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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1040 thread views

Transnational Thursday for November 27, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

During this holiday season, are you interacting with any far-flung relatives who speak strange creoles/patoises/pidgins of your language? Do you think that such modes of speech should be considered proper languages in which their inhabitants can take pride, or merely disgusting bastardized dialects suitable only for reassimilation into the mother tongue? As a USAian with several relatives (mostly from Trinidad and St. Croix) who speak English with a very thick accent, and at least one (IIRC, from Antigua) who probably can be considered a speaker of creole rather than of English proper, I am inclined toward the latter opinion.

(I'm putting this in the Thursday thread rather than in the Friday thread because it seems like a culture-war topic. See, e. g., the laughs that /pol/ extracted from BBC Pidgin a while ago.)

I have relatives who speak three kinds of Chinese. Growing up, they spoke one only with family, another was the local vernacular, and they learned Mandarin at school. In all likelihood I will be the last person in the family to (barely) speak our ancestral tongue, but if I'm lucky one day I will have children who can deploy a few choice insults, like Sopranos characters spouting broken Sicilian phrases. Otherwise I appreciate the benefits of linguistic standardization, up to a point i.e. everyone being monolingual anglophones would be boring as hell to me.

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