Three Post-1900 language WIs:

First, presuming that the Chinese Empire survives past 1911 (somehow), how does butterflying away Sun Yat-Sen and the PRC change Chinese? Would a longer-lasting Qing Dynasty have much affect on the development of Standard Mandarin?

Second, presuming no Bolshevik revolution....what happens to the Russian language without the Soviets taking over? How does Imperial Russian develop? What policies would a Tsarist state follow with regards to language and Russification as it either liberalizes or later implodes?

And third....what does a linguistic map of a Nazi-victory Europe look like? How would Russian fare? Or other Slavic languages? What changes in terms of German? Do the Nazis pursue a Standardization of the German language intended to erase the various dialects? Do Germanic languages get special privileges over Romance languages? What about Euskera and other minority languages?

Just curious.....:eek:
 
And third....what does a linguistic map of a Nazi-victory Europe look like? How would Russian fare? Or other Slavic languages? What changes in terms of German? Do the Nazis pursue a Standardization of the German language intended to erase the various dialects? Do Germanic languages get special privileges over Romance languages? What about Euskera and other minority languages?

Just curious.....:eek:
Nazi German victory doesn't mean (without ASBs, anyway) a Nazi Empire covering the entirety of Europe. In non-Slavic territory, the Nazis put up puppet regimes, who had their own policies, if always deeply fascist. Dialects would be put under a bit more pressure than OTL, but OTL wasn't very dialect-friendly by itself. Expect more countries resembling France linguistically.
 
Nazi German victory doesn't mean (without ASBs, anyway) a Nazi Empire covering the entirety of Europe. In non-Slavic territory, the Nazis put up puppet regimes, who had their own policies, if always deeply fascist. Dialects would be put under a bit more pressure than OTL, but OTL wasn't very dialect-friendly by itself. Expect more countries resembling France linguistically.

I agree to an extent. However if this Nazi dominance survives as long as the Soviet Empire did, there would be strong pressure for German to become a second language throughout Europe. This would be much more lasting than Soviet attempts to force Russian as a second language in the warsaw pact because German was already considered an important language of scholarship and literature throughout Europe...Russian wasn't. I suspect this might lead to a Europe in which all internal diplomacy, business, and scholarship was handled in German.

The Nazis might also favor and foster the use of Germanic dialects as first languages in occupied countries such as Belgium which had multiple official languages. One might imagine attempts by a fascist regime in Britain to purge English of its romance elements and restore a "purer Anglo-Saxon" tongue. Other similar "back to our Germanic roots" movements might even become popular among collaborators and puppets in France or Spain with increased interest in the study of lost Frankish and Gothic dialects. Celts would still be screwed no matter what.

In the east, assuming the Nazis came even halfway close to acheiving their bizarre resettlement goals, German as a first language would come to dominate Poland and parts of the former Soviet Union. Slavic languages would still be spoken, but rarely written. Given the presumably favorable position some long-term German allies such as Finland and Hungary would have, their languages, although hardly Germanic, might expand and become more widely respected and understood in other parts of Eastern Europe.
 
I agree to an extent. However if this Nazi dominance survives as long as the Soviet Empire did, there would be strong pressure for German to become a second language throughout Europe. This would be much more lasting than Soviet attempts to force Russian as a second language in the warsaw pact because German was already considered an important language of scholarship and literature throughout Europe...Russian wasn't. I suspect this might lead to a Europe in which all internal diplomacy, business, and scholarship was handled in German.

The Nazis might also favor and foster the use of Germanic dialects as first languages in occupied countries such as Belgium which had multiple official languages. One might imagine attempts by a fascist regime in Britain to purge English of its romance elements and restore a "purer Anglo-Saxon" tongue. Other similar "back to our Germanic roots" movements might even become popular among collaborators and puppets in France or Spain with increased interest in the study of lost Frankish and Gothic dialects. Celts would still be screwed no matter what.

In the east, assuming the Nazis came even halfway close to acheiving their bizarre resettlement goals, German as a first language would come to dominate Poland and parts of the former Soviet Union. Slavic languages would still be spoken, but rarely written. Given the presumably favorable position some long-term German allies such as Finland and Hungary would have, their languages, although hardly Germanic, might expand and become more widely respected and understood in other parts of Eastern Europe.

I can see that also. What would be interesting would be to speculate on what might happen to Croatian. The language is Slavic, but the Nazis created Croatia in World War II as an ally....Croatian might be the only written Slavic language, at least until the Nazi Empire collapses.

Nazi German victory doesn't mean (without ASBs, anyway) a Nazi Empire covering the entirety of Europe. In non-Slavic territory, the Nazis put up puppet regimes, who had their own policies, if always deeply fascist. Dialects would be put under a bit more pressure than OTL, but OTL wasn't very dialect-friendly by itself. Expect more countries resembling France linguistically.

True, but how much freedom will Nazi-ruled France or Holland have? I can't see linguistic minorities faring very well, and if they revolt, what's to stop the Nazis from turning Barcelona into another Lidice?
 
Second, presuming no Bolshevik revolution....what happens to the Russian language without the Soviets taking over? How does Imperial Russian develop? What policies would a Tsarist state follow with regards to language and Russification as it either liberalizes or later implodes?

Say what you will about the Soviets, but none of the national languages of the Republics would look or sound much like today, and many smaller languages would never become literary languages at all. The Kyrgyz/Kazakh/Uzbek/Karakalpak division was finalized during the Soviet era, and today's literary langauges might not even be called the same thing. Ukranian in today's form was limited largely to Western Ukraine, and may still be limited to there to this day.

Liberalizing within Imperial borders, ironically, wouldn't help any language except those whose speakers had considerable resources and motivation. Finnish, Polish, Lithuanian might do well. Ossetian or Tatar may not at all. The economics-driven assimilation and centralization would do what it does everywhere in the world, but on a lager scale.
 
Off the top of my head: Moldavian and Macedonian don't get created. There is no movement to unify Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian standards. French doesn't obliterate all other languages of France as completely as it did (although maybe it was a bit too late for that). On the other hand, languages of Spain other than Spanish suffer even worse than IOTL. EDIT: this was for the third WI, I'll think about the rest and some more for this one :)
 
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Say what you will about the Soviets, but none of the national languages of the Republics would look or sound much like today, and many smaller languages would never become literary languages at all. The Kyrgyz/Kazakh/Uzbek/Karakalpak division was finalized during the Soviet era, and today's literary langauges might not even be called the same thing. Ukranian in today's form was limited largely to Western Ukraine, and may still be limited to there to this day.

Liberalizing within Imperial borders, ironically, wouldn't help any language except those whose speakers had considerable resources and motivation. Finnish, Polish, Lithuanian might do well. Ossetian or Tatar may not at all. The economics-driven assimilation and centralization would do what it does everywhere in the world, but on a lager scale.

That's a good point. What about languages like Georgian or Armenian with a long history of independent speaking and their own scripts?

Off the top of my head: Moldavian and Macedonian don't get created. There is no movement to unify Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian standards. French doesn't obliterate all other languages of France as completely as it did (although maybe it was a bit too late for that). On the other hand, languages of Spain other than Spanish suffer even worse than IOTL. EDIT: this was for the third WI, I'll think about the rest and some more for this one :)

Hn.....no Moldavian or Macedonian, eh? Those would all change Europe as it is....interesting.
 

Hendryk

Banned
First, presuming that the Chinese Empire survives past 1911 (somehow), how does butterflying away Sun Yat-Sen and the PRC change Chinese? Would a longer-lasting Qing Dynasty have much affect on the development of Standard Mandarin?
Well, there is one obvious change (which took place in "Superpower Empire" as well): simplified characters aren't developed, and all the Chinese-speaking world keeps using the "traditional" characters. They are, admittedly, even more difficult to learn than the "simplified" ones of the PRC in OTL, but Taiwan and Hong Kong manage just fine with them, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Beyond that, there may be minor changes to vernacular Mandarin, as the process of linguistic standardization had just begun when the Qing dynasty was overthrown, with the decision in 1909 to set up guoyu (i.e. standard Mandarin) as China's official language. This language, obviously, isn't the same as classical Mandarin, the highly codified tongue used by scholars and bureaucrats since the pre-Imperial era; the difference between the two is about the same as between Latin and, say, the medieval Florentine dialect.

So, in short, if a Chinese from OTL visited my TL or an ATL in which the Qing dynasty made it past 1911, he'd definitely notice linguistic differences, but not enough that it would hinder mutual intelligibility.
 
in the late 1930s, there was a trend among Flemish nazis (nazi wannabes) to use German.
However, since very few of them atually every studied the language, it came out rather mangled. In the end, they sort of settled for useing the occasional German word in an otherwise entirely Dutch sentence.

In a nazi victory scenario, I can definitly see some schools switching entirely to German (in Flanders anyway) ... with mixed results. In the end, I guess German will simply replace French as the language of the government while the average Fleming keeps speaking Dutch.
 
Well, there is one obvious change (which took place in "Superpower Empire" as well): simplified characters aren't developed, and all the Chinese-speaking world keeps using the "traditional" characters. They are, admittedly, even more difficult to learn than the "simplified" ones of the PRC in OTL, but Taiwan and Hong Kong manage just fine with them, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Beyond that, there may be minor changes to vernacular Mandarin, as the process of linguistic standardization had just begun when the Qing dynasty was overthrown, with the decision in 1909 to set up guoyu (i.e. standard Mandarin) as China's official language. This language, obviously, isn't the same as classical Mandarin, the highly codified tongue used by scholars and bureaucrats since the pre-Imperial era; the difference between the two is about the same as between Latin and, say, the medieval Florentine dialect.

So, in short, if a Chinese from OTL visited my TL or an ATL in which the Qing dynasty made it past 1911, he'd definitely notice linguistic differences, but not enough that it would hinder mutual intelligibility.

Ah....thanks for giving your input.

in the late 1930s, there was a trend among Flemish nazis (nazi wannabes) to use German.
However, since very few of them atually every studied the language, it came out rather mangled. In the end, they sort of settled for useing the occasional German word in an otherwise entirely Dutch sentence.

In a nazi victory scenario, I can definitly see some schools switching entirely to German (in Flanders anyway) ... with mixed results. In the end, I guess German will simply replace French as the language of the government while the average Fleming keeps speaking Dutch.

Hn....that would be interesting in and of itself....
 
That's a good point. What about languages like Georgian or Armenian with a long history of independent speaking and their own scripts?

I don't know the extent of Russification there. If there was a liberal Empire, I imagine they'd do ok. Both Georgians and Amenians were somewhat represented in the middle and upper classes and so the motivation and the money are there. The revolution-related vocabulary may be different, though :D
 
Hn.....no Moldavian or Macedonian, eh? Those would all change Europe as it is....interesting.
Well it's not *hugely* important but it's one effect among many, no need to be snide.
Say what you will about the Soviets, but none of the national languages of the Republics would look or sound much like today, and many smaller languages would never become literary languages at all. The Kyrgyz/Kazakh/Uzbek/Karakalpak division was finalized during the Soviet era, and today's literary langauges might not even be called the same thing. Ukranian in today's form was limited largely to Western Ukraine, and may still be limited to there to this day.

Liberalizing within Imperial borders, ironically, wouldn't help any language except those whose speakers had considerable resources and motivation. Finnish, Polish, Lithuanian might do well. Ossetian or Tatar may not at all. The economics-driven assimilation and centralization would do what it does everywhere in the world, but on a lager scale.

Many Central Asian languages might not even become standartized. We may get smaller lagnuages from grassroots effort ratehr than top-down state-handed. Or there might be just one big Central Asian Turkic Dachsprache. Probably both? Depends on how society there develops, the political status of Central Asia, etc. What lead to the current situation was Stalin's policy of nation-creation, he wanted to create nations of sizes that fit him, not too big, but not too small either, so not to seek a regional identity. Then in cases like Moldovan, where the majority of an ethnicity lived in anotehr country, it was created by choosing regional dialect features absent in standard Romanian (but may be present in other, non-Moldavian Romanian dialects) deliberately, which approach was copied by Tito in Macedonian. This technique must have been used with the Central Asian languages too, to make them as divergent as possible, but I don't know enarly enough about them to know.
Stalin elevated divide et impera to a whole new level, with that and the moving of whole ethnicities around, that crazy guy. And another brilliant touch was drawing crazy wiggly borders so that each republic has enough of various minorities of just the right size to cause trouble to regional "governments" and local dictators who might get uppity. Witness Transnistria, the Caucasus (and not only Nagorno-Karabakh), and much of Central Asia.

P.S. In another thread I helped a friend with the linguistics of a dystopian ATL for his (soon to be published) SF novel in which the Soviet Union is much more successful in WWII (somewhat earlier PoD though) and there's a Serbian-dominated Soviet-puppet Yougoslavia covering the Balkans with Dobrujan, Thracian, Moesian and Shop languages created in a similar manner (which was actually the Comintern's plan, which never materialised due to the Stalin/Tito fallout). It's *actually* about the Cold War going hot in space and the protagonist starts off as a slave worker in Siberia digging tunnels for Gravity Trains.
P.P.S. I posted this article about the attitudes towards the usage of Wu today: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1437 What do you guys think about the development of other Sinitic langs ITTL (the first)?
 
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"In another thread" -- huh? I meant another forum.
"I posted this article" -- lol? I meant read.

EDIT: Oh, I get it, I meant "posted this link in another thread." and got my two postscripts mixed up. Sorry to necro the thread.
 
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