Preservation of cultures

[Stephen van Jaarsveldt]

Hey, you quiet lot. Just because I'm in a different time-zone now, doesn't mean you can slack with your debating. Come now. Up, up !

We started a Libertarian Google Group up here and it only has 5 members so far, but already the debates are flowing. This is the best tool ever - thanks again Trevor for the initiative. One topic which has been fairly hot of late, was immigration, and in particular how Ottawa can decide who to let into Canada, while the people of Alberta get to have little to no say in who enters their territory - it is decided by bureaucrats far, far away. Physically and ideologically.

Anyway, this was my most recent contribution to that thread, and I thought I'd share it also with you guys;

... I spent 6 months in Ireland and learned to speak English, because nobody there spoke anything else - it was out of necessity. We then spent 6 months in Sweden and I learnt to speak Swedish - similar thing. I subsequently heard / spoke zero Swedish for many years and forgot most of it, but watching Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, after a while it started coming back and I could watch without reading the sub-titles. Years later I worked for a German company and really struggled to learn German... until I spent a few weeks in a very small rural town in Germany where one guy spoke Jordanian and everyone else spoke only German - my German improved in leaps and bounds. A friend of mine grew up on a farm where only his parents spoke Afrikaans and everyone else spoke only Venda, so he was fluent in both and he later moved to France where he learned to speak French.

Both of us had been repeatedly exposed to various other languages like Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana, Pedi, Sotho and several others, yet never picked up any of it. I've also observed this with other people, some being cousins and close relatives. It would seem that, if you are surrounded by people who speak only one language and exclusively that language, then you can pick it up fairly easily. The moment they have the option of reverting to a language you already understand, learning the new language becomes much, much harder. If there is another language present, you won't learn any of it - it becomes practically impossible to pick up either of them. Unless they are closely related AND closely related to a language you already understand, for example, if you know Xhosa and then try to learn Zulu while Tswana is around or if you know Dutch and try to learn Flemish while Afrikaans is around. But that is more like learning another dialect of your already known language.

Now comes the really interesting hypothesis. If Ludwig von Mises is correct in saying that culture is mainly driven or determined by common language, then keeping your culture or assimilating others into it, means not learning their language and / or them learning yours. It also follows that, if I'm correct in the observations above, importing a lot of immigrants of the same language is bad, but importing a bunch of different ones is not just neutral, but actively good. It means if you import a million Kenyans, then a lot of Albertans will learn Swahili and assimilate or integrate some Kenyan culture... but if you add in ten thousand Pakistanis, ten thousand Chinese, ten thousand Greeks, ten thousand Mexicans, etc... then no-one will learn Swahili. Everyone will just keep speaking their own languages and not integrate much culturally. It seems our brains simply can't handle all the permutations or make all the linguistic classifications to group like with like in such a varied mixture... so it just gives up on learning any of it.

This is why, after 350 years of mixing, South Africa can still have 11 distinct official languages and corresponding cultures, not counting various smaller tribal divisions. It seems to me, mixing one kind of people into the pot changes the flavour of the pot, but mixing in a bunch of flavours, causes clumps of the elements rather than a mixture. Of course, there still are some influences, but they seem mainly to be exceptions on the fringes of the clumps. Maybe the answer to cultural preservation then, is to have open borders. ;-)

S.

[Hügo Krüger]

I suggest that you learn Steven Pinker's book on the language instinct regarding this phenomenon.

The first issue that I have is that you claim that SA has 11 distinct official languages. This is actually wrong and linguists have pointed this out numerous times. The 11 languages comes from the Apartheid regime's tribal classifications. 

For all practical purposes, Sepedi, Tswana and Sotho are the same language. The differences between them is what we would call dialects or variants in most other languages.

The same case can be made for Zulu, Ndebele, Swasi and Xhosa. 

Venda is the only one that seems to stand out a bit, the reason being that the Venda people were traditionally isolated.

Languages follow a bell curve of distribution and if you read Noam Chomskys work on this subject you will realize the massive role that the state played in trying to enforce a certain dialect onto populations. This however never really works and kids often revert back to speaking the dialect of their peers.

The second issue is that you make the assumption that culture is equal to language. This is also not true. Children for example have a culture of their own that is often distinct from their parents. Also geography plays a big role over here. An English white kid in the North of SA has a culture most closer to an Afrikaans white kid than between Afrikaners of the North and South of the country. This is why English folk in Pretoria share many conservative views of the Afrikaners alongside them. 

The next issue that we need to clarify is that of 'mother tongue'. It is true that babies at a young age respond to the frequencies of their mothers, however children are more likely to speak the dialect of their friends. The concept is something between maatjietaal and moedertaal. This is why an Afrikaans kid who goes to an English school will not show any big development issues (math and science is often an exception), but a black class in SA who is forced to speak English when none of their friends do have a tougher time struggling. Hence the case for teaching in mother tongue actually makes sense. 

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[Stephen van Jaarsveldt]

Eish. I feel betrayed. I was expecting an echo-chamber rather than a critique - my bad expectations. Brief rebuttal then;

1. I said "11 distinct official languages". Official meaning "according to government" i.e. NOT accurate, by definition. Technically you can split Afrikaans up into four distinct flavours or you can lump it with Dutch and Flemish, depending on what you're trying to do, but I was trying to illustrate a point without going down that rabbit hole. I failed, it's sure dark down here.

2. Now where did I put that link to my Orania LibSem presentation on "Culture is esoteric BS" ? Can you find it ? I must have left it in my other asbestos pants. I should have added to that presentation that language (a learned attribute, not inate / genetic) was (as I mentioned below) what Ludwig (not me) considered central to culture. Oh well, spilt milk.

3. I was trying not to use the words "native language" for obvious reasons, but at the same time using "mother-tongue" does not seem right either, for the reasons you state plus a filthy one... which is why I didn't... so maybe it's the milk up my asbestos pants in this dark rabbit-hole, but I don't think I get your last argument... or was it just an addition / observation ?

S.