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Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
People would use it as the lingua franca even if they didn't use it as their mother tongue.
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Funny you should mention the multiple languages thing. Around here, we have two official languages, Finnish and Swedish. De facto, the "Swedish" the Finnoswedes speak here isn't really so much Swedish - a foreigner listening to the two dialects could probably mistake them as two totally ceparate languages. In any case, the amount of population that speaks Swedish as their native is a small one - around 5%, and declining. The whole country gets translated to Swedish for this, though, meaning everyone studies Swedish at school, all signs (except in some places where the signs are solely in Swedish) are in both languages, public services staff have to (in theory) be able to conduct their work in both languages. There's probably no research done on the net cost of all this, but the gain is obviously very insignificant - the vast majority of the Finnoswedes can communicate in Finnish too, and the ones who can't should really take a look at the mirror and figure why they're requiring anyone to learn Swedish for their sake anyways. The lingua franca -concept works to a certain extent, but there are areas where people will insist on using Swedish. I once tried to buy a McDonalds meal in a small town in the Southwestern coast, and I wasn't able to do it in Finnish, so I just ****ed off. Talk about the shares of other languages, Russian is catching up Swedish fast of lately, with the rich Russians moving into Finland or at least buying summer residences and spending a large chunk of the year here.
The whole case regarding the integration-assimilation is really an upside down question. For some reason, the modern view is that cultural integration should happen: there should be a plethora of cultures inside one culture (subcultures, whatever you call them), to allow things like languages, burkhas in passports (come'on, what's the point of having a picture in a passport if all you can see is the eyes and cloth), and such. Personally I'm a fan of assimilation:
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Originally Posted by Deffeh
I cant help but agree with something my dad said to me; he suggested that if he were ever to move to France, he would have to speak french and follow to a public degree at least, french customs and practices - in essence, become french. I think the same thing applies in the UK.
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If you move into a foreign country, it is, in my opinion, polite to at least try to behave like it's expected and habitual in the local culture. I don't see any reason why the native majority in the area would be expected to integrate a tiny majority in a fashion that breaks the majority - like in Finland, where the majority is expected to learn Swedish so that the minority could live on their grounds, instead of speaking what the majority does, Finnish. (Of course, the issue with Finnoswedes is a little different - they've been here for quite a while, and they're not really Swedish either). If you'd start shoveling it enough (the integration), you'll eventually end up having fifteen official languages and a lot of time will be spent speculating which signs should appear in Hindi or Hebrew and why. It's just not practical nor necessary.
Why on earth would someone want to move to a country where the culture is such that you don't want to adjust to the way of life there?