Most successful cultural/linguistic assimilations?

Right, and there's always the "it's nice in the abstract, but will it be useful to our children". Which is why the smart thing would be to publish more in the languages and run more things in them so people have something they can say "I want to learn this language to read X or go to conference Y" for.
 
Minority languages need legal support. The Québec/Catalonia approach of making them politically dominant in their home area may be the only real way to keep them healthy. The key is that a language has to be attractive enough for both 1) its speakers to pass it on to their children and 2) for non-speakers to be motivated to learn it.

If a language has no legal status, there is no practical reason for #2, and while some speakers will pass it on to promote their heritage, a lot of people just aren't willing to make that effort, especially when they already speak the national language. In France today you have to be pretty motivated to keep the ancestral language going. In each generation there have been a lot who don't have that motivation, so the number of speakers shrinks progressively.

Even bilingualism may not be sufficient to revive them. Yes, it gives the language some legal prestige and support in school, but it allows the majority to keep speaking its own language. Ireland is a classic example. They made Irish official but allowed everyone to keep using English all the time. So when there is an announcement in Irish, 95 % of the population just waits for the English translation. The 5 % that speaks Irish (if it is even that many) may be barely hanging on but there just is not much incentive for the great majority to join them. Bilingualism works best if both languages still have a lot of speakers to begin with.
 
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The Andean countries are both Quechua-speaking and Spanish-speaking. Mexico is a Nahuatl-speaking and a Spanish-speaking country. For the purposes of this topic, the only Latin American countries that we can consider "successful" are Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Everywhere else has failed to completely assimilate its native population.
Puerto Rico too
 
...2 pages of discussion and the elephant in the room still not mentioned: Rome. I dont think you can beat that.
If you don't count succesor languages of Latin like Spanish or French then i'd say that Arabic and English(especially) has been more succesfull than Latin.
 
What about Bavaria. 150 years ago,they went to war with Prussia and got whopped. 100 years ago, they still had the Royal Bavarian Air Corps flying alongside the German air force. Today, they consider themselves the utmost guardians of German cultural values and rather then seceding wish they could just unite all of Germany under their own supervision.
 
If you don't count succesor languages of Latin like Spanish or French then i'd say that Arabic and English(especially) has been more succesfull than Latin.

I was thinking about the time when Rome existed. At the period latin went from a small middle italian languauge to assimilate Italy, Gallia, Iberia, big parts of Brittain, Illyria, Moesia, Dacia and North Africa.

Arabic is similar but IMO not as successfull: they assimilated the arabic peninsula, iraq, syria and mostly Egypt and North africa, they were present in Iberia and Sicily. I dont know if we can speak of assimilation in Iran and the rest of the muslim world. That together is less then the roman achievment IMO.

Brittain is ahead in absolute numbers I think however I would put Rome ahead still. I think that at the time of Rome's zenit a bigger percentage of the world had adopted latin than british ever. Whats more Rome managed to romanize much more of its Empire than Brittain- and even those parts that in the end didnt adopt latin continued to call themselfs roman a millenia after the fall of Rome. So we could count them as assimilated as well I think.
 
Pretty much any state in the Western Hemisphere (except maybe Bolivia), since the vast majority of countries there are now dominated by languages which had no native speakers in the whole hemisphere just 500 years ago. Of course this wasn’t exactly nonviolent but cultural assimilation rarely is.

Other than that, the spread of Mandarin and Latin over the course of antiquity are both very significant. Honorable mention goes to Arabic.

One last mention (although it isn’t exactly a language assimilation) is the proliferation of the Phoenician alphabet, which in turn influenced the three most widely used alphabets in history: Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek. Most of the world (with a few exceptions in Asia) uses an alphabet derived from the original Phoenician
 
What Sweden did to Scania after 1658 is a good example. The common people were left untouched but the Swedes went after every Danish institution you could possibly think of, both secular and religious, and deposed and replaced them with Swedish ones. Within one generation the people went from being speaking Danish to speaking Swedish. Within two, the only way you would have known that Skåne wasn't always Swedish would be by looking in a history book. It assimilation was by all accounts extremely successful, dare I say more successful than many of the examples given so far on this thread, but no one seems to know or care because Scandinavian history "isn't important".

The Scanians outside the population in the bigger towns spoke Danish until mass education arrived and Swedish vocabulary became common among the Scanians, and the traditional rural dialects of southern Scania still have a much larger mutual intelligibility with Danish than Swedish usual have or even South Jutish or Norwegian. The problem with Scandinavian as example of assimilation are that as we have a large degree of mutual intelligibility and common religion, we pretty much define nationality by what country we live in. In fact Norwegian are a good example of this in Northern Norway they speak dialects close to the West Norwegian dialects which use Nynorsk, but they still use Bokmål as written standard, even through Bokmål are pretty much a local Norwegian version of insular Danish.
 
I was thinking about the time when Rome existed. At the period latin went from a small middle italian languauge to assimilate Italy, Gallia, Iberia, big parts of Brittain, Illyria, Moesia, Dacia and North Africa.

Arabic is similar but IMO not as successfull: they assimilated the arabic peninsula, iraq, syria and mostly Egypt and North africa, they were present in Iberia and Sicily. I dont know if we can speak of assimilation in Iran and the rest of the muslim world. That together is less then the roman achievment IMO.

I think it's an interesting question which is hard to definitely answer. There are 250 million Arabic speakers vs about 183 million speakers of Latin based languages (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy).

Both languages became closely linked with a great religion (Christianity, Islam), although the religious significance of Arabic has probably lasted better down to the present.

The lands conquered by Arabic were already peopled by advanced civilisations that had existed for thousands of years, whereas the lands conquered by Latin were occupied by barbarian tribes at a much lower level of development.

Iran and Turkey have their own languages which were never displaced by Arabic, though one can find a few loan words and religious terms. Likewise Urdu in Pakistan.

Similarly, Germanic and other European languages often have some Latin words in them. In the end it's hard to say which was more significant, since the answer depends when and where we mean. Over all Chinese and Hindustani are probably bigger than them both. :)
 
I think it's an interesting question which is hard to definitely answer. There are 250 million Arabic speakers vs about 183 million speakers of Latin based languages (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy).

You must add to the Latin pool all of Latin America from the Rio grande to Tierra del Fuego and you will find more than 183 million Latin based speakers.
 
You must add to the Latin pool all of Latin America from the Rio grande to Tierra del Fuego and you will find more than 183 million Latin based speakers.

Yeah true. That's where it gets a bit hard to measure. Are we measuring speakers within the former territories of the Roman Empire? Or speakers world wide? The New World hadn't even been discovered by Europeans in the Roman period. But with a long term view, absolutely.

Of course Arabic has similar problems too. Do we include areas that historically were Berber speaking, and only Arabized later? And Arabic is really a range of dialects which can be quite different to each other the further apart geographically.
 
Yeah true. That's where it gets a bit hard to measure. Are we measuring speakers within the former territories of the Roman Empire? Or speakers world wide? The New World hadn't even been discovered by Europeans in the Roman period. But with a long term view, absolutely.

Of course Arabic has similar problems too. Do we include areas that historically were Berber speaking, and only Arabized later? And Arabic is really a range of dialects which can be quite different to each other the further apart geographically.

I think it's better to include those speakers outside the boundaries of the Empire as long as there is a direct or indirect relation,and you can trace a line from the ultimate source.

For example, Latin America was assimilated linguistically by Spain and Portugal in Spanish and Portuguese. But why these languages? What made Spanish and Portuguese speak those languages? It's because Rome assimilated Hispania.

Or just ask this question. Without Rome, would Mexico or Brazil speak Romance languages?

Same goes with Arabic languages, but I have less knowledge about it. But by analogy, why not?
 
I think it's an interesting question which is hard to definitely answer. There are 250 million Arabic speakers vs about 183 million speakers of Latin based languages (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy).

Both languages became closely linked with a great religion (Christianity, Islam), although the religious significance of Arabic has probably lasted better down to the present.

The lands conquered by Arabic were already peopled by advanced civilisations that had existed for thousands of years, whereas the lands conquered by Latin were occupied by barbarian tribes at a much lower level of development.

Iran and Turkey have their own languages which were never displaced by Arabic, though one can find a few loan words and religious terms. Likewise Urdu in Pakistan.

Similarly, Germanic and other European languages often have some Latin words in them. In the end it's hard to say which was more significant, since the answer depends when and where we mean. Over all Chinese and Hindustani are probably bigger than them both. :)

Two points:
1. Why does everyone insist on success based on what remains today? Rome was incredibly successfull of romanizing its Empire. Its a credit to that how much survives of that today. However I think it should be investigated in their own time.

2. If you really insist on counting todays latin based languages, you could add as well Latin America...
 
So by your account USA Is a Spanish speaking Country, Canadá Is a French Speaking Country, England Is Welsh Speaking Country, Sweden and Norway áre Sami speaking Countries, Finland Is swedish and Sami speaking Country?

Edit: sorry my bad, Canadá is a French speaking Country
Swedish is one of the official languages in Finland, it is a Swedish speaking country.
 
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