#upp amaryllis och vakna min lilja; hör hur alla fåglar skrålar

[myrthing]

I'm going to be serious for a bit and refrain from friendly language family ribbing, and before I start I need you all to know how much that distresses me. (That's it, that's the disclaimer.)

There's this thing that is always in the back of my mind in online spaces, and it's this one: Language. To me, the internet is in English. I don't speak Spanish or Mandarin, so those spheres are off-limit to me, whereas English, as the current lingua franca, got taught to me in school. I acquired my fluency online. So: the internet is in English

The Internet is also American. That's not surprising; of course people from the USA will dominate an Anglophone sphere. It's a fucking huge country, with English as its de facto official language. I don't think there's a single European out there who hasn't had some grievance with the absolute US cultural dominance online. Take racism discourse, as a completely non-controversial example: Discussions that start focused on racism in US history are excellent! It is not great when people try to use those exact perspectives on other countries, which erases their native points of view, and prevents cross-cultural understanding. Discussion of worldwide racism can't be forced into a US shaped mould.

Right about here is where I usually start thinking about languages. English is my second language (mine and over a billion other people worldwide). According to Wikipedia, 380 million people speak English as their native language. My first language has ten million speakers.

I'm Scandinavian, so I'm the kind of white that gets creeps salivating about genocide and pure Aryan women. I am, by skin colour and heritage and passport, the kind of privileged person that tops the racial hierarchy (for argument's sake, I'm ignoring disability here).

But only if you think my language doesn't matter. 10 million native speakers are a lot more than what most languages in the world have. At the same time, 10 million doesn't even get you to the top 50 most spoken languages. We're usually somewhere at the tail end of the top 100 most spoken, which should only serve to illustrate how many languages there are in the world (so goddamn many, despite all the ones we've lost).

If I were American, I would be about as privileged as I could be on the global scale. But I'm not American. "White" isn't a language or a culture. I have some touchstone in common with people my age across the western world. I read Harry Potter as a kid, but I never watched SpongeBob. Maybe you have at least heard of Pippi Longstocking, but you certainly never watched Spader, Madame! (yes this is the example I'm going with here, don't question the fact that it's neither for children nor temporarily accurate for my generation)

The point I'm attempting to make, via rambling, is that language matters. The closer you are culturally to the current giant, the more influenced will your culture be. The fewer speakers, the more vulnerable to erasure and decline. An official language of a sovereign nation is more robust than an indigenous minority language.

Language is the carrier of culture. Am I privileged over a Mexican Spanish speaker? Over a person who speaks Hindi? My language is privileged over Saami, over Finnish, over Meänkieli, but is raw numbers of speakers the only thing that matters? Of course not: consider how literature plays a part, how many books or newspapers or comics are written and published in a language. Are there movies, music, radio.

The Internet, as a place where English is the lingua franca, and where the default country is assumed to be the USA, there is an idea that all non-English languages are minority languages, that all non-white ethnicities are minorities. Online, the only reason you have to assume a US default is myopia.

#language #languages #privilege #racism #saw some things that just made me tired #“whose complaints are most valid: the white esl speaker in another country or the brown immigrant in the US” is also a fun topic to cry at #I mean. discuss. #(to be clear: an extremely and interesting valid discussion that gets emotional because language is emotional) #anyway: #upp amaryllis och vakna min lilja; hör hur alla fåglar skrålar #jeff jeff! pam pam! jag får spader madame!