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submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by Hextubewontallowme@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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.

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[-] TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 months ago

Because the world is not utopia, and individualism combined with a unipolar hegemon (UK before, USA now) made the division of society a feature and not a problem. Also, capitalism forces us to fake productivity and not have free time for ourselves to indulge in useless things like... learning more languages and cultures to become harmonious with more people. Wars and genocides are useful, you know... to fill the pockets of some white swines.

[-] frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 months ago

How did unipolar prevent a majority language?

How did wars and genocides prevent a majority language?

How is learning the majority language useless to your career?

[-] BrownMinusBlue@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 4 months ago

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.

[-] TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml -2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 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.

this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
61 points (82.8% liked)

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