Comment by sombragris

nkozyra 4 days ago

> That "casual English" is somewhat part of the language of the new generation.

It's a near global lingua franca and the Internet has only accelerated that.

I wonder how long it will be until English just sort of becomes first language in non-native English speaking countries with the current trajectory and momentum of English-first Llama.

Shame it couldn't be a more cohesive spoken language.

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keybored 4 days ago

It won’t happen except in the imagination of mono-lingual-future dreamers on HN (popular idea here for some reason).

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- altruios 4 days ago
  
  Well, speaking in different languages facilitates different modes of thinking which results in different thoughts. Some thoughts are easier to have in one language than another. It takes all sorts to make a world and multiple languages means a broader mental space to explore ideas.
  People against that tend to lean totalitarian. People for a monoculture, that is. That is an inherently limiting philosophy which can only die out as it narrows the 'acceptable ideas' list over time.
  
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  keybored 4 days ago
  
  > Well, speaking in different languages facilitates different modes of thinking
  Sapir-Whorf? Can’t that just be put to bed by now?
  > People against that tend to lean totalitarian. People for a monoculture, that is.
  On the topic of languages at least.
  Some technologists seem to want to get rid of all ostensibly useless things. More than one language being one of them.
  
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- Wytwwww 4 days ago
  
  Depends on the country probably. In some places, at least reasonably high English fluency is near universal. It wouldn't be surprising if these countries eventually became effectively bilingual.
  
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  keybored 4 days ago
  
  That’s different. GP said “first language”…
  
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- darby_nine 4 days ago
  
  Eh it'll probably be the de-facto public/professional/transactional register and people will speak another language at home.
  
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  keybored 4 days ago
  
  Based on what? Again we’re just throwing eventualities out there with no basis in current reality.
  People are pretty good at understanding English in Norway. But the only factor that introduces English into the conversation is when someone does not speak Norwegian. In my experience.
  People are extrapolating from the fact that people use English-borrowed slang to these far-fetched scenarios. Yeah? Slang and words have always been borrowed. Not even medical doctors speak Latin to each other.
  
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  darby_nine 4 days ago
  
  > Based on what?
  I never expected to be taken as declaring an objective fact; I just notice that this is already how workplaces are shaping up. I could easily be very wrong.
  Anyway, with the internet the understanding of proximity changes. With an increasingly global economy everyone will be closer to people they only share english with. Or maybe mandarin, if you want me to emphasize skeptacism.
  
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  numpad0 4 days ago
  
  No offense, but sometimes an annoying aspects of monolingual people(those without substantial second language training, not just ** monolingualism totaritarianists) is that sometimes the only aspect of the concept of a language some of them understand is words.
  About 30% each of English vocabulary is to have been borrowed from French. That means the phrase "it's all French to me" in free standing could logically imply that you do have good idea of what is being said. That's obviously never the case.
  That's because dictionary vocabulary is just an asset file for a language. It's a major, but still a part of a language. Integrating bunch of words into a language only inflates that dataset.
  Dinitrogen tetroxide(N2O4) is apparently called "tetraoksid diazota" in Russian. Do memorizing bunch of those compounds in Russian makes you fluent in that language? I'd very much doubt it.
  
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  darby_nine 4 days ago
  
  > That means the phrase "it's all French to me" in free standing could logically imply that you do have good idea of what is being said.
  It is not logical to infer that because a word is derived from another language that you'd have any chance of understanding it. The phrase just is a cute recognition of the same derivation.
  But you seem to imply monolanguage speakers think the opposite! I strongly suspect this is true of multi-language speakers that learned language through formal techniques. Language is so universal you cannot expect people to be ignorant of its complexity despite their never descending to its depths.
  But I'd also like to point out French is occasionally quite understandable. It's when french falls into simple phrases that it becomes unintelligible. As an analytic language it's nearly as easy to decipher as latin is, although orthography is very difficult to learn.
  
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pseingatl 4 days ago

It happened in Ireland in the 19th century.

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- broken-kebab 3 days ago
  
  It's completely different thing: Ireland was a province loosing its language to metropoly. FWIW English wasn't even accepted as global lingua franca back then.
  
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throw__away7391 4 days ago

I have observed in dozens of countries that the youngest generation now speaks English quite fluently in most of the world. Boomers might know only a few phrases, many millennials can speak well enough, but quite a lot of teenagers now are speaking fluently, using slang and making jokes.

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- razakel 4 days ago
  
  I've heard of kids becoming fluent in English before their mother tongue simply from exposure to subtitled TV and movies! It's usually countries where the market is too small to justify dubbing.
  
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Yeul 4 days ago

Pretty much already happening across the well to do city folks here in the Netherlands.
Ultimately you have to choose a language that everyone can express themselves in and it sure as hell ain't Dutch lmao.

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- retrac 4 days ago
  
  Dutch is so close to English that at times it is almost a dialect of English. "Ik zag de boot zinken." / "I saw the boat sink."
  The rest of the world can't watch English TV with subtitles for a few months/years and come away with a passing understanding of English. It's a much steeper cliff.
  The technical term is diglossia and it's much more common when the two languages are closely related. Latin being the written standard when the spoken language had evolved into Old French or Old Spanish is another classic example.
  
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  anthk 4 days ago
  
  Old Spanish (12th century, El Cid as an example) was closer on spelling to Latin than the 16/17th century one from Don Quixote.
  
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- acomjean 4 days ago
  
  My mom was a German / English technical translator in the US. At one point she said those Germans need to decide, English or German. I guess the French from time to time make French words for those with English roots.
  Though the German word for cell phone, “handy” is pretty great.
  
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  CRConrad 4 hours ago
  
  > Though the German word for cell phone, “handy” is pretty great.
  But it sounds rather silly in the standard German pronounciation of "henndii".
  
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  ethbr1 4 days ago
  
  The French are pretty serious about preventing linguistic hegemony and fund measures to slow/prevent it.
  
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  em-bee 4 days ago
  
  as a native german, speaking english fluently it drives me nuts. i mean, "handy" is not even borrowed like "computer" but invented by germans as a pseudo-anglicism.
  
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  dylan604 4 days ago
  
  But the English euphemism for "handy" would sure cause some confusion, and potential disappointment. Just like the 'merican slang "double fisted" takes a whole other meaning in the UK
  
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johnisgood 4 days ago

Like Lojban?

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euroderf 4 days ago

Same phenom in Finland. But then it gets kinda weird when recruitment ads have job titles in English and then the body text in Finnish.

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calpaterson 4 days ago

Speaking of - I'm organising a coffee morning for HN readers here in Helsinki. Get in touch (email in my profile) if you want to come along

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dustincoates 4 days ago

The same thing with job titles happens in France, too.
Also, back when tech meetups were more common, you would often have where the title and description were in English, and the talks in French.

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- archi42 4 days ago
  
  Not only tech... I live close to the French border. My wife asked me to go to some criminal dinner event thing in France, and all the leaflets and the website were English. Great! Checking out the details, a small remark in a table with the dates and such catches my eye "Language: French". Well, maybe that's the French date,... Nope, that's for all scheduled events. Kthxbye. At least we were not surprised on site, because my French c'est no bene.
  
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pvaldes 4 days ago

People spent more time reading your job offer if is explained in their own language. Less friction, more eyeball time, that is what you want if you are a recruiter.

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- euroderf 4 days ago
  
  Oh, sure. It's not the Finnish body text that throws ya off. It's seeing that after the big, bold English job title !
  
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