> Wouldn't Africa be better off if English became the most spoken language?
No. Superficially it may seem like it but practically it would stagnate their native languages and dumb down the population.
> There are more resources, technical and otherwise, available in English than Swahili.
Yes there is. But the exercise of translating resources to your own language helps advance a language and a peoples. A few days ago we had a submission about how some of the translators of goethe became some of the best english writers.
All you have to do is look at the resurgence of europe and european culture as europe "abandoned" latin in favor of the native languages. We wouldn't have shakespeare without the push towards linguistic nationalism - the move to translate bible, etc to one's own native language.
> I wonder what the income effect of knowing English is for an Indian, compared to someone who only knows Hindi. I'd guess that it's significant.
It depends on whether india supports an english-first system or hindi first system. Besides only a small fraction of jobs within each country requires english.
English dependence can be viewed as why india and so much of africa is so poor and undeveloped. You need a healthy amount of national pride to develop your country. Japan, South Korea, China, etc developed through their own languages.
Doesn't mean I think everyone should abandon english. Learn what you want, but foster and develop your own languages.
> English dependence can be viewed as why india and so much of africa is so poor and undeveloped. You need a healthy amount of national pride to develop your country. Japan, South Korea, China, etc developed through their own languages.
You’re totally cherry picking your examples, to the point that no one can take what you wrote seriously at all. Afghanistan has their own language, Amazon tribes even have their own language…how are those countries/areas doing right now?
The suggestion was to demote the native language in favor of english since english had the knowledge. My point was to elevate the native language by bringing that knowledge ( english, arabic, russian, chinese, french, etc ) into your native language.
> it was to prefer English over Swahili as a 'lingua-franca' across regions.
That's what I'm against. And it's a good thing england didn't prefer french ( lingua-franca ) over its native language or we'd all be speaking french. It's a good thing descartes was translated into english rather than everyone speaking french. From a practical standpoint, it just makes sense to prioritize your native language.
>English dependence can be viewed as why india and so much of africa is so poor and undeveloped. You need a healthy amount of national pride to develop your country. Japan, South Korea, China, etc developed through their own languages.
Even if there's such a correlation (which I'm not convinced of) it's probably not cause and effect but both caused by colonisation.
In all fairness linguistic nationalism killed many regional languages. The European regional languages that survived were only due to either geographic isolation or much higher than average population density.
No. Superficially it may seem like it but practically it would stagnate their native languages and dumb down the population.
> There are more resources, technical and otherwise, available in English than Swahili.
Yes there is. But the exercise of translating resources to your own language helps advance a language and a peoples. A few days ago we had a submission about how some of the translators of goethe became some of the best english writers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523802
All you have to do is look at the resurgence of europe and european culture as europe "abandoned" latin in favor of the native languages. We wouldn't have shakespeare without the push towards linguistic nationalism - the move to translate bible, etc to one's own native language.
> I wonder what the income effect of knowing English is for an Indian, compared to someone who only knows Hindi. I'd guess that it's significant.
It depends on whether india supports an english-first system or hindi first system. Besides only a small fraction of jobs within each country requires english.
English dependence can be viewed as why india and so much of africa is so poor and undeveloped. You need a healthy amount of national pride to develop your country. Japan, South Korea, China, etc developed through their own languages.
Doesn't mean I think everyone should abandon english. Learn what you want, but foster and develop your own languages.