12-08-2023, 06:17 PM
Well, you can merge very similar languages, if there is active politics surrounding it increasing the exposure to the other languages.
1) Swedish, Danish and Norwegian all used to be called "Danish". On Swedish TV, there didn't used to be subtitles for Danish or Norwegian speakers. Now there are, and suddenly people complain they can't understand Danish or Norwegian anymore. Same for Faroe Island and Iceland, in the 70s they didn't use English with each other, now Icelanders complain they can't understand Faroe Islanders. These are all because we stopped having constant exposure to our neighbors, and instead now we have constant exposure to faraway countries like the USA or UK. At the same time, Swedish students will still use textbooks written in Danish in school, and things like that.
2) Standard Japanese, Indonesian, Mandarin, one form of Norwegian, modern Hebrew, etc, are actually synthetic languages (planned/artificial languages). These mixed vocabulary and grammatical aspects from different dialects (in the case of Japanese) and languages (in the case of Indonesian, and Modern Hebrew, which was revitalized by native Yiddish speakers who found "real" Hebrew difficult). And were a success, now the mother tongue of thousands and millions of people.
There are a lot of people who have created "pan" languages, such as Pan-Slavic, and to some extent scientific attempts at recreating "Proto" languages like Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Eskimo-Aleut, which are all attempts at merging languages. If you think you speak the language of 20 million people, instead of one of 5 million people, or of 1 million people instead of 5,000 people, there is a big change in your mentality. If you can suddenly attend school in another town, or your school can use textbooks written by another town or country, it opens up better opportunities for everyone involved. The difficult part is convincing someone to start learning and enforcing this new language, even if it actually is a very small jump from what they're currently using (tell the UK to start writing color instead of colour!).
Even as you do this, you can keep local dialects. Most countries in Europe and Asia are like this, with a different dialect in every town. Research has shown that among other things, what kills languages is 1. the inability to use them at school or work (getting beaten for them, etc), 2. Feeling that the other language is so difficult you literally need to sacrifice your own language to learn it properly (Parents trying to have their family abandon Hindi and just use English, because they feel otherwise their kids will never acquire good English. As an English teacher I see this kind of thing a lot, and it's really sad.)
1) Swedish, Danish and Norwegian all used to be called "Danish". On Swedish TV, there didn't used to be subtitles for Danish or Norwegian speakers. Now there are, and suddenly people complain they can't understand Danish or Norwegian anymore. Same for Faroe Island and Iceland, in the 70s they didn't use English with each other, now Icelanders complain they can't understand Faroe Islanders. These are all because we stopped having constant exposure to our neighbors, and instead now we have constant exposure to faraway countries like the USA or UK. At the same time, Swedish students will still use textbooks written in Danish in school, and things like that.
2) Standard Japanese, Indonesian, Mandarin, one form of Norwegian, modern Hebrew, etc, are actually synthetic languages (planned/artificial languages). These mixed vocabulary and grammatical aspects from different dialects (in the case of Japanese) and languages (in the case of Indonesian, and Modern Hebrew, which was revitalized by native Yiddish speakers who found "real" Hebrew difficult). And were a success, now the mother tongue of thousands and millions of people.
There are a lot of people who have created "pan" languages, such as Pan-Slavic, and to some extent scientific attempts at recreating "Proto" languages like Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Eskimo-Aleut, which are all attempts at merging languages. If you think you speak the language of 20 million people, instead of one of 5 million people, or of 1 million people instead of 5,000 people, there is a big change in your mentality. If you can suddenly attend school in another town, or your school can use textbooks written by another town or country, it opens up better opportunities for everyone involved. The difficult part is convincing someone to start learning and enforcing this new language, even if it actually is a very small jump from what they're currently using (tell the UK to start writing color instead of colour!).
Even as you do this, you can keep local dialects. Most countries in Europe and Asia are like this, with a different dialect in every town. Research has shown that among other things, what kills languages is 1. the inability to use them at school or work (getting beaten for them, etc), 2. Feeling that the other language is so difficult you literally need to sacrifice your own language to learn it properly (Parents trying to have their family abandon Hindi and just use English, because they feel otherwise their kids will never acquire good English. As an English teacher I see this kind of thing a lot, and it's really sad.)
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