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0 pointsSamoyedFurFluff4y ago0 comments

> On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given language across large populations and large geographies. Often without involving genocide or prison camps.

Which country is this? Genuinely curious. I’m a native English speaker and any time English was established as a country wide lingua franca it involved colonization and suppression of other people, even in England.

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newsbinator4y ago

There are several examples. Here's one that involved fining people for not speaking the lingua franca in public:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen,_speak_Turkish!

I'm not sure exactly how I feel about this. I hope we can get everyone to a global language without so much as a $1 fine, but if it did require a generation of fines and public shaming, it could fall into "the ends justify the means" territory.

In my modern/developed country we fine citizens heavily for entering without presenting a valid PCR test against covid. That's because we believe the public good of having everyone free of covid outweighs the public evil of fining people for simply existing as they are.

Would the public good of switching the globe to a unified language be worth fines and social pressure?

I don't know the answer to that, which maybe correlates with my score on the "Darkness Measure" we've recently seen posted here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734100

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