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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8529 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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This social structure is extremely common in history and is dishonestly presented as proof of how people can be “multilingual”.

I do not see what's dishonest about such a claim. Being multilingual isn't the same as being equally or maximally fluent in all the languages of concern. Being able to be conversational at all is the bare minimum, and counts by itself.

Being multilingual is not a stable situation. Languages exist in a hierarchy wrt each other and their relative strength changes over generations often drastically. In the modern world without some heavy nationalist pressure all but the highest prestige language(s) typically dies out. Surely you have some good experience with this process as an Indian who writes long internet articles in English?

Being monolingual isn't a stable situation either! Languages change and evolve, and morph into new ones. I resist the urge to make sweeping pronouncements or value judgements here.

The Romans learned Greek for centuries even after their own uncontested dominance. Latin was a mark of class and a scholarly language for tens of generations after it had died out in common use.

Surely you have some good experience with this process as an Indian who writes long internet articles in English?

India has almost as many languages as gods. Very few of them have died for good, and those that did were closer to tiny dialects with a few hundreds or thousands of speakers. I don't think any language that had a million speakers or more in living memory has died out, even if there's been a trend of consolidation with English and Hindi. A lot of people speak their native tongue as usual, but write it using Latin characters. There's no clear trend of one particular language sweeping everything else away.

I'm not sure what we're arguing about, this conversation has veered far away from what I criticized as flaws in the grandparent comment. I have no objection to the claim that people who learn multiple languages tend to be better at a few and only passable at others. That's obviously true.

The question is why. The comment far above claims that it's because languages are mutually exclusive, learning one necessarily takes away from the others.

I say this isn't true. If you take math and history lessons, learning more history won't make you worse at math, but you will obviously not learn as much math as someone who hyperfocused on it.

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