I think many members of diaspora communities would heavily dispute this, depending on how high a bar you want to set for “language skills.” Many second or third generation immigrants who have weak...
This is the kind of thing that should not need saying out loud. You can’t have meaningly cultural knowledge without language skills - and vice versa.
I think many members of diaspora communities would heavily dispute this, depending on how high a bar you want to set for “language skills.” Many second or third generation immigrants who have weak grasps of their mother tongue due to lack of opportunities to practice and general pressure towards assimilation. But it would be incorrect so say they don’t participate in the culture.
I agree you can have some cultural understanding/knowledge without knowing the language. But there are serious, serious limits to how you can internalize cultural phenomena and participate in...
I agree you can have some cultural understanding/knowledge without knowing the language.
But there are serious, serious limits to how you can internalize cultural phenomena and participate in culture without knowing the language.
Language is a way of knowing. The way we speak, the way words are ordered in a sentence, what words mean and what vocabulary is in use are all formative parts of culture. Without being able to participate in that, you're missing out on extremely important parts of the culture.
There's also just so much cultural content you can't listen to, read or watch because you don't speak the language. Cultural references are also largely lacking, expressions, interactions and common points of reference that are shorthand for different parts of culture.
I say this speaking two languages natively and having lived extensively in those cultures. I speak a third language fluently, but I wouldn't pass for a native as I don't speak enough and my vocabulary isn't big enough.
Where my experience in this context gets relevant is that there are languages so close to the ones I speak that I can understand when people speak, or the majority of words in writing. That still makes me a cultural outsider when conversations happen in those languages because I just don't have the same cultural points of reference. Those references are only available in those languages.
I don't know how those people think, and sometimes there are clearly barriers and different types of logic that stem from the language (and are inherent to that culture) that are not available to me. There are also clearly puns/references/associations that are only available through language and can't be translated.
Culture is also ever-changing. Many words and phrases are replaced every year. As different issues dominate culture and spread within the language body, diaspora are gradually more and more removed from the current culture unless they have access to and participate in culture to stay up to date.
Now a common history, that can be transmitted, owned and part of all our identities? That doesn't require language in the same way because the past is static. We can branch off the same stem on our cultural tree, but grow gradually farther apart without being immersed in the same culture and language.
What I’d dispute is the assertion that a culture has one language. Like I said with diaspora cultures, the diaspora community is an offshoot of the culture that largely functions in a different...
I agree you can have some cultural understanding/knowledge without knowing the language.
What I’d dispute is the assertion that a culture has one language. Like I said with diaspora cultures, the diaspora community is an offshoot of the culture that largely functions in a different language, but they still maintain connections and have plenty of cross pollination with each other. This is much more common in India where ethnic lines are pretty well defined but language has historically been pretty loose. You will have branches of families that speak different Indian languages at home but largely speak to each other in only English or Hindi or some pidgin version of one of the languages.
I think this very quickly becomes a separate culture unless you maintain a lot of cross-pollination though, which is something that largely wasn't possible until recently. Italian Americans and...
Like I said with diaspora cultures, the diaspora community is an offshoot of the culture that largely functions in a different language, but they still maintain connections and have plenty of cross pollination with each other.
I think this very quickly becomes a separate culture unless you maintain a lot of cross-pollination though, which is something that largely wasn't possible until recently. Italian Americans and Irish Americans have distinct cultures of their own, but they differ substantially from the modern cultures back in the European countries from which their ancestors emigrated. They would not have much easier a time fitting in in Italy or Ireland than any other Americans, and perhaps even harder because there's some tension there that those with no heritage wouldn't have. And in Ireland's case there's not even really much of a language issue!
The key here isn't even necessarily language (though imo that would be the principle factor to assimilate into the non-disaphora in most cases), it's continued intermingling between the diasphora and the non-diasphora. Without that, either the diasphora becomes its own culture with divergent traits (including but not exclusively language) or the disaphora slowly assimilates into the culture around them.
The example again being India, where it did happen, because the political lines and the linguistic lines were not at all congruent. The political boundaries shifted constantly over time and...
I think this very quickly becomes a separate culture unless you maintain a lot of cross-pollination though, which is something that largely wasn't possible until recently.
The example again being India, where it did happen, because the political lines and the linguistic lines were not at all congruent. The political boundaries shifted constantly over time and languages were more of a group of big spectrums of various dialects across them, but the fundamental units of society were families and castes, which maintained their own distinct customs and traditions that they maintained wherever they went and whomever they lived around. The norms around endogamy, where people would marry across geographic and linguistic lines but within caste lines, means a great deal of cultural continuity happens across language groups and even geographies. Most educated people are bilingual at a minimum, with people more often being able to speak bits and pieces of many different languages.
Many conversations in my family just involve long stretches of us piecing together between us what the "proper" way to say something in Telugu (our technical mother tongue) is. Because each group of cousins speaks some hyper-specific regional dialect and none of us are natively fluent in the formal or "correct" version of the language. Generally it's my one aunt, who is a big reader, that is able to settle those arguments authoritatively.
And this wasn't a unique dynamic to India, it's just where it persists most strongly today, but it was pretty universal to societies up until the modern conception of a "nation-state" took hold that melds linguistic, religious, cultural, and ethnic identities all into one big ball and draws a firm boundary around the territory that it's all supposed to live in. But this is kind of a fiction. People are mobile and cultural constructs like language even moreso. They're not just like immutable attributes. Learning languages that are grammatically similar and where you have basically all the background cultural context is actually not that hard when you're around a lot of people who are natively polyglots. As long as there's a lingua franca that everyone is equally comfortable in the glue can bind everyone together. And groups of polyglots tend to have social dynamics that allow people who don't understand each other (like individuals who can translate quickly in conversations) to keep interacting.
Now the Scotland example might be a bit egregious, because from the article it doesn't actually sound like people have any persistent link to the "mother" culture and might just be sort of LARPing based on stereotypes. That starts to look a bit more like cultural appropriation than actual participation in the culture.
Oh I don't dispute anything you said (well worded fwiw) and you definitely know more about the situation in India than I do. I don't think the linguistic boundary is really the most fundamental...
Oh I don't dispute anything you said (well worded fwiw) and you definitely know more about the situation in India than I do. I don't think the linguistic boundary is really the most fundamental thing, but rather the divergence of diasphora culture over time if there's not enough contact between the diasphora and the main culture. Both language and culture evolve and change over time, after all, and you're right that none of this is immutable. But when two groups from the same culture are no longer in contact they inevitably diverge as they change in different ways.
I think the situation you describe is most different from those that I described in that there's a high degree of intermingling between the described groups, and that cultural continuity is less of a thing when there are very large geographic distances or practical boundaries between different parts of a diasphora -- consider, for instance, the cultural differences between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews despite each of those groups having significant internal cultural continuity across pretty large geographic spans. If anything, I think linguistic differences between groups that were originally part of the same culture are more likely to be a symptom of cultural divergence than the cause of it imo.
Also yeah I don't even think the Scots can claim a history of diasphora -- they had significant influence from the Norse hundreds of years ago and probably plenty of intermarriage in that time, but it's definitely primarily LARPing based on stereotypes imo. You can contrast this with Norwegian American culture in parts of the US, which descends from much more recent Norwegian immigration to the US and has mostly assimilated with mainstream US culture.
I didn't know we did. I've yet to meet someone back home who purports to be of Scandinavian descent. Based on the article seems to be only in the more northern territories.
I didn't know we did. I've yet to meet someone back home who purports to be of Scandinavian descent. Based on the article seems to be only in the more northern territories.
I think many members of diaspora communities would heavily dispute this, depending on how high a bar you want to set for “language skills.” Many second or third generation immigrants who have weak grasps of their mother tongue due to lack of opportunities to practice and general pressure towards assimilation. But it would be incorrect so say they don’t participate in the culture.
I agree you can have some cultural understanding/knowledge without knowing the language.
But there are serious, serious limits to how you can internalize cultural phenomena and participate in culture without knowing the language.
Language is a way of knowing. The way we speak, the way words are ordered in a sentence, what words mean and what vocabulary is in use are all formative parts of culture. Without being able to participate in that, you're missing out on extremely important parts of the culture.
There's also just so much cultural content you can't listen to, read or watch because you don't speak the language. Cultural references are also largely lacking, expressions, interactions and common points of reference that are shorthand for different parts of culture.
I say this speaking two languages natively and having lived extensively in those cultures. I speak a third language fluently, but I wouldn't pass for a native as I don't speak enough and my vocabulary isn't big enough.
Where my experience in this context gets relevant is that there are languages so close to the ones I speak that I can understand when people speak, or the majority of words in writing. That still makes me a cultural outsider when conversations happen in those languages because I just don't have the same cultural points of reference. Those references are only available in those languages.
I don't know how those people think, and sometimes there are clearly barriers and different types of logic that stem from the language (and are inherent to that culture) that are not available to me. There are also clearly puns/references/associations that are only available through language and can't be translated.
Culture is also ever-changing. Many words and phrases are replaced every year. As different issues dominate culture and spread within the language body, diaspora are gradually more and more removed from the current culture unless they have access to and participate in culture to stay up to date.
Now a common history, that can be transmitted, owned and part of all our identities? That doesn't require language in the same way because the past is static. We can branch off the same stem on our cultural tree, but grow gradually farther apart without being immersed in the same culture and language.
What I’d dispute is the assertion that a culture has one language. Like I said with diaspora cultures, the diaspora community is an offshoot of the culture that largely functions in a different language, but they still maintain connections and have plenty of cross pollination with each other. This is much more common in India where ethnic lines are pretty well defined but language has historically been pretty loose. You will have branches of families that speak different Indian languages at home but largely speak to each other in only English or Hindi or some pidgin version of one of the languages.
I think this very quickly becomes a separate culture unless you maintain a lot of cross-pollination though, which is something that largely wasn't possible until recently. Italian Americans and Irish Americans have distinct cultures of their own, but they differ substantially from the modern cultures back in the European countries from which their ancestors emigrated. They would not have much easier a time fitting in in Italy or Ireland than any other Americans, and perhaps even harder because there's some tension there that those with no heritage wouldn't have. And in Ireland's case there's not even really much of a language issue!
The key here isn't even necessarily language (though imo that would be the principle factor to assimilate into the non-disaphora in most cases), it's continued intermingling between the diasphora and the non-diasphora. Without that, either the diasphora becomes its own culture with divergent traits (including but not exclusively language) or the disaphora slowly assimilates into the culture around them.
The example again being India, where it did happen, because the political lines and the linguistic lines were not at all congruent. The political boundaries shifted constantly over time and languages were more of a group of big spectrums of various dialects across them, but the fundamental units of society were families and castes, which maintained their own distinct customs and traditions that they maintained wherever they went and whomever they lived around. The norms around endogamy, where people would marry across geographic and linguistic lines but within caste lines, means a great deal of cultural continuity happens across language groups and even geographies. Most educated people are bilingual at a minimum, with people more often being able to speak bits and pieces of many different languages.
Many conversations in my family just involve long stretches of us piecing together between us what the "proper" way to say something in Telugu (our technical mother tongue) is. Because each group of cousins speaks some hyper-specific regional dialect and none of us are natively fluent in the formal or "correct" version of the language. Generally it's my one aunt, who is a big reader, that is able to settle those arguments authoritatively.
And this wasn't a unique dynamic to India, it's just where it persists most strongly today, but it was pretty universal to societies up until the modern conception of a "nation-state" took hold that melds linguistic, religious, cultural, and ethnic identities all into one big ball and draws a firm boundary around the territory that it's all supposed to live in. But this is kind of a fiction. People are mobile and cultural constructs like language even moreso. They're not just like immutable attributes. Learning languages that are grammatically similar and where you have basically all the background cultural context is actually not that hard when you're around a lot of people who are natively polyglots. As long as there's a lingua franca that everyone is equally comfortable in the glue can bind everyone together. And groups of polyglots tend to have social dynamics that allow people who don't understand each other (like individuals who can translate quickly in conversations) to keep interacting.
Now the Scotland example might be a bit egregious, because from the article it doesn't actually sound like people have any persistent link to the "mother" culture and might just be sort of LARPing based on stereotypes. That starts to look a bit more like cultural appropriation than actual participation in the culture.
Oh I don't dispute anything you said (well worded fwiw) and you definitely know more about the situation in India than I do. I don't think the linguistic boundary is really the most fundamental thing, but rather the divergence of diasphora culture over time if there's not enough contact between the diasphora and the main culture. Both language and culture evolve and change over time, after all, and you're right that none of this is immutable. But when two groups from the same culture are no longer in contact they inevitably diverge as they change in different ways.
I think the situation you describe is most different from those that I described in that there's a high degree of intermingling between the described groups, and that cultural continuity is less of a thing when there are very large geographic distances or practical boundaries between different parts of a diasphora -- consider, for instance, the cultural differences between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews despite each of those groups having significant internal cultural continuity across pretty large geographic spans. If anything, I think linguistic differences between groups that were originally part of the same culture are more likely to be a symptom of cultural divergence than the cause of it imo.
Also yeah I don't even think the Scots can claim a history of diasphora -- they had significant influence from the Norse hundreds of years ago and probably plenty of intermarriage in that time, but it's definitely primarily LARPing based on stereotypes imo. You can contrast this with Norwegian American culture in parts of the US, which descends from much more recent Norwegian immigration to the US and has mostly assimilated with mainstream US culture.
I didn't know we did. I've yet to meet someone back home who purports to be of Scandinavian descent. Based on the article seems to be only in the more northern territories.
Which makes sense, because the Orkneys do have an affinity with Norway.