanish-Catalan bilingualism is as widespread as, or even more widespread than, today. Then you come along and say, well, maybe, but all this is temporary, and the diversity will, eventually, disappear.
I can't foretell the future, and I don't necessarily believe people who claim that they can.
Let me shorten the span of that word "eventually" a little bit so that you can provide counterproof -
In modern urbanized society, bilingualism is lucky to survive for more than two generations. (This applies to what you brought up about the word "WILL" as well, Salmoneus.)
Hence, talk about "vibrant bilingualism" a la Barcelona in modern society is pretty meaningless, since such "vibrancy" will
quickly kill the bilingualism with it. All bilingualism, if it were to exist indefinitely, must exist under a backdrop of segregation and isolation in order to continue to exist. But that's not what we want either, is it?
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Of course, it still leaves the question of why you want to stop people speaking their own language, given that you know they're going to stop anyway. It seems to me that you are like the man who bursts into the Oval Office shouting "we must nuke the world, we must nuke the world!", and when asked why replies "because its inevitable that we will, so we might as well."
Did I ever say that I want to
stop people from speaking their own languages? Does any sane government in the world seriously pursue that policy anyway?
The reason I started this "bilingualism turns into monolingualism" point is to show that vibrant bilingualism is nearly impossible to maintain in modern society, which in turn is in response to the Barcelona example that bilingualism can in fact exist in a "vibrant" state. I did not start this point as a "reason" to "stop" people from speaking minority languages.