>>743The language 'problem' is a bit of a toughie.
On one hand, languages have constantly evolved, changed, and died over the ages, while on the other, language death and subsumption in contemporaneity can be primarily construed as an effect of Capitalist homogenization.
Though there is of course a lot of this in the former Socialist states as well.
Moving into the future, I don't know what is to be done truly about language.
I feel much language could survive in a more horizontally organized industrial society, and that industry need not necessarily be exclusively a funnel towards centralization.
Internet and TV have a lot of effect on accent and vernacular, but people still retain these things by and large as long as they are still comprehensible within the general scope of the language (unlike minority languages).
Actually having fully functional and self sufficient communities within a horizontally organized society removes many of the factors which drive people towards that centralizing extinction of Communal culture.
You no longer need to abandon Cherokee or Creek in favor of English when the reservation actually has its own agriculture, industry, and economy, thus keeping the youth around rather than driving them out.
The actual underlying factors need to be conducive to the survival of the language though; mere protections for native languages seem to be as 'idealistic' as Liberal constitutional rights are.
I suppose you'd be more knowledgeable about the USSR, but it's to my understanding that in spite of the protections ASSRs and regular SSRs had for their languages, Russian still grew to be predominant much in the same way as English is the world over today.
Not because of any secret 'language extermination campaigns,' or any absurdity like that, but wholly because the socioeconomic factors discouraged one's own language and encouraged the bigger one.
The average /leftypol/ consensus appears to be that this is a good thing, and everyone should just suck it up because we're meat robots and ought to all speak one language because it's more productive, but I'm not so convinced.
So-called Communists really ought to be advocating for, you know, Communism: actual Communally organized society, but that board is so damned confoundedly knee-deep in pure ideology that the 'Soviet Union is perfect and in my alt-history it still exists.'
And while the Soviet Union organized itself more horizontally than Western Capitalism, it still by and large centralized everyone into megacities, just smaller and more evenly spread out megacities.
A population center of 1 million every few hundred miles in Siberia (at least roughly so according to my broad understanding), but no cities of absurd magnitude like Tokyo (unless you'd count Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev in such a category).
I know I'm likely rambling at this point, and don't mean to give too much grief to the USSR, but centralization for the sake of raw productivity is largely what drives the subsumption of language moreso than anything else.
And that is a quintessential function of Capitalism, but too was written in the core of Soviet Socialism in order to finally 'catch up to these West' as the line goes.
Today the Chinese group of languages, and languages in China as a whole, are facing much the same ordeal; it is Capitalism in its unbridled form driving them all to Mandarin more than anything else, but it's happening.
The language issue might well just be deprecated soon enough anyway, as the nearer we get to fully controllable prosthetics, the nearer we get to general brain interfacing (with computers), and this is where tech vs. prim really reaches its head.
I like Bookchinitery and Dem. Confederalism in general; I think it promotes this sort of decentralized societal ideal while taking into account ecology and the arguments of prims,
but my issue isn't that responsible tech will never be possible, I think it's more that tech is currently on its way to killing us without the time to build Bookchin's more responsible world.
We are so dreadfully near the point where the mind and computer become one; I don't know if this truly guarantees an Eldritch Landian future, but one thing's for certain: language is deprecated when we can communicate in raw data.
And maybe if it results in a positive future it's not so terrible a thing, but I'm quite certain that a future where the human form is transcended in such a manner is one where while one language will not grow to dominate all, no language would any longer be relevant.
So I guess my overall point is that decentralized (Communist) society even with industry I think maintains languages for the most part, but that none of that will likely matter because tech is magnificent and terrifying.
I hope this is all comprehensible and not schizoposting.
>>744I hate how he reads thorn as 'b' or 'p' instead of 'th' (even though it makes it funnier)