ceigered:Additionally, due to strong regional influences, you'd have some dialects springing up here and there

But really, these people should be speaking their native languages most of the time, not Esperanto. Esperanto should be the language that you speak with people abroad, NOT with people in your region, so I think that would greatly decrease the risk of splitting into dialects.

In my opinion, creoles formed because people had to learn English (French, Spanish, whatever), that is, the local colonialist prestige language, in order to get ahead in life. The colonists came in and if you were a local, you had no choice but to learn one of these languages if you wanted to be successful. And you probably had to speak that colonialist language at your workplace all day.

With Esperanto, there would be no replacement of local languages. You would speak your local language at work, all local business would take place in the local language, and you'd only pull out your Esperanto when a foreigner came in. And how often does that happen? Even in a region with many small countries that use different languages, most people aren't travelling internationally every day, so people wouldn't be using their Esperanto most of the time. Even if Fremdlandia is just a short distance away, you probably speak Hejmlandish at home, even if you speak fluent Fremdlandish (or fluent Esperanto). Only a very few offices would have Esperanto as the 'office language', and even if most people spoke good Esperanto, they would spend most of their life speaking their region's language, not Esperanto.

Absolutely, Erinja.

Isn't this just another case of imagining that the 'laws' of linguistics are adequate for what is a truly unique phenomenon in mankinds linguistic development - ie Esperanto.

erinja:

ceigered:Additionally, due to strong regional influences, you'd have some dialects springing up here and there

But really, these people should be speaking their native languages most of the time, not Esperanto. Esperanto should be the language that you speak with people abroad, NOT with people in your region, so I think that would greatly decrease the risk of splitting into dialects.

Mmmm, so I guess English in India is just a myth then? (also note that I'm not saying anything about SPLITTING - this is more like having mould grow on a piece of wood than the wood being shattered)

With Esperanto, there would be no replacement of local languages. You would speak your local language at work, all local business would take place in the local language, and you'd only pull out your Esperanto when a foreigner came in. And how often does that happen? Even in a region with many small countries that use different languages, most people aren't travelling internationally every day, so people wouldn't be using their Esperanto most of the time. Even if Fremdlandia is just a short distance away, you probably speak Hejmlandish at home, even if you speak fluent Fremdlandish (or fluent Esperanto). Only a very few offices would have Esperanto as the 'office language', and even if most people spoke good Esperanto, they would spend most of their life speaking their region's language, not Esperanto.

I'm sorry, I can't agree. If we're to imagine Esperanto as the world-uniting language, we must imagine it in such a role, not the one it has today. For example, English is not being imposed on any country, nor are people being forced to learn it as a primary language are they? They're learning it as their main secondary language. Yet it's still having a tremendous impact on languages world wide. A ridiculous amount of words in Japanese for example stem from English roots, and that's clearly only happened in the last 100-200 years max. What would make Esperanto any different? No one in the general public would really care about "Esperanto isn't a replacement for local languages". That's just propaganda to them since there's no way to enforce it..

Once again I stress this is not about splitting into dialects. This is about the creation of dialects, just as we have slang English today, and how each "slang" is different for each region. Only we're dealing with the short term here. For Esperanto, we need to consider the long term. Since Esperanto would be THE WORLD LANGUAGE, it'd still have tremendous influence even if it was only a second language! It'd be more convenient for people to stick to Esperanto in an international context than hold on tightly to tradition if things like employment etc required it (yet another factor). That said, OF COURSE people would be still speaking their home language all the time. But particularly international communities might find the use of a colloquial variant of Esperanto a nice compromise. Who knows! The point is that at a global scale, if something as improbable as the Fina Venko occurred, Esperanto would no longer be treated the same, and the speakers who at the moment make up the majority and treat Esperanto ever so idealistically would end up being in the minority by the end of the day. Add 100+ years of post-fina-venko history and Esperanto would have a massive influence on the world, and the world would have a massive influence on Esperanto.

Sudanglo:Isn't this just another case of imagining that the 'laws' of linguistics are adequate for what is a truly unique phenomenon in mankinds linguistic development - ie Esperanto.

Still finding this elitist attitude of a speaker of a made up language ironic. Esperanto ain't so unique. It is unique in some areas, but not as much as you're making it sound.

(Not to mention that this is less about linguistics and more about history and predicting a future society's interactions with the hypothetical adoption of Esperanto, something linguists normally don't like to touch in a serious manner).

The future is unknowable. One can only speculate.

But if in the era of the Fina Venko, Esperanto was largely how it is today and hadn't split up or had regional variants, then the linguists might have to revise their idea about what must happen to languages.

As you well know Ceiger, I am highly sceptical about the idea of universal truths about language based on the study of what mainly happens in natural languages.

I think Erinja's picture of the world in a Fina Venko state is what you would expect.

Only a small proportion of the population would be actively using Esperanto. The main difference would be that those who needed to regularly deal with speakers of other languages would often use Esperanto in preference to spending years learning national languages.

However the possible developments in translation technology make everything uncertain.

In a world in which Esperanto is part of the educational sytem, I can imagine that there might be a relatively large body of speakers at a certain limited level, but the language would still be defined by those users who had most need for Esperanto, and therefore were most competent in the language.

Should the dubbing or subtitling of foreign films become common place, those subtitles or translations would be under the control of expert speakers.

sudanglo:
But if in the era of the Fina Venko, Esperanto was largely how it is today and hadn't split up or had regional variants, then the linguists might have to revise their idea about what must happen to languages.

Indeed. One of the marks of science is that it's generalizations are always open to revision in light of new evidence. That's the whole point of science, and it shouldn't inhibit the making of those generalizations in the first place.

At the current time, most speakers of Esperanto, be they Raumists or Finvenkists, are rather protective of the language. They/we realize that despite what it has achieved, Esperanto is still an "endangered" language. Nothing guarantees its survival from one generation to the next, and some things, such as reforms and breakup into dialects, actually threaten it.

If we imagine a Fina Venko where enough people speak Esperanto that nobody has that protective feeling toward it, we might expect to see more rapid change in the language, in the form of new/borrowed words, new ways of putting sentences together, and so on. But I'd expect the use of Esperanto in important international documents, reports, interoffice memos, and the like, to act as a brake on any very strong tendencies to break up into dialects. As always, slang will be the most chaotic aspect. The "Singlish" spoken in Singapore today has a lot of slang that I wouldn't understand, but people are generally capable of avoiding slang when they need to communicate with "outsiders". I'd expect to see something similar with Esperanto.

Don't be silly, ceigered. India has a completely different situation than what we are talking about.

I mentioned earlier the situation in which you have a colonialist prestige language. People whose country has been colonized by someone else are likely to have no choice but to learn the colonial language if they want to get ahead in their career. That was certainly true in India. And it is still true to an extent today. As I mentioned in my previous post, this is *EXACTLY* the situation in which creoles, pidgins, and local dialects form. You get a large population of people speaking a foreign language together. Due to the colonialist influence they have no choice but to speak that foreign language. Furthermore, India has so many different languages that English may have been the only possible intermediate language among Indian people from different regions. India is so diverse, that it's as if all of Europe were combined into one single country, and then some.

On Japan and Korea - yes, they have a lot of English slang words. It's because of the coolness factor. But you could also work in a form of colonialism. You had, and still have, American soldiers stationed in Japan and Korea, especially following WWII and the Korean War. They spread their slang and their ideas. But that's a totally different system again, than the situation in India. It isn't a dialect of Japanese or of Korean, it's just a few slang words added. And English itself has had barely any influence from Korean in particular, beyond the occasional word that you hear from someone stationed there ("Oh, the ajummas used to bring us food")

So I would NOT say that there is a Korean dialect of English, or a Japanese dialect of English.

I can definitely see Esperanto picking up some loan words if it gets more international, and I can see it giving some loan words to some local languages. But I don't see separate dialects of Esperanto forming. For example, although educated Swedes generally speak good English, write university theses in English, etc. they don't generally speak English at home, and I wouldn't say that there is a special Swedish dialect of English. They speak Swedish with one another, and English with outsiders. This is the model I would foresee for Esperanto, the model without colonialism. The colonialism-based model of India (Africa, Haiti, etc), which creates a local dialect, pidgin, or creole of the colonialist language -- I don't really foresee that for Esperanto.

erinja:On Japan and Korea - yes, they have a lot of English slang words. It's because of the coolness factor. But you could also work in a form of colonialism. You had, and still have, American soldiers stationed in Japan and Korea, especially following WWII and the Korean War.

Another interesting thing related to this is that North Korean has many different loanwords to South. I believe they more often originate in Russian or Chinese, than English.

Speaking of loan words, maybe haŝioj should be added to the Lernu! Vortaro, as an alternative to manĝobastonetoj? I have the sense that haŝioj is pretty well known now; am I mistaken?

I happen to know haŝioj but I don't know how widespread it is. I never heard the local Esperanto speakers say it on my visit to Taiwan.

I seem to have misinterpreted the scope of this fina venko. But I agree Sudanglo that if Erinja's predictions occur (which I stress I'm trying to say "no that's impossible"), we might have to rewrite the way we think of social change and languages in a historical context.

But I still have a strong feeling that an commonly-spoken world-wide esperanto over the long term would meet challenges we currently insist would never happen, simply because we've never been able to test on that scale before, as even Latin, English etc are imperfect tests (too smaller scales and as you've said there was the issue of colonialism - although that could affect Esperanto too).