Language revival

What is language reivival? It usually is an attempted by individuals or entire cultural communities, governments, and other interested parties to reverse the decline of a language. If the decline is severe, the language may be endangered, moribund or even extinct. The goals are to get people to continue speaking said language and return it to daily use. A example of this is Irish in Ireland being promoted by the government or the Hebrew languages by Israel.

Use this thread to discuss PODs or anything that can help revive extinct or endangered languages. Be nice!

Cuāuhtemōc said:

What is language reivival? It usually is an attempted by individuals or entire cultural communities, governments, and other interested parties to reverse the decline of a language. If the decline is severe, the language may be endangered, moribund or even extinct. The goals are to get people to continue speaking said language and return it to daily use. A example of this is Irish in Ireland being promoted by the government or the Hebrew languages by Israel.

Use this thread to discuss PODs or anything that can help revive extinct or endangered languages. Be nice!

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I think Mexico can promote one of the Nahuatl languages or Mayan languages, I think with a POD with the Criolos being decmized this can happen.

The Ottoman Empire is able to take over Italy and possibly other regions and promotes Latin to make itself seen as the Roman Empire?

The Ottoman Empire had a Vassal where Latin was the Major Language: the Republic of Ragusa.

kasumigenx said:

I think Mexico can promote one of the Nahuatl languages or Mayan languages, I think with a POD with the Criolos being decmized this can happen.

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I think Guatemala promotes Mayan these days, even saw a program that showed kids being taught the glyphs and all, and to the extent of my knowledge Mexico does the same, at least in the Yucatan with Mayan. When I went there some signs were actually trilingual.

I was wondering if it was possible for Nahuatl and Quechua to be promoted as official languages instead of Spanish when the Viceroyalties of Peru and Mexico become independent? I'm aware that Spanish was still the minority language in most of Latin America until the 20th century. It wouldn't take much to have both languages be used by the majority of the people living in those countries. Perhaps if the criollo elite decides to pick up the native languages as a symbol of resistance against the Spanish?

EDIT: Probably unlikely unless it was an earlier POD.

9 Fanged Hummingbird said:

I think Guatemala promotes Mayan these days, even saw a program that showed kids being taught the glyphs and all, and to the extent of my knowledge Mexico does the same, at least in the Yucatan with Mayan. When I went there some signs were actually trilingual.

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Make me wonder on a dangerous political rant if Chaves, pro 'Indigenous Resistance', did anything actually to help the natives and their languages...
Or if Morales, who is Quecha side I think, try to help Aymara, or vice versa, or... try to replace one by the other...

The Ubbergeek said:

Make me wonder on a dangerous political rant if Chaves, pro 'Indigenous Resistance', did anything actually to help the natives and their languages...
Or if Morales, who is Quecha side I think, try to help Aymara, or vice versa, or... try to replace one by the other...

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Quechua and Aymara are already national languages I think. The Maya languages have the possibility of becoming national languages as well especially if the Maya of Chan Santa Cruz defeat the Yucateco separatists and establish an independent native state in the Yucatan.

https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=203611

If we expend the thread to living but very minority or moribound languages, there is the rheto-romances ones, small romance familly languages spoken in Swissterland and around, by no more than 3% swisses now. And in this thread, I pounders with others to inflate the %, maybe by an alternate swis (civic?) nationalism by example - a neutral but really swiss language...


In the same part... Breitz, the celtic language ('Britonic') of France, could have been more energic and lively with a King and Nation less focused on One Nation, One Language...

Feel free to include them.

I was wondering if it was possible if there is also the possibility of having Aramaic revived as a spoken language by the Maronite Christians of Lebanon or the Assyrians of northern Iraq. Maybe if the Assyrians are granted their independent state as promised by the British after WWI and if the French decide to set up an independent state only for the Maronites...

Cajun French is being taught to children in a few areas of Louisiana. Gotta teach it quick before the great-grand parents and grandparents die off. There's also a more modest effort to teach Cajun French in Texas. But this is a post 1900 POD,

Maybe the Cajuns don't have so much oil. They would not have to learn so much English to deal people in the oil business. Fewer Cajuns would move into Texas and rely on their English skills, and the Cajuns in Texas might remain more isolated and not seek to follow their bothers from Louisiana working on the oil business.

Maybe the Cajuns could develop local industries that would keep them from becoming so assimilated.

But they are not as assimilated as you might thing there is a three hour local radio program in Houston with the announcers speaking in Cajun Franglais and the songs mostly in French.

I few tweaks could make Cajun French be a viable language today.

Regarding Nahuatl, I remember hearing about México City's mayor having his public employees in the Federal District learn Nahuatl as a way to preserve the language.

As Cuāuhtemōc mentioned before though, at the time of independence and for most of the 19th century, much of the populace of México didn't speak Spanish...with the right butterflies one can make it so that some ATL Méxican government embraces Nahuatl as a form of asserting Méxican nationalism early on.

In a situation where Islam isn't founded or if the Caliphate does not conquer Egypt from the Eastern Roman Empire, the Coptic form of the Ancient Egyptian language would continue to be the dominant language of the peasantry. I can see Coptic creeping up to replace Greek as the prestige language in Egypt especially if the natives do end up rebelling and breaking off from the greater Empire. It's not necessary language revival since the language would continue to be dominant.

I also had the idea of the British directly annexing Egypt into the colonial empire instead of maintaining it as a client state. The British colonial authorities could try to impose the Coptic language on the population, especially the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt which is predominately Arabic speaking. When the British pull out, I can see the Coptic language having a few hundred thousand to a few million native speakers.

Cuāuhtemōc said:

I also had the idea of the British directly annexing Egypt into the colonial empire instead of maintaining it as a client state. The British colonial authorities could try to impose the Coptic language on the population, especially the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt which is predominately Arabic speaking. When the British pull out, I can see the Coptic language having a few hundred thousand to a few million native speakers.

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That would risk being a lightening rod for a mass uprising just like using cow fat to grease rifles was the lightening rod for the India uprising. By this time Egyptians view themselves as Muslims and thus Arabic was their language. You can also expect mass slaughtering of the Coptic Christians, since they get seen as traitors and collaborators. I don't think any European colonial empire has ever tried to destroy a local language (excepting New World settlement colonies with too few locals); it would create needless hatred for no gain.

It would be interesting to see the continued existence or revival of the Cumbric dialect of Brythonic. The main occurrence that could allow this would be for the Kingdom of Strathclyde to continue existence, which could perhaps be achieved if there's no English unification and Scotland remains weak. A proper POD could perhaps be the Battle of Dunmail Raise, and having Dunmail 'the last King of Cumbria' survive or even win.

EternalCynic said:

That would risk being a lightening rod for a mass uprising just like using cow fat to grease rifles was the lightening rod for the India uprising. By this time Egyptians view themselves as Muslims and thus Arabic was their language. You can also expect mass slaughtering of the Coptic Christians, since they get seen as traitors and collaborators. I don't think any European colonial empire has ever tried to destroy a local language (excepting New World settlement colonies with too few locals); it would create needless hatred for no gain.

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Perhaps. It was just a random idea I just tossed.

The Spaniards did their damn best to eradicate Quechua, Aymara, Nahuatl and Maya if you want to mention one colonial empire. It didn't work because even after the deaths caused by war and pestilience among other things, there were millions of Indians compared to a few dozen thousand Europeans. They did manage to discredit them as prestige languages by the time Latin America won its wars of independence.

Cuāuhtemōc said:

...
I also had the idea of the British directly annexing Egypt into the colonial empire instead of maintaining it as a client state. The British colonial authorities could try to impose the Coptic language on the population, especially the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt which is predominately Arabic speaking. When the British pull out, I can see the Coptic language having a few hundred thousand to a few million native speakers.

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EternalCynic said:

That would risk being a lightening rod for a mass uprising just like using cow fat to grease rifles was the lightening rod for the India uprising. By this time Egyptians view themselves as Muslims and thus Arabic was their language. You can also expect mass slaughtering of the Coptic Christians, since they get seen as traitors and collaborators. I don't think any European colonial empire has ever tried to destroy a local language (excepting New World settlement colonies with too few locals); it would create needless hatred for no gain.

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Yes, if it was the colonialists doing it (and I'd think, if they were going to mess around with their subject's language preferences, they'd seek to promote English instead!) it would backfire. But what if it were a radical nationalist movement?

Iranians widely know Arabic but don't prefer to speak it; they have their own languages, as do many other Muslims who consider themselves quite faithful yet know Arabic only as a second language, if at all. The last Shah did not find it necessary to impose the Farsi language because it had simply survived (and indeed prospered, becoming a widely-known second, or third, language throughout the Muslim world, a language of poetry and culture). But he did seek to de-emphasize Iran's membership in the sphere of Islam in favor of glorification of the realm's ancient, pre-Islamic historical glory. (And the Islamic revolution which ousted and succeeded him in turn sought to reverse much of that and focus instead on Iran's role as a Muslim society instead...)

Thus, if Egypt for instance had both a survival of Coptic among a significant part of the populace and a radical nationalistic movement that viewed itself as modernistic and not bound to traditional views of Islam, and some of those Copts were major leaders of the movement and the Coptic ethnicity (presumably Christians by tradition though perhaps the revolutionary ones would turn their backs on their confession as much as their Muslim-backgrounded comrades ignored Islam) proved active and crucial in imposing the new regime, I could then see the new government actively backing Coptic under a patriotic banner. I doubt very much they'd seek to impose it on Egyptians who were committed to Arabic, which would still be the majority language.

It would be more likely something like this would happen if the struggle for power of the nationalists (who might well be socialists, or even members of the Third, Communist, International) was a hard and bitter one against say a British colonialism that in an alt-timeline decided they'd better stay in power at all costs, rather than as OTL a gradual retreat toward more distant forms of indirect rule that in turn allowed a simple coup to oust Britain's chosen king.

Catmo said:

Cajun French is being taught to children in a few areas of Louisiana. Gotta teach it quick before the great-grand parents and grandparents die off. There's also a more modest effort to teach Cajun French in Texas. But this is a post 1900 POD,

Maybe the Cajuns don't have so much oil. They would not have to learn so much English to deal people in the oil business. Fewer Cajuns would move into Texas and rely on their English skills, and the Cajuns in Texas might remain more isolated and not seek to follow their bothers from Louisiana working on the oil business.

Maybe the Cajuns could develop local industries that would keep them from becoming so assimilated.

But they are not as assimilated as you might thing there is a three hour local radio program in Houston with the announcers speaking in Cajun Franglais and the songs mostly in French.

I few tweaks could make Cajun French be a viable language today.

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The tricky bit is making it distinctively Cajun French, as a distinct dialect, that survives.

Quebecois is, I gather, a very distinctive form of French; the Creole spoken in Haiti is even more so. But in each case, part of the reason a very different version is spoken there from that spoken in Paris is not a simple matter of distance and time; it's because the French-speaking populace was not seen as continuous with the ruling circles for a very long time. In Haiti's case, because frankly as an independent African-descended nation surrounded first by slave plantations and then later by nominally free peoples who were however still firmly under the thumb of their former masters in other political forms, the nation was treated as a pariah, and eventually it was the English-speaking USA that sought to dominate the place. In Quebec, the French-speaking populace clung to their mother tongue despite strong British discouragement for generations before they were finally able to assert an equivalent dignity in politics.

I suspect that if Haiti had found a more honored place in the community of nations, their leadership, even though themselves from humble Creole origins, would soon adopt the most Parisian, Academy-approved, international form of French they could and it would diffuse downward rapidly; considering the deep African roots of Kriol I suppose it would persist but the solid majority of Haitians today would be speaking a dialect much closer to standard French. And if in Quebec the habitants had not merely been tolerated but were masters of their own house--or of course if New France had somehow never wound up in British hands in the first place--again the dialect would have re-converged on Parisian French, for reasons of prestige.

So the same thing in Louisiana and among the Acadian diaspora--it's a delicate balancing game between inadequate numbers and social influence for the language to persist at all, versus so much success that the leadership seeks the dignity of "cleaning up" their French to international standards set in Paris. By analogy with Quebec, the Cajuns would need to be more numerous and also oppressed, so they have a refuge in sheer numbers for their distinct dialect to survive in, but no prospect of a widespread respectability save what they can eventually earn by stubborn persistence.

Shevek23 said:

Yes, if it was the colonialists doing it (and I'd think, if they were going to mess around with their subject's language preferences, they'd seek to promote English instead!) it would backfire. But what if it were a radical nationalist movement?

Iranians widely know Arabic but don't prefer to speak it; they have their own languages, as do many other Muslims who consider themselves quite faithful yet know Arabic only as a second language, if at all. The last Shah did not find it necessary to impose the Farsi language because it had simply survived (and indeed prospered, becoming a widely-known second, or third, language throughout the Muslim world, a language of poetry and culture). But he did seek to de-emphasize Iran's membership in the sphere of Islam in favor of glorification of the realm's ancient, pre-Islamic historical glory. (And the Islamic revolution which ousted and succeeded him in turn sought to reverse much of that and focus instead on Iran's role as a Muslim society instead...)

Thus, if Egypt for instance had both a survival of Coptic among a significant part of the populace and a radical nationalistic movement that viewed itself as modernistic and not bound to traditional views of Islam, and some of those Copts were major leaders of the movement and the Coptic ethnicity (presumably Christians by tradition though perhaps the revolutionary ones would turn their backs on their confession as much as their Muslim-backgrounded comrades ignored Islam) proved active and crucial in imposing the new regime, I could then see the new government actively backing Coptic under a patriotic banner. I doubt very much they'd seek to impose it on Egyptians who were committed to Arabic, which would still be the majority language.

It would be more likely something like this would happen if the struggle for power of the nationalists (who might well be socialists, or even members of the Third, Communist, International) was a hard and bitter one against say a British colonialism that in an alt-timeline decided they'd better stay in power at all costs, rather than as OTL a gradual retreat toward more distant forms of indirect rule that in turn allowed a simple coup to oust Britain's chosen king.

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Although Coptic would be difficult, the idea of some kind of language revival in Egypt is not as ASB as you might think. During Mohammed Ali's rule Egypt went through some truly massive societal changes and I could see Mohammed Ali pushing for alternate language development.

I think the best chance for some kind of language revival/alt language development would be for Mohammed Ali to promote the usage of a dialect heavy vocabulary in the military, the first Egyptian newspapers, state run universities and schools, and in Literary society. Possibly borrowing from Coptic or maybe even circassian languages to replace words seen as too ottoman or turkish. Ali could possibly encourage the use of the Latin alphabet instead of the arabic one.

Ali was already suppressing the Clergy and the other traditional centers of power and he and the military had a lot of control over most level of egyptian society at the time so he could probably have started to implement something like this under the guise of modernizing Egypt and moving it further away from the Ottoman Empire.

It wouldn't be as extreme as replacing over 1000 years of Arabic with Coptic but with a POD in the early 1800s Egyptian Arabic today could develop to be distict enough from the standard to be recognized as a seperate language.

As an aside, OTL's Irish language revival was a spectacular failure. Far less people speak Gaelic today in Ireland than at independence. IIRC, this is in part because they thought by teaching bilingually, and moving Gaelic-speakers into classes with English-speakers, the result has been everyone speaks English as a first language, Gaelic about as well as American students speak Spanish (read, very poorly). Indeed, it's generally only private schooling exclusively in Gaelic that really keeps retention of the language.

In contrast, Welsh was actually revived pretty thoroughly. Even though only a minority of Welsh now speak it, the number in Wales (600,000) is greater than all other surviving Celtic languages put together.

In general, I think this is in the wrong forum, as most POD's will be post-1900. Language revival is really only something people would care about after the start of the Nationalist era post 1848, and most attempts weren't even implemented until the early 20th century

One thing I've wondered is if some North African states, post-independence, could have embraced the idea that everyone was of Berber ancestry ultimately, and begin universal education in a standardized Berber dialect. If this was done in say the 1950s in say Morocco or Algeria, I think either one would probably be majority Berber speaking today.

These are the languages that I wanted to revive or change their fates

-The dialect groups of Region 2 and Region 3 in the Northern part of the Philippines, I want to have them spoken by a majority and have a strong dialect continuum, some of my ancestors once spoken one of the dialects in Region 2-3, perhaps if a successor state of Mayi is established before the Spanish came these languages could fare better, in default they were meant to overwhelm the dialects surrounding them but they became a minority because of the Genocidal policies against the speakers of these dialects which include resettlement policies(resettlement from what is now region 1 and 4 especially after famines) and force work like in the tabacco monopoly.

-The dialect group of Sichuan, I wanted to see that language survive and how it will look like in the present.

-The Lowland languages of Taiwanese Aborigines, I think they could fare better and have a revival program in the early 20th century if the speakers survive at that time.