language barrier neccessitates nationalism ?

Some time ago I was told that Yiddish was very frowned on by the Israeli state. I don’t think it was actually banned outright, just considered inappropriate for use in the new state.

Either way, those who have lost their native languages on account of various circumstances (through economic compulsion, linguistic imperialism etc) have been made to adopt some other language or culture on the behalf of some dominant group. For example, the indigenous Nahuatl in Central America have been wiped out for the most part by Spanish language. However, in holding on to their distant past and treasuring their "ancestral" culture, Central American workers only cling to an aspect of capitalism that has been eclipsed by another, more dominant, aspect, namely the colonial domination that has led to the destruction of indigenous lives and cultures. So, it makes clinging to any ancestral or indigenous languages and cultures mostly irrelevant to class struggle.

You previously wrote:

In all likelihood, the disappearance of the state would be accompanied by the disappearance of nations and bourgeois culture. Whilst historic injustices to minorities would be ended and creative activity would begin in a completely new sense than any previously existed, any tendency to go back to old and lost languages and cultures would only lead to sentimental bourgeois nationalism and false promises of the likes of Leninist right to self determination.

All foreign languages were frowned upon by the Zionists in Israel, as running counter to their Romantic reinvention of the Hebrew Race. Yiddish was subsequently associated with extreme isolationist Haredi sects. The stigma against foreign languages has since abated. There has even been a revival of secular Yiddish culture, well as Ladino and other Jewish dialects, in the last few decades.

I don't quite see this. Languages are currently dying at the rate of about one a fortnight. Even if this is stopped post-revolution, which I am not sure it would be, I don't see that "an expression of human creative energies" will create enough languages to make up the deficit.

Surely one of the most important forces behind the evolution of new languages, just as it is behind the evolution of new species is isolation, which in the past century has decreased dramatically. Would the varying different Romance languages have even evolved if the Romans had had television and other forms of modern media.

Also there is a critical mass below which languages become 'moribund' and are unlikely to recover. The figures that I have read for this are generally around 50,000 speakers. It is possible that a fundamental change to economic and social systems could change that number, but I imagine that there will still be a threshold, which means that many of the world's existing languages will go extinct.

The definition of moribund given by Michael E. Krauss is different. He charecterises a language as 'moribund' if it is not being spoken by children today. He believes that 15-30%, or 900-1,800 of the world's languages are now moribund, and 60-80% are endangered.

I think that in the future there will invariably be less languages whether there is a revolution or not, just as today there are less languages than there were one hundred years ago.

Devrim

To a certain extent this happened in Turkey during the 1920s. Modern Turkish replaced Ottoman as the official language, and at the same time the alphabet was changed. This means that anything written pre-1927 is inaccessible to modern Turkish speakers in its original form. Even early modern Turkish is difficult, due to the large amount of Ottoman words, with for example Atatürk's famous 36 hour speech, 'Nutuk', has been 'translated' into modern Turkish three times since it was made.

Ottoman was the language of the state administrative system. It was incomprehensible though to the Turkish peasantry, working class, and lower middle class, let alone to speakers of other languages.

It was the language of the state and the elite.

Devrim

I don't really think that 'peoples' that make choices like this really exist. There are of course many people who do make this choice, mostly for the benefit of their children.

Devrim

Thank you Devrin, I had not considered the points you make, though cannot disagree with them. The other night on BBC World Service I heard a woman saying that her mother refused to speak to her in her (mother’s) native tongue. I consider this kind of occurrence a tragedy, a crime of capitalism.

Working class wrote:

I have no idea why anyone, post-revolution would wish to go back to old and lost languages and cultures. These people would have to be rather eccentric though I doubt if they would pose a threat to the revolution. I imagine their activities would be akin to the historic re-enactment societies of today. I agree that post-revolution creative activity would be new (how could it be other), though surely all cultural development is based on a sifting and careful utilisation of the old?

I came on anarchism mainly through working with people (almost exclusively men) and realising they had the attributes identified by the founders of the movement to organise their own lives. I would never idealise working class culture (as it’s a product of capitalism) though there is much of value, which should be prized – the world would be a sadder place without an Irish jig.

That is only a way to put it. Materially speaking, languages serve as a medium of communication. Is saying "hello" in Arabic more useful than saying it in Chinese? All this serves to do is to communicate a particular thought of an individual to another. It is debatable if all thoughts in individuals are based on language (there is no conclusive evidence to this claim). So, to claim that languages would be based on sifting and careful utilisation of the old is to obscure the core issue of language.

I would argue against such a sentimental argument, To workers of, say, Papua New Guinea, this would make little sense and as such is base don a sentimental national view. From an internationalist perspective, this would make very little sense.

In Cairo I would imagine yes, it is.

It depends what you see as the tragedy here. When you see grandparents who can't communicate with their grandchildren that is, as you put it, a tragedy. I don't think it is a tragedy though that people no longer speak the same language as more remote ancestors though.

I think that like much else in the world the Irish jig has become a commodity, sold to people in forms like 'Riverdance' precisely because it is something that is no longer practised by these people on a day to day basis.

Devrim

Workingclass it would appear we write at cross purposes. Of course that is only a way to put it (that occurs to me).

Your statement that languages are not based on ‘a sifting and careful utilisation of the old’ is a claim outside of my experience. When we write or talk, that is exactly what we are doing. Or do we somehow step outside of history? Occasionally we may make up a word though I don’t remember ever doing so. This is my material world though of course I cannot prove that you are in it.

As I am ignorant of their culture, I do not know of any music/activity, that the workers of Papua New Guinea find pleasurable, though presuming they do, I would not sneer at them for being ‘sentimental’ (or nationalistic).

I do not set myself up as a cultural commissar. I value the world’s diverse cultures and do not imagine a post-revolutionary future, a brave new world, where everyone has to jump some libertarian sentimentality test. People enjoy many pursuits which appear incomprehensible to others, and as long as they do no harm, I say play on, and sod international-uniformity.

Devrim, a mother refusing to address her child in her own language is based, I think, on the feeling that it is necessary to give her child a ‘clean’ start in an ‘alien’ culture, and that is the basic tragedy. Her past is seen as a liability of which her child must be free. For Europeans arriving in America this may have had some justification, though for aboriginal peoples it is another form of genocide.

I’d agree that ‘Riverdance’ and the like are commodities and would be no loss to humanity if they disappeared into the dustbin of history. It is ten years since I was last in Ireland, and much may have changed, though I was amazed at the amount of so called ‘traditional music’ that was being played in the pubs. I was visiting folk in County Sligo, which is famous for its fiddle tradition, so perhaps this creative activity was not reflected in the rest of the island.

My relatives in Angus tell me that over the last few years there has been a craze for Scottish country dancing. I had though Bill Hayley and The Comets had killed that off more than fifty years ago! People are wonderfully resilient and unpredictable, sometimes subverting the system; until of course the exploitation industry catches on to make a few bob.