I don't believe linguistic protectionism carries the day when it comes to explaining the absence of political blogs from, say, Germany or France, that are published in English. I don?t think there?s a simple explanation for their relative scarcity, apart from the obvious truism that English is not the native language of most European countries - as the discussion regarding Bjoern's entry amply demonstrates. I think, the most important variables have been named by those commenting in his blog ? penetration of internet connection, especially flat-rate connections allowing to spend a significant amount online reading, awareness of blogging as a concept as well as a technology, motivation to put one?s opinion out there? someone mentioned a possible connection between 9/11 and a rise in blogging -, the main topics of the blog in question, one?s native language?s market size, the target audience, and evidently, the ability to write in English in a way allowing to express sometimes complicated issues and thoughts in a (hopefully) clear and mostly coherent manner. Just by looking at this range of factors (and there are probably a lot more), it becomes obvious to me that c.p. only a small fraction of blogs will be written in English instead of their author?s native language.

Many good points here, but I still believe linguistic protectionism is a major factor, though of course not the only one, in discouraging Europeans from writing English. I spent some time in Germany last summer. One day in Lübeck I walked into a geek store, (sf&f, comics, board and role-playing games, goths behind the counter, etc.) I have at least one foot planted in the geek subculture, and I feel as much at home in a geek store with a decent comics or sf&f section as in a bookstore with a good history section. There's a homey feeling to it, an oasis of me-ness in the city desert.

To visit a geek store in Germany, however, was an unsettling experience. It was all in German! Favourite books translated, beloved movies dubbed. I should have known they would be, but it still upset me. Scifi&Fantasy taught me English. I hate grammar, and I never got good foreign language grades in school. (I also learned, and quickly suppressed, German.) My English didn't improve beyond tourist standards until I discovered Asimov, Heinlein, Tolkien and the bunch at 16 or so. There's more to it than that, (a BBS I visited for a couple of years - not incidentally run by ultra-geeks - encouraged us to write in English), but without having read all those books I might not easily have found the courage to use the language myself. I am confident that you won't find many Norwegians with a better starting point for writing English than geeks.

In Germany, that venue for learning English appears to be closed. I don't know if language laws are directly responsible for the unavailability of English books, but I suspect they are at least indirectly responsible. Whatever the cause, the effect is obvious. You can understand a foreign language based on what you learn in school, but you can't speak or use it fluently with that alone.

Omitting impossible definitions, I would agree that ?culture? does not only consist of language. But language is a very important part of culture. Just think of slang, think of thirteen year-olds inventing their own words to represent their own worlds, think of the fit birds and the hot foxes mentioned above. Even British English and American English are quite different today. Differences in language reflect differences in culture and thinking. I very vividly remember a discussion of three Norwegian fellow students in a seminar concerning ethnic conflict regulation about which language is the real ?Norwegian?. Their discussion was a clear sign to me that, also in Norway, language is an important part of culture.

The three Norwegians were probably discussing nynorsk vs bokmål, the two official, virtually identical variations of written Norwegian. Bokmål descends from Danish, the official language during our 400 years as a Danish province. Nynorsk was created, (some would say recreated), by 19th century romanticists, out of Norwegian dialects, in an effort to find an authentic form of Norwegian. It's been a hot issue ever since. To this day, the linguistic border between bokmål and nynorsk is also a cultural border, between urban and rural, east and west.

Tobias is right, this is a cultural issue, and I was too quick to separate language from culture. Language is part of culture, but is it a part without which we would no longer be us, or is it just a border around our culture, a means of preserving backwards compatibility with our cultural heritage? I sometimes wonder if not an important reason why many are so eager to identify language with culture is that they're afraid or unable to answer the question of what it is, beyond our language, that makes us distinctly Norwegian. We've shed far more important aspects of our national character than our language in the last century. Perhaps it is because we can think of little else to connect us to our ancestors that we hold on to the belief that language is a central part of our culture, that at least we have that left. But even our language has changed. 19th century Norwegian was practically Danish, today the two are recognizably different.

Perhaps what makes us Norwegian isn't any single core of unchangable traits, but our common memory of and identification with a continous, but always changing, line through history. That line doesn't break if we gradually adopt English as a second language, it just takes a new direction, and if we happen to like that direction, (as I do), respect for our past should not stop us from moving in it. It didn't stop us before. To me, this is about looking to the future. Linguistic protectionism is a form of nostalgia. I respect the desire to preserve our cultural heritage, but not if the price is to make ourselves a museum piece, a four million strong eternal commemoration of Henrik Ibsen. Will our descendants be able to read Ibsen untranslated? Now, that's a fair question. The question that bothers me most, though, is what language our next Ibsen will write in. I hope it's English - don't you?

Your reaction to your experience in the German geek store is revealing.

you write:

"I don't know if language laws are directly responsible for the unavailability of English books, but I suspect they are at least indirectly responsible. Whatever the cause, the effect is obvious."

Maybe German geeks just prefer their geek material in German. Simple market forces. That's certainly true in Poland, Polish geeks prefer their geek-out material in Polish. Some enjoy reading material in English (or other languages if they know them) but as far as I can tell, they view that as an addition to their Polish-language geek material and not a substitute for it.

Perhaps - I won't blame it all on government intervention, and what people chose of their own free will is of course their business. (I'm curious to know, though, how widespread English education is in Polish schools, and how common English is on TV.)

My main point is that cultures that import Western culture but not Western language may perhaps preserve their language, but they'll always be on the receiving end of Western culture. I don't think that's a good bargain. What upset me so much about that store was that if _not even geeks_ in Germany read English, then there's not much chance for what I hope for to happen there.

Having lived for several years in Germany, it was interesting when I took a vacation trip to Denmark. I noticed in Copenhagen that many people spoke English and that the American movies at the theater were shown in English with Danish subtitles, rather than being dubbed into Danish. In Germany, the same movies would have been dubbed into German, probably because the size of the German population is so much larger and makes it cost-effective to hire voice actors to dub the movie, rather than just putting in subtitles. As Michael notes above, market forces dictate such things. A country with a population of a few million like Norway or Denmark is in a very different situation than Germany with 83 million (plus Austria and other German-speaking places like Switzerland). I would guess that there is some critical mass of population beyond which foreign language penetration into the culture becomes much more difficult. Poland has less than half of Germany's population, but several times that of Norway, so I would guess that the population critical mass level is less than Poland's 38 million. It is only if a country's population isn't large enough to have massive translations of popular American/ English culture into its own language that it seeks out the material in the original English.

And regarding the nynorsk vs bokmal argument, wouldn't it be better to go with Icelandic? As I understand it, that language is closest to the pure Old Norse tongue...

"Perhaps - I won't blame it all on government intervention, and what people chose of their own free will is of course their business. (I'm curious to know, though, how widespread English education is in Polish schools, and how common English is on TV.)"

Well, Poland doesn't have the luxury that Norway has had of putting all it's foreign language eggs in one basket. German and Russian have been and still are important foreign languages here (Russian is sort of making a comeback and is much more popular than it was even five years ago).

Educationally, access to English is market-driven, meaning the elite have it (or make sure they have it) and other people get by as best they can. Some schools offer English free others offer German and/or French. In some schools foreign languages are offered as optional (paid) extra subjects. There is _no_ concern among professional English teachers about those who can't afford the market price (which is steep).
On TV, foreign language movies and series are shown in Poland with the original soundtrack turned down a little with a single 'lektor' doing a voice over translation (it's just as horrible as it sounds).
Currently I don't know if any foreign series is in the top 10 despite the number of them on, Polish series are currently more popular. Also, "Foreign" doesn't mean only those made in English speaking countries, more series from continental Europe (mostly French and German) are making their way onto Polish TV and Latin American telenovelas retain a certain market share. Foreign movies are usually shown in the original language with subtitles. Some movies (mostly children's movies) are dubbed.

Poland has a fairly strong local music market (album oriented, not single oriented) but English language music is generally widely popular but so is some other foreign music (the biggest foreign language album last year was Tatu, in Russian).

I'll address your other questions in another post.

Hi Bjørn,

>"I don't know if language laws are directly responsible for the >unavailability of English books, but I suspect they are at least >indirectly responsible."

There are no quota laws in Germany regarding foreign language use in radio or tv, or forced translation of movie titles as there is in France. Germany does not officially pursue a strategy of liguistic preservation.

There are, however, private linguistic associations which monitor the development of the German language. And a treaty has been signed between Germany, Switzland, Belgium, Luxemburg, Liechtenstein, and Austria concerning the official rules of German spelling in 1998.

Having German as official language probably discriminates in some sense against other languages, as people can not use them in most instances when dealing with the German administration, or in the sense that it is up each university to accept or not to accept English papers while they have to take German ones. But is that really a valid argument? What would be the alternative? Forcing people to use English? Hardly.

Anyway, German is developing - but not always in a beautiful direction, as the following hilarious piece of evidence against German fashion designer Jil Sander demonstrates (those who don't speak German, simply count the words you understand and you will understand the joke) - this is from an interview given in German... and she is not simply using Angslicisms but English words mixed with German, sometimes without a real grammatical structure: Especially the use of English verbs in a German sentence makes me bang my head against the wall. It is stuff like this that makes people become linguistic protectionists -

"Mein Leben ist eine giving-story. Ich habe verstanden, daß man contemporary sein muß, das future-Denken haben muß. Meine Idee war, die hand-tailored- Geschichte mit neuen Technologien zu verbinden. Und für den Erfolg war mein coordinated concept entscheidend, die Idee, daß man viele Teile einer collection miteinander combinen kann. Aber die audience hat das alles von Anfang an auch supported. Der problembewußte Mensch von heute kann diese Sachen, diese refined Qualitäten mit spirit eben auch appreciaten. Allerdings geht unser voice auch auf bestimmte Zielgruppen. Wer Lady-isches will, searcht nicht bei Jil Sander. Man muß Sinn haben für das effortless, das magic meines Stils."

Now many people would have used "style" which has come to denote something slightly distinct from "Stil" in German - but Jil Sander is actually using an in-between-language.

For those who do speak German, here's an interesting article regarding the implementation of Anglicisms into German:
http://www.duden.de/index2.html?dtsprache/links/links_dtallg.html

And here's one (in English) regarding the French official efforts and failure to preserve la belle langue the way Molière knew it.
http://www.discoverfrance.net/France/News/English_invasion.shtml

>"My main point is that cultures that import Western culture but not >Western language may perhaps preserve their language, but they'll
>always be on the receiving end of Western culture."

Again, I feel uncomfortable with your identification of "British/American" and "Western".

As for dubbed movies - there are more and more original versions being shown even in most medium sized cities now that more and more people speak better English and prefer to see the original version and billions of Euros have been invested in new multiplex cinemas in the course of the last few years. It's totally a market incentive driven, private decision to show a dubbed or an original version.

best,
Tobias

Dear Björn, here is another good blog concerning anyone interested in German views (in English; the number seems to grow):

http://chicagoboyz.blogspot.com/

hans

Just a quick note from Brussels, where English is very widespread indeed. It's quite common to see ads, signs, even TV commercials, entirely in English with no local-language equivalent at all. Of course that's partially because Brussels is a highly multinational city, but also, I think, because many Belgians see using English as a way to render irrelevant the petty linguistic squabbles that make Belgian political and social life so amusing. In fact there have even been suggestions that English should become the fourth official language.

In any case, it's a far cry from France (let alone Québec), where English is still definitely a *faux pas*.

"Belgians see using English as a way to render irrelevant the petty linguistic squabbles that make Belgian political and social life so amusing."

Pretty stupid-ass line of thinking if you ask me. A real potential advantage of Europe vs. the US is linguistic flexibility, the EU seems determined to throw that great asset away and play by somebody else's rules.

The point I was trying to make is that English is seen by some as a "neutral" language, in other words, a way to transcend the (IMHO) rather silly Flemish vs. French language wars and get on with it. A great deal of time and energy -- and public money -- is spent on promoting the interests of each "language community," which are petty and fragmented like you wouldn't believe.

Not that Belgians will ever adopt English as their only language; they generally see the value of being multilingual, and these days to get any sort of decent job in Brussels you have to be at least trilingual.

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