Nielsio: When does this nonsense end regarding everyone speaking a different language? I'm thinking if public schools stopped teaching language(s), this change would happen much faster.
XXX: This is one of the most ridiculous ACist arguments I have ever read. Even countries where the majority of the population is basically bilingual like Sweden or the Netherlands it will take centuries before English is used as much as the native languages. Lots of other countries where it's easy to find people who speak English there are active movemtents to keep the influence of English down. Besides the "language market" is totally inefficient in it's reaction time. Right now English is going great, but the demand for Mandarin is rising, but it is in no way sure whether it will overtake English. I would even predict that getting rid of public schooling would make the US a zone of bigger language diversity. Some schools will offer Spanish language education exlusively.
Nielsio:
"This is one of the most ridiculous ACist arguments I have ever read."
fyi, "most ridiculous ACist argument ever" is generally overused and has lost all meaning.
"Even countries where the majority of the population is basically bilingual like Sweden or the Netherlands it will take centuries before English is used as much as the native languages."
This seems a baseless assertion. How could you possibly know this?
"Lots of other countries where it's easy to find people who speak English there are active movemtents to keep the influence of English down. Besides the "language market" is totally inefficient in it's reaction time. Right now English is going great, but the demand for Mandarin is rising, but it is in no way sure whether it will overtake English."
"I would even predict that getting rid of public schooling would make the US a zone of bigger language diversity."
Because of public schooling, the people in the country hold on to their national language harder than they otherwise might. In a free market a common medium of exchange (money) develops organically. As markets widen, the medium of exchange widens with it. The same thing could happen with language. Currently people are forced to spend a lot of energy on their national languages. If they wouldn't invest that much in this imposed language but instead would look out at the opportunities that exist in the real world (information, friends, jobs, etc), and learn/adapt based on that, then things would change much faster, imo. The fact that some people would underinvest in English as compared to now doesn't mean that overall we wouldn't be heading towards faster integration.
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Thoughts on language socialism?
In school I had no interest in learning/speaking Spanish or French, and that's what was taught. I do, on the other hand, have an interest in Gaelic and German, and I recently bought a beginner's book for Gaelic. I've also been teaching myself to write in runes.
The idea of public schools teaching people a language (which most people generally forget, because they only take it just to graduate) is just their way of trying to "standarize" people and trying to make people more "diverse". Spanish, we have a lot of Spanish speakers in the United States, so the government wants to make non-Spanish speakers more versatile. French, I don't know what the reason for that is, besides it being a more well known language. You can also take Latin, which I don't recall many people taking. I'm pretty sure other public schools had a better foreign language department.
If someone wants to learn a language they will, I see it as wasted time. Honestly, I think a class that studies the origins of languages of the world as a whole, and just learning about many languages instead of learning to speak/write in one language would be more enlightening.