Im native. It was only 2 generations ago, that this was happening! My own grandfather was taken from his family, had his head shaved, and was given a European name. It makes me feel better knowing that this is becoming more and more common knowledge. Thank you for mentioning why our languages have died out so severely. In my tribe, Zuni, there are leas than 1000 people in this current generation who are native speakers. I am one of them. hadiya-tsuyy’a!
Hey I hope this message finds you well. I am a postgraduate student in Asia, working on sociolinguistics :) would it be possible that I could find your master thesis somewhere on the Internet? I am also very intrigued by the complexity of language ideologies. It is fine if you don't feel like sharing :) Thank you!!!
I've had a conversation with my dad where I try to convice him on the importance of keeping alive the linguistic richness in our country (I live in Guatemala and there are 20+ Mayan languages that each day are being more and more replaced with Spanish in the communities, and the government efforts to keep them alive don't seem to be working). However, to him, mantaining "linguistic richness" for the sake of it is just not that worth it. He holds that Spanish should be the language taught in schools of the indigenous communities because it is simply way more useful. I've had a hard time with his argument because it is hard to not agree with it, I mean, I'm certain that language diversity is really important, but I can't really say why, and the sad reality is that for most people in this empoverished communities knowing Spanish is the only way to get a decent job, for example, or access higher education, or even just be taken seriously. It would definitely be more efficient if everyone simply knew spanish and the minority languages disappeared, but I cannot put into words why that is wrong without recurring to that "mantaining lignuistic richness" idea that only works if you already value language. Any help? pd: I know this is happening everywhere due to globalization, so there must be a clear answer, right?
The problem is there really isn't a good reason to preserve dying languages, other than an argument for preserving culture, and even that is a tenuous one. Sure, you can try and save the languages, but if the people feel like they need to go to the big (and more importantly Spanish) cities to make a living, they're not going to have a reason to speak their mother tongues anyway.
I watched a Ted-talk about this once, and they discussed how indigenous languages contain knowledge of the environment around it and local medicines. The way is was describe was, "The loss of an indigenous language can be the loss of the next miracle drug." Languages also show scientist how our brains work, and many languages have pushed the boundaries of what we thought was possible. It can be hard to make the case at first, but there is a lot of evidence that everyone benefits from linguistic diversity. Personally I think the best way to show your dad would be to try to get him to learn one of the languages, because it might be better to experience it first hand.
I think the history of the Bangladesh Liberation War may be a useful research point. The war came about because Bangladeshis wanted the right to speak their own language but Pakistan suppressed them.
it has always infuriated me when people say there should just be one world language just because theyre frustrated that they have to learn one in school, so much culture would get lost, the world so boring thank you for these videos as always crash course 🥰
you have to also agree that's because taking say spanish class has a low probability that you will actually learn spanish, but it is high probability to affect your grade negatively. I had the luxury of being raised bilingual, and let me tell you it was still difficult to juggle, calculus, art, literature, and physics, along with Spanish. It's a nuisance to learn Spanish and it gets worse when they want you to appreciate it, the same way Art and Speech is, and as you can see, our modern "Art" is nothing to boast about. The conclusion anyone would get fron those classes is, "Wow, what a waste of my time". Which ironically can sum up my first 2 years of high school.
@@WhoLetTheDogOut I think you're barking at the wrong tree here. It's not the language, it's the curriculum and the methods. In many parts of Europe people know 2 to 3 languages on average.
A shared language makes it easier to work together through cooperation. A shared language can help people grow together through establishing a shared culture. Although, a "world language" wouldn't necessarily have to replace local languages anyway.
1:50 - the dialect chain example sounds exactly like the "ring species" example for the fuzzy definition of a biological species. In fact, this episode illustrates a lot of the parallels between cultural and biological evolution.
I have to admit that it's quite amazing to hear the mention of the residential school system . I'm a 2nd generation descendant of not attending those schools . Greta coverage of a topic not covered all the time. Thumbs up from this indigenous from canada
Dialectology is definitely one of my favorite subjects in sociolinguistics, so I enjoyed the video! The question of what "counts" as a different language is a fascinating one that's bound up in so much more than just the literal features of a language.
Great video! I did my master's degree in Teaching Chinese as a foreign language and there's always more to learn about learning (and teaching) languages! I encourage everyone to give it a try! Find a language you are interested in and do your best! You won't regret it!
Just wanted to point out that there''s at least one example of a sign language that isn't primarily associated with Deaf communities, Plains Indian Sign Language, which has primarily been a language of trade and communication between people who don't share a spoken language.
I remember the high-school French and Spanish teachers having a conversation with each other in their respective languages before class one day and they just sorta figured it out. Used it as an example of the similarity between romance languages.
2:37 Hey ! I was surprised to hear the Occitan language, or languages, referred to as "a variety of french that is closer to spanish or italian", in the same video speaking about linguistic rights and raising awareness of minority languages. The Occitan language group is a really interesting example of a dialect chain and is not a dialect of French - it was subject to a concerted effort to make French the one and only national language during the French Revolution, to promote national unity. Part of this was convincing speakers of occitan languages that their language was a deformed French, and not a "real" language. As a result it is now a minority language, despite being the dominant language in the Occitan region, notably the south of France, several hundred years ago. Occitan is a really interesting question for linguists in terms of what defines a dialect or a separate language - I keep rferring to it as both a language and a group of languages because it's still a hotly debated question today. It also has a very interesting history and a wealth of literature and poetry dating from medieval times. The concept of "courtly love" and "chivalry" originated in Troubadour poetry in the occitan language. If you're interested in the history of minority languages, do a little research into the regional languages of France, it's a great example of how our idea of "one nation = one language" developed and the harm it does to speakers of minority languages and linguistic diversity. Thank you Crash Course for the amazing stuff you do, I'm so happy to see linguistic rights treated so concisely and see people talking about it. Mercès Crash Course, per ço que fasètz !
As a catalan speaker and philology student, I really appreciate your great job!! Thank you for the accuracy and clearness. I love these linguistics videos. Keep it up!!
As Taiwanese, we always have a lot of problems with our relationship with China. It really bothers me and frustrates me, especially when I only speak Chinese and not Taiwanese. This video shows me that this situation is not only for Taiwanese, thank you.
Will there be an episode about conlangs? I would love a discussion or thoughts on conlanging and how it relates to linguistics, especially in the academia.
It's great that you make a case for linguistic diversity, but I wish you'd have shown the other side of the coin too, the benefits of large-scale mutual intelligibility. It's easy to paint politicians as evil.
This. Its easy to look at the evil part but most person in the world learn english voluntaring to better they way of life. A global languange is very useful for almost everything
i've also noticed that this series is very strongly biased towards certain beliefs of the nature of "should", and while arguments are proposed, it's still a series that's supposed to give people some knowledge of linguistics, thus inserting opinions into it might be a problematic idea, especially since people supporting opposite vews are portraid as evil opressors, not just politicians
@@caorusso4926 only because that they've been forced into a society where learning English is now the best option. Without imperialism and colonialism, they would have been perfectly content with their native tongue, so it is up to the dominant power to recognise the damage caused by linguistic and cultural hegemony and take steps to reverse it
I always found it weird that my hispanic friend could speak spanish in italy and they understood him just fine for the most part yet Okinawa Japanese have a hard time understanding mainland Japanese a lot of the time
This one felt hard for me- we're french canadians, and we speak french canadian sign language. It's usually referred to as Québec sign language, but it's spoken throughout Canada. It's also tiny compared to the ASL juggernaut. There exists one dictionary that was funded by french-speaking colleges and parent groups. There is only one school in Ontario that teaches it- and it has less than 50 students, including the residential students. The parent council for the school literally puts out recorded versions of popular storybooks for the kids- because there are no ressources. There's no kids' shows with LSQ translations. There's no baby-sign-along books like I have found dozens of times in bookstores for ASL-speakers. And even within LSQ, my daughter and I would have to try really hard to understand someone from Québec city. We get there, but it's a bit rough. A lot of people have asked why on earth it's not the same as French sign language- and all I can say is "it's just not". It shares almost 40% of its signs with ASL (if you count signs that have the same orientation and position but slightly different movements, etc) but I have no idea what ASL-speakers are saying. Ontario recognizes the right to teach children ASL, LSQ and PlainsSL, and Nunavut recognizes Inuiuuk, but that's it for Canada. Québec doesn't even recognize LSQ as an official language, and fully 10% of their population is deaf. But it's always so nice to have you touch upon signed languages, anyhow. So many people forget that these languages exist, or believe them to not be real languages. Thank you!!
Japan has more languages than just Japanese, namely languages spoken in Okinawa and other smaller islands, but for the sake of unity, Japan calls them "dialects", which means they don't get any kind of official protection or promotion. Ainu, a language isolate once spoken in Hokkaido by the Ainu people was only recognized as an indigenous language and not a dialect since 2008, now that it's too late and basically extinct.
We have SO MANY languages that are used in Canada, but we only learn two in school. I think that we should be able to learn ASL as well as an Indigenous language of our choosing. French is an essential language, but only if you live in QC, NB or Ottawa, so why not give us a chance to learn something that makes us more connected
Interesting! As a biologist, the way that the Thought Bubble explains the difference between language and dialect is very much analogous to the difference between species and subspecies.
6:24 Chinese languages only share the same writing system because it was standardized during the 20th century to be more like Beijing Mandarin, which doesn't even reflect how it's actually spoken by speakers of their own languages. If the individual languages standardized their own writing systems so that the text is written how it's naturally spoken in each those languages, Mandarin speakers (and speakers of other Sinitic languages) would not be able to understand nearly as much if at all. For that matter, there are problems when using the Chinese script to represent modern spoken Sinitic languages. The standard set of characters is not enough to write Cantonese. New characters had to be made for even the most commonly used words, or in very rare cases, such words are written using Latin letters. In fact, the standard Chinese script became so incompatible with spoken Taiwanese Minnan that a whole Latin-based orthography was proposed to represent the language, called Pe̍h-ōe-jī.
I wish we had words between dialect and language to describe languages. Spanish and Italian, for example, fall somewhere between this gap. I know the video jokes about linguists measuring intelligibility, but do they actually have a way to do so? Having an accurate measure of intelligibility can help us more clearly define the spectrum of languages.
When I visited Sri Lanka, the two major languages use different writing styles and languages. Citizens must use English to converse. Road signs are in all three languages.
Re language ideologies: the Bangladesh Liberation War was specifically because Bangladeshis wanted the right to speak their own language but were being suppressed by Pakistan.
the 1:1 relationship between nation and language strikes me as a uniquely American view of the world. In a larger context people might know it's untrue for where they live, but might still be bullshitted by their education or peers into thinking like that about other countries on far away continents.
Um no, its a highly European view of the world, you know, the place where the idea of nation-states arose (One ethnic group, one people, one language for one country).
It's not uniquely American, it's a very prominent idea in nationalism in general. The idea that a nation is a group of people speaking the same language, is one of the main ideologies of creating a nation. The French state after the Revolution (and for a long time after) suppressed dialects and languages that were not metropolitan French (like Breton, or Occitan, etc.); Great Britain systematically repressed Welsh or Cornish; the idea of a German nation encompassed everyone speaking "German" (ignoring the various dialects and languages falling under that umbrella); the Hungarians tried to "magyarise" the various peoples living in the pre-WW1 Kingdom of Hungary; and even today we see that principle in action e.g. in ex-Yugoslavia where the successor states try to establish "their own" national languages out of the larger Serbocroatian continuum. That a linguistic map of Europe today has linguistic borders clearly following, in most cases, the national borders, is an effect of this idea. The European nation states in the 19th and 20th century purposefully eradicated linguistic minorities in their borders because of this supposed 1:1 relationship.
I disagree. This relationship is even used by nationalists and separatists to justify their political stances. Europe is full of this. In Spain we have several languages and most of the separatist movements are based on the "we have a language, we are a nation" logic. You even have the case of the Basque Country where several not mutually intelligible "village languages" were amalgamated into an official language by the founder of Basque nationalism.
It's a fairly common nation-building tool worldwide, not just in the US. It's easy to justify your state's borders to the world if you can convince them it matches some distinct people-group (the literal meaning of "nation") with a distinct culture, and, yes, a distinct standardized language with distinct differences you can point to as roughly aligning with said borders and treat the dialects that blur the line near said borders as just a funny regional accent. It's easier to make political statements of "us" versus "them" when most people in your country accept that "we" speak one language and "they" speak a bizzare foreign tongue...even if your dialect is closer to your neighbors just across the border than to the standardized version in the capitol--and if an independance movement can convince enough folks that they speak a different language from the dominant culture in the country, as many Balkan states did in the breakup of Yugoslavia, it's much more likely to succeed. Not every country defines itself around such a rigid national identity, but a lot do, and that kind of thinking played a huge part in the original European idea of the "nation-state" as opposed to the much-more-common-around-the-world-throughout-history loose tribal confederation, subnational city-state or petty kingdom, or multi-national empires. Many have walked that idea back, like the Dutch, who used to heavily suppress the non-Hollandic regional languages of the Netherlands, but now recognize many of them, such as Frisian, as separate languages (even if they still treat them with suspicion). The general point about people being more likely to say so about far away nations they know nothing about, even if they know it's not true in their homeland *is* broadly true though, except if they are in the grips of a VERY strong nationalist movement. Humans just find it easier to start from the simplest model that matches their experience (ie if they live in a predominantly monolingual community that speaks their country's dominant language that "Country A speaks Language A") and only revise that model as they are taught differently or confronted with too many exceptions to ignore.
I had no idea about village sign languages. So happy to be continually learning more about the Deaf community. Makes me a better linguist and more prepared to enter my PhD studies!
I've been fascinated for years by Scots, which I consider to be a separate language to English. I don't speak it myself, but my ancestors did and I'd love to see more done for its preservation and promotion.
There's a useful term that came out of Sinitic linguistics, which is "topolect", which is a more accurate translation of the term in Mandarin that is often translated as "dialect". Unfortunately, that difference doesn't matter much to the CCP, who see any deviation from what's spoken around Beijing as simply bad Chinese not worth preserving.
Wait, at 3:42, why are people from the original communities of the Diaspora babies "not up on the current slang" if larger groups (their homeland communities) change how they talk faster than smaller groups (Diaspora communities)?
Really awesome video, thank you for so much information! :) I‘ve got an amateurish question. I grew up with the official German (Hochdeutsch) language. You mentioned, that many European countries try to create one official language and teach that to form unity. Now looking at Germany‘s neighbours, Austria and Northern Switzerland, these nations claim to speak official Hochdeutsch (in legal frameworks) too, but in person I often got the feedback, that the people proudly state, that they speak Austrian or Schwitzerdütsch (Swiss German). I went to school abroad, where Austrian teachers refused to accept German vegetable/fruit words as correct, because in Austrian it was called differently and punished me (mark-wise) for that. Johanisbeere - Ribisl (actually hungarian word btw) , Kartoffel-Erdapfel and so on. Moreover I realized that many Austrian/Swiss teenagers face the problem that speaking their dialect makes it harder for them writing it the correct Hochdeutsch way. I learned writing by pronouncing and articulating correctly (thereby hearing the letters). Is that a danger? You might know, that understanding Austrians/Swiss becomes very hard, losing the ability to communicate (just like your village example). Except, the Swiss are the village and Germany and any German learner is a metropolis. Looking forward to your answer or other comments! Cheers!
This is a rather complex question. I'm not going to answer your questions directly as we would need to discuss what "danger" means in this context. However, I want to point out that there are multiple "Hochdeutschs" - there is "Schweizer Hochdeutsch", "Bundesdeutsches Hochdeutsch", and "Österreichisches (Hoch-)deutsch". These are, at least by many, considered to be varieties of "German". In other words, although this perspective has its own issues, one could argue that there is another "layer": There's "Deutsch", then there are various "Hochdeutschs" and then there's a continuum of dialects. Also, Schwyzerdütsch ist usually considered to be a separate variety from "Schweizer Hochdeutsch".
You have half a point. Early in the history of Canada, when it was first partitioned into upper and lower Canada before the Confederation was formed, the two parts were given equal seats in spite of the Francophone area being more populous. However, when Ottowa and Quebec were formed, and the other maritime provinces were added, this quickly stopped being the case. If Canada is guilty of suppressing anyone, it's the First Nations, not Francophone Canadians.
Always loving the sign language inclusion in this series. This episode touches on the little recognized fact that ASL was created by native speakers and not hearing instructors (except for the alphabet signs from Spain)
(1) Your "chain of villages" example is EXACTLY like how ring species work. The evolution of language is a close analog to biological evolution. (2) I worked with a man who escaped Vietnam when Saigon fell. When it was politically possible for him to return to visit, everyone thought he talked funny. He wasn't aware of having changed at all. Some of it could be decrease in language skills in a mostly-English environment but I bet some of it was what you said -- Vietnamese had changed in Vietnam whereas he had tried his best to keep talking the same. I would disagree that the explanation is that larger groups change FASTER, though they probably do (more people coming up with changes) -- it's that different groups will change in different DIRECTIONS (why wouldn't they, with nothing to coordinate them?). (3) This may be a controversial idea, but what is a nation? I agree that there is NOT a one-to-one correspondence between COUNTRIES and languages. But some would argue that a NATION is DEFINED by a common language. This idea says that a country is a political construct, but a nation is cultural or social. It's been misused, as in demands for everyplace where the people speak German to be part of Germany (for the country to expand to equal the nation). Napoleon called himself not the Emperor of France but the Emperor of the French -- ruler of the people, not the geographic area. Again, I recognize that this is where nationalism comes in, and nationalism is dangerous. But if a nation is not the same as a country, what is it, and can it have more than one language?
It has everything to do with language, and language change. As Taylor explained in the video each generation of speakers of a language speaks slightly differently, and when group of speakers are separated for long enough, they can develop different dialects, and eventually different languages. So accents are often just part of dialects. British, North American, and Australian varieties of English, for example, have various accents, and those are part and parcel of the dialects present in those places. You also get accents when native speakers of one language learn and speak another language.
Accents are the "first step" towards dialects/different languages. Over time populations that don't talk to each other will begin to see their speech diverge. Initially the changes are minor (which is where we get accents, or community-specific slang), but over hundreds of years these changes become separate languages.
It actually has to do with language! When a child learns a language, they imitate the speech of their friends and close people the best they can. But they fail to be *perfect* averages, and the people they interact with is not the same forever. That means that everyone develops his own brand of speech, but the closer the people, the more similar they are. That process repeats itself each time a new person learns or acquires the language. Accent is just the pronunciation part of that process, especially the prosodic part of it. Prosody is the part of pronunciation that doesn't carry meaning. In foreign speakers, the process is similar: they fail to make a perfect copy of the speech of their teachers, and they fill the blanks with what they already know: their native accent.
I think it's because people use the phonology of their native languages when speaking in the foreign languages instead of using the foreign language's phonology.
That depends on what you count as an accent. However, it's easy for accents to form. People in essentially continuous contact with each other will typically sound similar to each other down to peer pressure. However, occasionally individuals will innovate and pronounce something a little differently, use a turn of phrase differently, or broaden, narrow, or shift the meaning of a word something. When such a change becomes an accepted form within a community, it diverges. Over time, various groups preserve older forms eschewed by the broader language community or innovate in ways also eschewed. This is how you get dialects: pile all that on over the course of decades and centuries, and groups of people begin to speak in ways that are mutually intelligible, but distinct to some extent that marks then apart geographically or otherwise. Accents lead to dialects, which lead to languages. It's a tough continuum of intelligibility.
Same with the Romanians living in US, they speak a dialect called Romerican, lol. It is full of romanized english words. Like the word match(as in matching clothes or colors) was transformed into meciui or meciuiește
I would like to point out that there is no official standard English. We don't have an academy, like French, Spanish, German or Italian, to decide what is or is not "good English", as far as I know we've never had one and there are none in the rest of the English speaking world. The "standardised" English that you're talking about has come about, in the UK, informally and unofficially. English is unusual amount large languages, and definitely among European languages, for being unregulated.
Depends on how tiny you slice them. American English is definitely a different dialect from British English, but is Boston English a different dialect from New York English? Do Brooklyn and Manhattan have their own dialects? Once you've settled on a small enough geographic area, how many racial and ethnic lines do you draw?
Language divide our specie. What If we all speak Latin or, mandarin, or English only ? Less division, it looks like the world is heading towards this direction
How slag words got accepted to the dictionaries? Why some new word got to be written in the dictionaries within a year of creation and other word wait decades to be accepted to them?
I have a question. Do scots speakers usually believe scots is its own language or just a dialect of english? Why did it became such a polemical topic? Could you maybe write a little bit of scots :) thanks!
What kind of questions? I speak Xhosa and English Most people in South Africa speak two to five languages. We're a country with 11 official languages. So it's understandable. But what kind of awkward questions do you get?
@@unathibabalwaguma-njingolo2814 Yeah, here in India too most of the people speak atleast 2 languages, most of our educational system includes a third optional language too. Cant recall of any awkward question
So aren't the Scandinavian languages dialects? The mutual intelligibility isn't equally distributed but we can understand each other more or less especially if we speak slowly and put in some extra effort
This was too one sided partially. It was implied that having a language standard is an evil ideology. It's a pity when dialects get rarer, but how do you think society would work without a standard? Imagine everyone could get out of a contract or a law, just by saying "But in this specific dialect, this word/phrase means something different, so the rule doesn't apply to me."! Or "Hmm, in this instruction to this really important thing that becomes dangerous if installed incorrectly they used a word that could also mean this...". It would be a mess! Please don't try to push your views on the viewers. Apart from that I really like the series, but this video wasn't all that great in some parts.
Im native. It was only 2 generations ago, that this was happening! My own grandfather was taken from his family, had his head shaved, and was given a European name. It makes me feel better knowing that this is becoming more and more common knowledge. Thank you for mentioning why our languages have died out so severely. In my tribe, Zuni, there are leas than 1000 people in this current generation who are native speakers. I am one of them. hadiya-tsuyy’a!
Do Zuni live Latin America as you have a Spanish surname?
As someone whose masters thesis is about language ideologies, I super appreciate it being explained to succinctly and clearly! :)
I was just thinking how similar this is to evolution. I would love to know your thoughts on that. They seem to go together in some ways.
Hey I hope this message finds you well. I am a postgraduate student in Asia, working on sociolinguistics :) would it be possible that I could find your master thesis somewhere on the Internet? I am also very intrigued by the complexity of language ideologies. It is fine if you don't feel like sharing :) Thank you!!!
As a linguistic anthropologist, I love talking about language ideologies. Thank you for all your work on this amazing project!
I've had a conversation with my dad where I try to convice him on the importance of keeping alive the linguistic richness in our country (I live in Guatemala and there are 20+ Mayan languages that each day are being more and more replaced with Spanish in the communities, and the government efforts to keep them alive don't seem to be working). However, to him, mantaining "linguistic richness" for the sake of it is just not that worth it. He holds that Spanish should be the language taught in schools of the indigenous communities because it is simply way more useful. I've had a hard time with his argument because it is hard to not agree with it, I mean, I'm certain that language diversity is really important, but I can't really say why, and the sad reality is that for most people in this empoverished communities knowing Spanish is the only way to get a decent job, for example, or access higher education, or even just be taken seriously. It would definitely be more efficient if everyone simply knew spanish and the minority languages disappeared, but I cannot put into words why that is wrong without recurring to that "mantaining lignuistic richness" idea that only works if you already value language. Any help?
pd: I know this is happening everywhere due to globalization, so there must be a clear answer, right?
Juan Pablo Cordon Do you speak a Mayan language, and if so, how did you learn it?
Why can't they learn both? You know you don't have to choose one or the other, bilingualism is very common around the world.
The problem is there really isn't a good reason to preserve dying languages, other than an argument for preserving culture, and even that is a tenuous one. Sure, you can try and save the languages, but if the people feel like they need to go to the big (and more importantly Spanish) cities to make a living, they're not going to have a reason to speak their mother tongues anyway.
I watched a Ted-talk about this once, and they discussed how indigenous languages contain knowledge of the environment around it and local medicines. The way is was describe was, "The loss of an indigenous language can be the loss of the next miracle drug." Languages also show scientist how our brains work, and many languages have pushed the boundaries of what we thought was possible. It can be hard to make the case at first, but there is a lot of evidence that everyone benefits from linguistic diversity. Personally I think the best way to show your dad would be to try to get him to learn one of the languages, because it might be better to experience it first hand.
I think the history of the Bangladesh Liberation War may be a useful research point. The war came about because Bangladeshis wanted the right to speak their own language but Pakistan suppressed them.
it has always infuriated me when people say there should just be one world language just because theyre frustrated that they have to learn one in school, so much culture would get lost, the world so boring
thank you for these videos as always crash course 🥰
you have to also agree that's because taking say spanish class has a low probability that you will actually learn spanish, but it is high probability to affect your grade negatively.
I had the luxury of being raised bilingual, and let me tell you it was still difficult to juggle, calculus, art, literature, and physics, along with Spanish. It's a nuisance to learn Spanish and it gets worse when they want you to appreciate it, the same way Art and Speech is, and as you can see, our modern "Art" is nothing to boast about.
The conclusion anyone would get fron those classes is, "Wow, what a waste of my time". Which ironically can sum up my first 2 years of high school.
Right... Because my spanish language is soooo interesting and my culture needs to be taught in every school.
Waste of a kids time honestly.
@@WhoLetTheDogOut Which is why its insensible to teach languages to older kids, they should be done and dealt with when they're young.
@@WhoLetTheDogOut I think you're barking at the wrong tree here. It's not the language, it's the curriculum and the methods. In many parts of Europe people know 2 to 3 languages on average.
A shared language makes it easier to work together through cooperation. A shared language can help people grow together through establishing a shared culture.
Although, a "world language" wouldn't necessarily have to replace local languages anyway.
1:50 - the dialect chain example sounds exactly like the "ring species" example for the fuzzy definition of a biological species. In fact, this episode illustrates a lot of the parallels between cultural and biological evolution.
I have to admit that it's quite amazing to hear the mention of the residential school system . I'm a 2nd generation descendant of not attending those schools . Greta coverage of a topic not covered all the time. Thumbs up from this indigenous from canada
Dialectology is definitely one of my favorite subjects in sociolinguistics, so I enjoyed the video! The question of what "counts" as a different language is a fascinating one that's bound up in so much more than just the literal features of a language.
Great video! I did my master's degree in Teaching Chinese as a foreign language and there's always more to learn about learning (and teaching) languages! I encourage everyone to give it a try! Find a language you are interested in and do your best! You won't regret it!
Just wanted to point out that there''s at least one example of a sign language that isn't primarily associated with Deaf communities, Plains Indian Sign Language, which has primarily been a language of trade and communication between people who don't share a spoken language.
I remember the high-school French and Spanish teachers having a conversation with each other in their respective languages before class one day and they just sorta figured it out. Used it as an example of the similarity between romance languages.
It makes me so happy to see the way this series treats signed languages
2:37 Hey ! I was surprised to hear the Occitan language, or languages, referred to as "a variety of french that is closer to spanish or italian", in the same video speaking about linguistic rights and raising awareness of minority languages. The Occitan language group is a really interesting example of a dialect chain and is not a dialect of French - it was subject to a concerted effort to make French the one and only national language during the French Revolution, to promote national unity. Part of this was convincing speakers of occitan languages that their language was a deformed French, and not a "real" language. As a result it is now a minority language, despite being the dominant language in the Occitan region, notably the south of France, several hundred years ago. Occitan is a really interesting question for linguists in terms of what defines a dialect or a separate language - I keep rferring to it as both a language and a group of languages because it's still a hotly debated question today.
It also has a very interesting history and a wealth of literature and poetry dating from medieval times. The concept of "courtly love" and "chivalry" originated in Troubadour poetry in the occitan language. If you're interested in the history of minority languages, do a little research into the regional languages of France, it's a great example of how our idea of "one nation = one language" developed and the harm it does to speakers of minority languages and linguistic diversity.
Thank you Crash Course for the amazing stuff you do, I'm so happy to see linguistic rights treated so concisely and see people talking about it.
Mercès Crash Course, per ço que fasètz !
Completely fascinating - even without Gavagai
As a catalan speaker and philology student, I really appreciate your great job!! Thank you for the accuracy and clearness. I love these linguistics videos. Keep it up!!
I love the way culture connects to language and language connects to culture! It's all so intertwined.
Never really gave serious thoughts about all these problems since I’m living in Vietnam and Vietnamese is our pride. Thanks Crash Course!
Been loving this series as an amateur linguist :)
As Taiwanese, we always have a lot of problems with our relationship with China. It really bothers me and frustrates me, especially when I only speak Chinese and not Taiwanese. This video shows me that this situation is not only for Taiwanese, thank you.
I came here looking for a fun linguistic time but only found depression
Yep, that's human history for you. :(
Will there be an episode about conlangs? I would love a discussion or thoughts on conlanging and how it relates to linguistics, especially in the academia.
I think we need to bring awareness of the importance of documenting languages, so they do not go extinct.
It's great that you make a case for linguistic diversity, but I wish you'd have shown the other side of the coin too, the benefits of large-scale mutual intelligibility. It's easy to paint politicians as evil.
This. Its easy to look at the evil part but most person in the world learn english voluntaring to better they way of life. A global languange is very useful for almost everything
i've also noticed that this series is very strongly biased towards certain beliefs of the nature of "should", and while arguments are proposed, it's still a series that's supposed to give people some knowledge of linguistics, thus inserting opinions into it might be a problematic idea, especially since people supporting opposite vews are portraid as evil opressors, not just politicians
Thank you, was about to comment something similar, yet less articulate.
the course is about linguistics, not economics
@@caorusso4926 only because that they've been forced into a society where learning English is now the best option. Without imperialism and colonialism, they would have been perfectly content with their native tongue, so it is up to the dominant power to recognise the damage caused by linguistic and cultural hegemony and take steps to reverse it
Fascinating. I love language history. Thx
I always found it weird that my hispanic friend could speak spanish in italy and they understood him just fine for the most part yet Okinawa Japanese have a hard time understanding mainland Japanese a lot of the time
This one felt hard for me- we're french canadians, and we speak french canadian sign language. It's usually referred to as Québec sign language, but it's spoken throughout Canada. It's also tiny compared to the ASL juggernaut. There exists one dictionary that was funded by french-speaking colleges and parent groups. There is only one school in Ontario that teaches it- and it has less than 50 students, including the residential students. The parent council for the school literally puts out recorded versions of popular storybooks for the kids- because there are no ressources. There's no kids' shows with LSQ translations. There's no baby-sign-along books like I have found dozens of times in bookstores for ASL-speakers.
And even within LSQ, my daughter and I would have to try really hard to understand someone from Québec city. We get there, but it's a bit rough.
A lot of people have asked why on earth it's not the same as French sign language- and all I can say is "it's just not". It shares almost 40% of its signs with ASL (if you count signs that have the same orientation and position but slightly different movements, etc) but I have no idea what ASL-speakers are saying.
Ontario recognizes the right to teach children ASL, LSQ and PlainsSL, and Nunavut recognizes Inuiuuk, but that's it for Canada. Québec doesn't even recognize LSQ as an official language, and fully 10% of their population is deaf.
But it's always so nice to have you touch upon signed languages, anyhow. So many people forget that these languages exist, or believe them to not be real languages. Thank you!!
Japan has more languages than just Japanese, namely languages spoken in Okinawa and other smaller islands, but for the sake of unity, Japan calls them "dialects", which means they don't get any kind of official protection or promotion. Ainu, a language isolate once spoken in Hokkaido by the Ainu people was only recognized as an indigenous language and not a dialect since 2008, now that it's too late and basically extinct.
We have SO MANY languages that are used in Canada, but we only learn two in school.
I think that we should be able to learn ASL as well as an Indigenous language of our choosing.
French is an essential language, but only if you live in QC, NB or Ottawa, so why not give us a chance to learn something that makes us more connected
I see a lot of parallels between the evolution of languages and the evolution of species. Excellent video! Thank you for making this!
Interesting! As a biologist, the way that the Thought Bubble explains the difference between language and dialect is very much analogous to the difference between species and subspecies.
Or between two species spatially or temporally.
Keep this series going! I want to learn how to use linguistics and understand it but I haven’t found any good resources
6:24 Chinese languages only share the same writing system because it was standardized during the 20th century to be more like Beijing Mandarin, which doesn't even reflect how it's actually spoken by speakers of their own languages. If the individual languages standardized their own writing systems so that the text is written how it's naturally spoken in each those languages, Mandarin speakers (and speakers of other Sinitic languages) would not be able to understand nearly as much if at all. For that matter, there are problems when using the Chinese script to represent modern spoken Sinitic languages. The standard set of characters is not enough to write Cantonese. New characters had to be made for even the most commonly used words, or in very rare cases, such words are written using Latin letters. In fact, the standard Chinese script became so incompatible with spoken Taiwanese Minnan that a whole Latin-based orthography was proposed to represent the language, called Pe̍h-ōe-jī.
2:00 ring species.
Is there crash course biology?
Yep, I spotted that too!
I wish we had words between dialect and language to describe languages. Spanish and Italian, for example, fall somewhere between this gap.
I know the video jokes about linguists measuring intelligibility, but do they actually have a way to do so? Having an accurate measure of intelligibility can help us more clearly define the spectrum of languages.
Please teach on history of English ,u explain well
When I visited Sri Lanka, the two major languages use different writing styles and languages. Citizens must use English to converse. Road signs are in all three languages.
Re language ideologies: the Bangladesh Liberation War was specifically because Bangladeshis wanted the right to speak their own language but were being suppressed by Pakistan.
the 1:1 relationship between nation and language strikes me as a uniquely American view of the world. In a larger context people might know it's untrue for where they live, but might still be bullshitted by their education or peers into thinking like that about other countries on far away continents.
Um no, its a highly European view of the world, you know, the place where the idea of nation-states arose (One ethnic group, one people, one language for one country).
It's not uniquely American, it's a very prominent idea in nationalism in general. The idea that a nation is a group of people speaking the same language, is one of the main ideologies of creating a nation. The French state after the Revolution (and for a long time after) suppressed dialects and languages that were not metropolitan French (like Breton, or Occitan, etc.); Great Britain systematically repressed Welsh or Cornish; the idea of a German nation encompassed everyone speaking "German" (ignoring the various dialects and languages falling under that umbrella); the Hungarians tried to "magyarise" the various peoples living in the pre-WW1 Kingdom of Hungary; and even today we see that principle in action e.g. in ex-Yugoslavia where the successor states try to establish "their own" national languages out of the larger Serbocroatian continuum.
That a linguistic map of Europe today has linguistic borders clearly following, in most cases, the national borders, is an effect of this idea. The European nation states in the 19th and 20th century purposefully eradicated linguistic minorities in their borders because of this supposed 1:1 relationship.
It's not uniquely American. It's an outgrowth on the idea of the nation state.
I disagree. This relationship is even used by nationalists and separatists to justify their political stances. Europe is full of this. In Spain we have several languages and most of the separatist movements are based on the "we have a language, we are a nation" logic. You even have the case of the Basque Country where several not mutually intelligible "village languages" were amalgamated into an official language by the founder of Basque nationalism.
It's a fairly common nation-building tool worldwide, not just in the US. It's easy to justify your state's borders to the world if you can convince them it matches some distinct people-group (the literal meaning of "nation") with a distinct culture, and, yes, a distinct standardized language with distinct differences you can point to as roughly aligning with said borders and treat the dialects that blur the line near said borders as just a funny regional accent. It's easier to make political statements of "us" versus "them" when most people in your country accept that "we" speak one language and "they" speak a bizzare foreign tongue...even if your dialect is closer to your neighbors just across the border than to the standardized version in the capitol--and if an independance movement can convince enough folks that they speak a different language from the dominant culture in the country, as many Balkan states did in the breakup of Yugoslavia, it's much more likely to succeed. Not every country defines itself around such a rigid national identity, but a lot do, and that kind of thinking played a huge part in the original European idea of the "nation-state" as opposed to the much-more-common-around-the-world-throughout-history loose tribal confederation, subnational city-state or petty kingdom, or multi-national empires. Many have walked that idea back, like the Dutch, who used to heavily suppress the non-Hollandic regional languages of the Netherlands, but now recognize many of them, such as Frisian, as separate languages (even if they still treat them with suspicion).
The general point about people being more likely to say so about far away nations they know nothing about, even if they know it's not true in their homeland *is* broadly true though, except if they are in the grips of a VERY strong nationalist movement. Humans just find it easier to start from the simplest model that matches their experience (ie if they live in a predominantly monolingual community that speaks their country's dominant language that "Country A speaks Language A") and only revise that model as they are taught differently or confronted with too many exceptions to ignore.
caught up on this series and really appreciate all i've learned so far. thanks taylor and cc team!
Also see Sylheti Bengali Vs 'Proper' Bengali (aka Dakhai Bangla)
I had no idea about village sign languages. So happy to be continually learning more about the Deaf community. Makes me a better linguist and more prepared to enter my PhD studies!
I've been fascinated for years by Scots, which I consider to be a separate language to English. I don't speak it myself, but my ancestors did and I'd love to see more done for its preservation and promotion.
There's a useful term that came out of Sinitic linguistics, which is "topolect", which is a more accurate translation of the term in Mandarin that is often translated as "dialect". Unfortunately, that difference doesn't matter much to the CCP, who see any deviation from what's spoken around Beijing as simply bad Chinese not worth preserving.
Wait, at 3:42, why are people from the original communities of the Diaspora babies "not up on the current slang" if larger groups (their homeland communities) change how they talk faster than smaller groups (Diaspora communities)?
Really awesome video, thank you for so much information! :) I‘ve got an amateurish question.
I grew up with the official German (Hochdeutsch) language. You mentioned, that many European countries try to create one official language and teach that to form unity. Now looking at Germany‘s neighbours, Austria and Northern Switzerland, these nations claim to speak official Hochdeutsch (in legal frameworks) too, but in person I often got the feedback, that the people proudly state, that they speak Austrian or Schwitzerdütsch (Swiss German). I went to school abroad, where Austrian teachers refused to accept German vegetable/fruit words as correct, because in Austrian it was called differently and punished me (mark-wise) for that. Johanisbeere - Ribisl (actually hungarian word btw) , Kartoffel-Erdapfel and so on. Moreover I realized that many Austrian/Swiss teenagers face the problem that speaking their dialect makes it harder for them writing it the correct Hochdeutsch way. I learned writing by pronouncing and articulating correctly (thereby hearing the letters). Is that a danger? You might know, that understanding Austrians/Swiss becomes very hard, losing the ability to communicate (just like your village example). Except, the Swiss are the village and Germany and any German learner is a metropolis.
Looking forward to your answer or other comments! Cheers!
This is a rather complex question. I'm not going to answer your questions directly as we would need to discuss what "danger" means in this context. However, I want to point out that there are multiple "Hochdeutschs" - there is "Schweizer Hochdeutsch", "Bundesdeutsches Hochdeutsch", and "Österreichisches (Hoch-)deutsch". These are, at least by many, considered to be varieties of "German". In other words, although this perspective has its own issues, one could argue that there is another "layer": There's "Deutsch", then there are various "Hochdeutschs" and then there's a continuum of dialects. Also, Schwyzerdütsch ist usually considered to be a separate variety from "Schweizer Hochdeutsch".
One of my favourite episodes so far!
Very interesting video, thanks for the free content!
I was hoping for an episode about conlanging
I can't wait for Verbatim!! I love Lingssssssss!!
Wonderful job 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
7:31: Canada also did this to suppress French, while the U.S. did it to suppress Spanish, among others.
Please! Don’t compare the efforts to suppress French in Canada with the residential school system. It’s not even close!
Sweden and Norway surpressed the Saami population in a similar way. I think most nation states have at some point in time tried to this.
You have half a point. Early in the history of Canada, when it was first partitioned into upper and lower Canada before the Confederation was formed, the two parts were given equal seats in spite of the Francophone area being more populous. However, when Ottowa and Quebec were formed, and the other maritime provinces were added, this quickly stopped being the case. If Canada is guilty of suppressing anyone, it's the First Nations, not Francophone Canadians.
very nice....In our courntry a proverb.....within five miles changing of water and language....
I believe the 'official version' as you termed it, of Italian, is not the Roman dialect, but the Florence dialect.
Always loving the sign language inclusion in this series. This episode touches on the little recognized fact that ASL was created by native speakers and not hearing instructors (except for the alphabet signs from Spain)
(1) Your "chain of villages" example is EXACTLY like how ring species work. The evolution of language is a close analog to biological evolution. (2) I worked with a man who escaped Vietnam when Saigon fell. When it was politically possible for him to return to visit, everyone thought he talked funny. He wasn't aware of having changed at all. Some of it could be decrease in language skills in a mostly-English environment but I bet some of it was what you said -- Vietnamese had changed in Vietnam whereas he had tried his best to keep talking the same. I would disagree that the explanation is that larger groups change FASTER, though they probably do (more people coming up with changes) -- it's that different groups will change in different DIRECTIONS (why wouldn't they, with nothing to coordinate them?). (3) This may be a controversial idea, but what is a nation? I agree that there is NOT a one-to-one correspondence between COUNTRIES and languages. But some would argue that a NATION is DEFINED by a common language. This idea says that a country is a political construct, but a nation is cultural or social. It's been misused, as in demands for everyplace where the people speak German to be part of Germany (for the country to expand to equal the nation). Napoleon called himself not the Emperor of France but the Emperor of the French -- ruler of the people, not the geographic area. Again, I recognize that this is where nationalism comes in, and nationalism is dangerous. But if a nation is not the same as a country, what is it, and can it have more than one language?
I don't think this has anything to do with language, but could someone explain to me how accents are created?
It has everything to do with language, and language change. As Taylor explained in the video each generation of speakers of a language speaks slightly differently, and when group of speakers are separated for long enough, they can develop different dialects, and eventually different languages. So accents are often just part of dialects. British, North American, and Australian varieties of English, for example, have various accents, and those are part and parcel of the dialects present in those places. You also get accents when native speakers of one language learn and speak another language.
Accents are the "first step" towards dialects/different languages. Over time populations that don't talk to each other will begin to see their speech diverge. Initially the changes are minor (which is where we get accents, or community-specific slang), but over hundreds of years these changes become separate languages.
It actually has to do with language!
When a child learns a language, they imitate the speech of their friends and close people the best they can. But they fail to be *perfect* averages, and the people they interact with is not the same forever. That means that everyone develops his own brand of speech, but the closer the people, the more similar they are. That process repeats itself each time a new person learns or acquires the language. Accent is just the pronunciation part of that process, especially the prosodic part of it. Prosody is the part of pronunciation that doesn't carry meaning.
In foreign speakers, the process is similar: they fail to make a perfect copy of the speech of their teachers, and they fill the blanks with what they already know: their native accent.
I think it's because people use the phonology of their native languages when speaking in the foreign languages instead of using the foreign language's phonology.
That depends on what you count as an accent. However, it's easy for accents to form.
People in essentially continuous contact with each other will typically sound similar to each other down to peer pressure. However, occasionally individuals will innovate and pronounce something a little differently, use a turn of phrase differently, or broaden, narrow, or shift the meaning of a word something. When such a change becomes an accepted form within a community, it diverges. Over time, various groups preserve older forms eschewed by the broader language community or innovate in ways also eschewed. This is how you get dialects: pile all that on over the course of decades and centuries, and groups of people begin to speak in ways that are mutually intelligible, but distinct to some extent that marks then apart geographically or otherwise.
Accents lead to dialects, which lead to languages. It's a tough continuum of intelligibility.
I never felt necessity of keeping variety of languages.
I am watching this for fun 😌
Ukrainian diaspora in Canada is so old it created its own Canadian Ukrainian dialect.
Same with the Romanians living in US, they speak a dialect called Romerican, lol. It is full of romanized english words. Like the word match(as in matching clothes or colors) was transformed into meciui or meciuiește
Thank you.
-What's the difference between a language and its dialect?
-a language has an army and a navy
Good video!
awesome at next level
I would like to point out that there is no official standard English. We don't have an academy, like French, Spanish, German or Italian, to decide what is or is not "good English", as far as I know we've never had one and there are none in the rest of the English speaking world. The "standardised" English that you're talking about has come about, in the UK, informally and unofficially. English is unusual amount large languages, and definitely among European languages, for being unregulated.
[Laughs In Lithuanian] language change over time? lol
Some change more/faster, others less/slower. Lithuanian might be one of the finest examples of a living linguistic fossil indeed. 😉
Icelandic and Faroese also come to mind, as they are much closer to the Old Norse than their siblings: Norwegian, Danish and Swedish.
Even Lithuanian changes over time. Slower maybe, but it changes. :)
Just because the Baltic languages appear conservative doesn't mean they didn't change.
Very excited about the Hebrew mention❤
I love this
Good video ❤
I have a feeling geographical divergences are going to happen less, now that telecommunications and the worldwide web exist.
Him in the word himalya means snow
So how many dialects are there in the world?
LOL over 8 billion and growing.
Depends on how tiny you slice them. American English is definitely a different dialect from British English, but is Boston English a different dialect from New York English? Do Brooklyn and Manhattan have their own dialects? Once you've settled on a small enough geographic area, how many racial and ethnic lines do you draw?
Language divide our specie.
What If we all speak Latin or, mandarin, or English only ?
Less division, it looks like the world is heading towards this direction
How can we request a video?
I’ve always wondered whether Afrikaans was a creole or if it was just a dialect of Dutch. The internet gives me contradictory information.
Omg! You are brilliant
Wow cool
I wish kids had more access to thisssss
Cool really cool
How politics affects language: The Balkan countries enter the chat.
nice...
There is a Sanskrit vilage in India which can teach anyone Sanskrit for free
Why are languages valuable? Why should we go to effort to protect them if it will only further divide us?
I love language!
Globish and esperanto forever!!!
Petition for a Music Theory Crash Course
How slag words got accepted to the dictionaries? Why some new word got to be written in the dictionaries within a year of creation and other word wait decades to be accepted to them?
Politics, and some times religion, and sometimes both. Also how quickly the new word come to wide spread general use.
the question is why should words be accepted to enter a dictionary
Where my Scots speakers at?
Any love for those of us who understand it due to speaking a related form?
I have a question. Do scots speakers usually believe scots is its own language or just a dialect of english? Why did it became such a polemical topic? Could you maybe write a little bit of scots :) thanks!
On the wikipedia? Yet?
Surprised she didn't mention Arabic dialects or Slavic Languages....
There are a lot of other examples; they probably cut most for time.
As am I! I speak a Levantine dialect and I cannnnoooot understand my neighbours! Its so bizzare.
Also surprised she called the Al Sayyid Bedouin tribe Israeli when they are an Palestinian Arab locality...
✌🏻
Who else here is a bilingual and gets awkward questions everytime he meets someone??
Not I, but have to say, I have great admiration for people who can speak two languages.
I hate when people ask "how do I say my name in other language?" and I have to explain that proper nouns aren't translatable
What kind of questions? I speak Xhosa and English Most people in South Africa speak two to five languages. We're a country with 11 official languages. So it's understandable. But what kind of awkward questions do you get?
@@mirasaladi2936 lol
@@unathibabalwaguma-njingolo2814 Yeah, here in India too most of the people speak atleast 2 languages, most of our educational system includes a third optional language too. Cant recall of any awkward question
sith ziamang eodvi eepk ti up!
try decoding that
this amazing video keep it up?
This amazing video keep it up!
Pity there’s not only one language. no misunderstanding . No us vs them caveman mentality.
👍
For some reason I thought this was gonna show me how to speak every language in 11 minutes
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis tellus.
Math is the most difficult language to learn and speak....
Especially the Calculus dialect...
🤣🤣
The Real Analysis dialect has entered the chat...
So aren't the Scandinavian languages dialects? The mutual intelligibility isn't equally distributed but we can understand each other more or less especially if we speak slowly and put in some extra effort
Ka pai
This was too one sided partially. It was implied that having a language standard is an evil ideology. It's a pity when dialects get rarer, but how do you think society would work without a standard? Imagine everyone could get out of a contract or a law, just by saying "But in this specific dialect, this word/phrase means something different, so the rule doesn't apply to me."! Or "Hmm, in this instruction to this really important thing that becomes dangerous if installed incorrectly they used a word that could also mean this...". It would be a mess! Please don't try to push your views on the viewers. Apart from that I really like the series, but this video wasn't all that great in some parts.
If Spanish evolved from Latin, how come there is still Latin?
Checkmate, linguists!