Linguistics

Fuck no.

So many regional languages suppressed by the Franco regime in Spain it's amazing how in less than 50 years they've come back and are actively embraced by the younger generation. I appreciate the diversity even though my lizard brain won't let me learn it.

In Canada we have two official languages. We also have several indigenous languages which may be in danger of being lost if people stop speaking them. I can't see how forcing everyone to embrace a single language won't put the cultures that speak the other languages in danger of being subdued, permanently altered, or even of disappearing.

Humans are at our best when we embrace diversity.

What’s the maximum number of first-class-official languages that are usable for all official use and actually equal in stature?

• Belgium has French and Flemish, though they’re essentially partitioned by region (i.e. in practice, you can’t rely on Flemish in Wallonia or French in Flanders). The language blocs have their own separate political parties and everything, and have the bare minimum amount to do with each other, like a divorced couple who can’t afford to move.
• The UK recognises Welsh and Scottish Gaelic, though they’re only used in their geographic areas (and even there, you get periodic cockups like some monolingual anglophone pasting a Google Translate error into the Welsh part of a sign).
• Ireland seems to be making a reasonable fist of having English and Irish; most business is conducted in English, though pretty much every Irish citizen learns Irish in school and spends a few months in the gaeltacht where English is not spoken, so I’d venture that the sorts of errors seen in Wales wouldn’t occur there.
• Sweden, meanwhile, has five official languages you can conduct any official business in; they include Sami, Yiddish and Romani, though not English, which almost everyone of working age speaks to a reasonable level. I imagine that dealing with the government in English would probably be easier than doing so in Romani, if those were your two choices.
• Not sure about Canada and Switzerland, but I get the impression that they’re geographically partitioned, if perhaps not as much as Belgium. In Canada, packaging seems to be bilingual by law, though Québec is aggressively francophone, with STOP signs reading ARRÉT and bans on English-language signage, whereas elsewhere, everyone speaks English. In Switzerland, meanwhile, there’s a sharp line between the French and German-speaking parts, which is sometimes called the “Rösti ditch”, and the Alps divide the German- and Italian-speaking parts. Meanwhile, more people primarily speak English than the fourth official language, Rhaeto-Romansch.

So from the above, I’m guessing that after about two languages at most, the country partitions into language regions which develop their own cultures, and ultimately economies and political orders.

Ganesh Devy isn't the only one with those views; they're pretty common among linguists. Perhaps because linguists know that language gives you a sense of belonging, connecting you to your peers, and to erase the language of a people is the same as to erase that people. Or, let's be blunt: like @Nakoichi@hexbear.net said, it's genocide.

That gets specially obvious if you rephrase the question in the title as "Should a government destroy that sense of belonging and the cultural diversity of the peoples subjected to the government, for the sake of some nationalistic babble like «cultural unity»?" (For any decent and morally sane person, the answer is "no". )

Language could liberate, but it could also disintegrate [...]

How's Switzerland going? There are language struggles there, such as the Romansch varieties slowly dying out, but you don't typically see independence movements there gaining any sort of traction; not even among the Gallo-Romance speakers, even if they would be backed up by some rather powerful nextdoor government. "Perhaps" because Switzerland doesn't treat its citizens as second class based on language?

In other words, because the government of Switzerland does the opposite as the government of India is trying to?

Tangent re: New Yorker: I’m about to host-block websites that drop a non-dismissible paywall over the browser and force a quit-and-restart

One can have a required language for some purposes, but it's impossible to think people would use it for everything. The premise is weak.