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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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Is fuentes encouraging people to move to the country and form a community? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him saying something like that. I wouldn’t have a problem with people advocating that they and people like them form close knit communities in the country and adopt whatever they consider to be the ideal lifestyle. I’d only really object to people imposing that lifestyle on other people.

I’m not even convinced language revivals in such isolated communities is as hard as you think. The issue is getting enough fluency that the next generation is raised speaking that language, rather than speaking the language of the broader culture.

The Irish and Welsh have aggressively tried language revival for decades to little avail. Billions spent on little-watched TV and other media in those languages, extremely regular classes for all grades in schools starting from a young age, all official documentation, forms, street signs etc in Welsh/Irish.

All it does is create a small middle class of true believer left-nationalists (common in Europe see Scotland or Catalonia) who subsist of taxpayer funding and are paid to act as a kind of living museum.

It only worked in Israel because at that time even most educated Arab and Shtetl Jews did not speak English as a common language, so they could pick their (re)invented language. If most early migrants to Israel had spoken English or Yiddish, one of them would have become the language. Actually, if the later wave of 70s to 90s Soviet migrants had moved to Israel in 48 the de facto official language would have been Yiddish.