this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
52 points (81.0% liked)

Asklemmy

43916 readers
1021 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Is the Tower of Babel still affecting us or something?

Edit:

We have 8 billion people, yet the best we could muster for the most total speakers of a language is under 2 billion, including non-natives...

  1. English (1,452 million speakers) First language: 372.9 million Total speakers: 1.4+ billion According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers.

https://www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world#:~:text=1.,English%20(1%2C452%20million%20speakers)&text=According%20to%20Ethnologue%2C%20English%20is,native%20and%20non%2Dnative%20speakers.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Comrade as to your point of unipolar hegemonie, wouldn't the opposite be true? That because of imperialism more people speak the same language. Example would be how former English colonies speak the same language, like India and Pakistan have their own languages but they also speak English due to colonialism and neo colonialism.

[โ€“] [email protected] -2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

While colonialism created conditions that made it favourable to benefit from the coloniser's language, the capitalist structure ensured a proxy form of colonialism never seen before in human history, where all forms of media and pop culture were hijacked. It is unique, and it is a perspective that only I have held and seen nobody talk about it, but Britain has utilised cricket as a tool of colonialism on Hindustan (post partition, India and Pakistan). It is part of reason why even after independence we continued to be silent, unlike China, who faced half as worse the fate as India, bounced back through Mao's revolution.

Now, back to this proxy colonialism that never left most countries even after Britain left them, post WW2 the baton seemed to have been passed onto USA. The iron grip of capitalism and a unique cocktail (western pop culture infused with the invention of modern advertisement by Edward Bernays that abused psychoanalysis theories) and the vacuum of money and opportunities created by western imperialism ensured no matter how hard colonised countries were crippled, they would have only few choices left - starve and shrivel (DPRK post 1980s USA bombing), become proxy subservient to west (IMF/WEF initiative) or become subservient to west in the form of brain drain and human resource drain. This is purely my theory and how I think about things without ever having read a word of socialist literature.

The adoption of their language was just one step among many steps they probably worked long ago, or worked as time went on. I do think it was thought of long ago, similar to what Zionist Project is.

I am not sure, I may be just rambling here, but whatever I guess.