What did you think about local vs national patriotism?

Post Reply New Topic

(Truly truth should be given more space to the possibility of entering the information in place on the post title:D )

Do you think that patriotism is more important than nationalism?
I know that in Germany many Germans are more attached to their Länder than to the German State.

Just as often Silesians in Poland, in the first place put his love for his beloved province of Silesia, have a specific accent. but see themselves as Poles.

I know that many Americans say, I'm Texan, I am a Californian, New Yorker, and so on, and only then tell me Americans. The same is with the Spaniards, they say I am Catalan, but then add a Spaniard.

Should not it be otherwise?

A region is by definition a part of a country. A dichotomy in a political context would only arise in case of a conflict between the local government and the state. The answer, as in most cases; it depends.

ill tell you my clan name, who my parents are, who my rlations are first and foremost - then and onlly then if someone asks if im "irish" ill say sure because i happen to live in this country but that hardlly matter to me, bloods all that really matter.

Americans don't say that.

They generally don't identify with their state. However, they may say, "THIS IS TEXAS!", and that means things are done differently in that region.

I wonder does all American tell the same English in all USA for example we had in Poland certain region and groups that speak Polish but with funny accent Like Górale, Ślazacy or Kaszubi Please not that name above are clickable link

Americans do have regional dialect differences that we are very aware of .

The South especially is distinctive. And within the south there are regional subdivisions in dialect. And Black Americans across the nation are notorious for speaking in "Ebonics"- which is as much an argot ( deliberate coded speech for an in group) as it is a dialect.

But according to Jame McWhorter (an American linguist who also happens to be Black) regional differences in American English (even including Black speech) are trivial compared to the dialect differences within any language in the old world. The way Americans from a 1000 miles apart speak differs much less than the Polish spoken by Poles living a hundred miles apart in Poland differs (or the English spoken by Britians living a 100 miles apart in England differs for that matter).

I used to be e-mail penpals with a young lady in the Netherlands, and she would talk about regional dialects of Dutch in her country- and her whole country is only half the size of Pennsylvania.

BTW:its odd that you mention "Catalans" in the same breath as "Californians". Catalans really are almost a whole seperate nationality from Spaniards. Catalan is a whole seperate language (its more like French than like Spanish), and the Catalan were their own seperate kingdom of Aragon before they merged with Castille to form Spain. So they arent really comparable to say "Nebraskans" in the USA.

I don't really have any 'patriotism' not even sure what that is supposed to be in the context of todays world anyways honestly. But I would say state and local issues effect me more directly than some more national issues in the immediate since so I probably tend more towards concerning myself with the city and state I live in rather than the whole nation....though I also know issues within the federal government and policies of theirs I don't agree with also effect states and thus still effect me. But as for being patriotic I don't really have any prideful feelings about 'oh yeah I'm american, yipee' nor do I really think about 'OMG Colorado is the greatest 420!" I mean the legalization of weed is nice but there are some issues in that, and the tax is ridiculous and there is plenty of right wing crap about how we need to welcome more fracking in colorado which is BS but we have politicians pushing for that and stupid voters who would go for it.

Personally I find patriotism and nationalism rather illogical,but I understand why people grow to have attachments both locally and nationally.
In the UK the situation is complex,which was highlighted in the recent referendum.Both England and Scotland were ancient kingdoms so even though we have been united for over 300 years,in many ways we are still separate nations with different legal and education systems,churches and aspects of culture. In language,'Scottish English' has parallels with American English in having different usages for certain words.We also have separate international sports teams,as do Wales and Northern Ireland,a fact that has played a major part
in retaining national identities.
I would normally say I'm Scottish in the first instance,as much in the interests of accuracy as national pride,and I'm also happy to call myself British depending on the context.

The American South has 6 or 7 major dialects depending on which linguist you ask, and those major dialects have many variations. On top of that, there are places with entirely unique dialects. For example, there is a small island not far from my home that has it's entirely unique culture and English dialect. The people there all fish for a living, live in poverty (at least recently thanks to new laws) compared to most Americans, and they've stayed mostly isolated from the rest of the state for the last three hundred years. New state and federal regulations are destroying the culture and dialect though. The North also has a wide range of dialects.

That?s very debatable at best. The old kingdoms which made up Spain were abolished at the beginning of the 19th century. There?s no trace of the Crown of Aragon as such in the current administrative arrangement of the Spanish territory. Catalonia is only a fraction of the former Crown of Aragon, and one of the seventeen Spanish so-called Autonomous Communities. There are many nationalists, but it?s way, way too late to save anything looking like a ?separate Catalan nationality? in the long term, especially the Catalan language. The mass immigration from other Spanish regions during Franco?s regime, when Spanish was the only official language and Catalonia didn?t even exist officially at all, dealt it a decisive blow. Most people living in Catalonia today are of mixed descent, and Catalan is no longer the most spoken language there, which makes any attempt to save it likely undemocratic. On the other hand, this doesn?t even matter much legally, because the Spanish Constitution states that every Spanish citizen has a duty to know the Spanish language, while there?s no such thing with Catalan, and all attempts to introduce it have been deemed unconstitutional. Thus, native Catalan speakers would have either to accept being counted also as Spanish speakers, or to be breaking no less than the Constitution.

This is extremely unlikely to change, because it?d require support from a majority of the whole Spanish population. There?s a long-established view that Spanish speakers can freely move throughout the Spanish territory (presumably throughout its former colonies, too, before they were lost) without having to learn any other language, expecting the locals to speak Spanish to them, no matter what their mother language is or what they speak in their everyday lives. This began to take shape at a time when Spanish wasn?t widely spoken yet in some regions, including Catalonia, and it only grows stronger as the use of the other languages declines, eventually to extinction. It?s usually considered rude to speak them in front of a Spanish speaker, no matter if the language has been spoken for centuries in that place, while it?s perfectly good form to speak Spanish to the locals, even if they?re not as comfortable speaking it, because you have no obligation to learn their language. So a majority of all Spaniards will never vote in favor of having to learn Catalan to move to Catalonia, instead of continuing to demand that Catalans speak Spanish to them, forcing it into more and more areas of public life and, as a consequence, merrily driving Catalan to extinction in the long term. Even if Catalonia became independent due to economic interests?which won?t happen, either, because a majority of Spaniards will never support it?the language shift wouldn?t stop, because it?d need to be favored by its current Spanish-speaking inhabitants, who outnumber the Catalan speakers.

In fact, Ireland is a good example of what happens once language shift starts, even if the region becomes independent. To successfully save the indigenous language, independence has to come much earlier. Portugal is an example of this: hadn?t the Portuguese chosen the right moment to rebel and break away from Spain in the 17th century, Portuguese would now be in a similar situation to Catalan in Portugal, while it probably wouldn?t be spoken much at all in Brazil or the African countries where it is official, Spanish having taken its place.

Portuguese also makes a decent example of how differently what was originally the same language can fare under different political conditions: while it flourished in Portugal and its former colonies, it was reduced over the centuries to a mere ?peasant speech?, considered unworthy of any serious learnèd or written use, in Galicia and a few little Galician-Portuguese-speaking areas which happened to lie east of the Spanish border, in the current regions of Castile and Leon, Extremadura, and Andalusia. A more drastic example can be found in Olivenza, a village which was fully part of Portugal till the first years of the 19th century, when it was grabbed by Spain. Portuguese, of course, enjoyed official status there and was used initially with no stigma in all areas of life, unlike what happened in the above-mentioned regions, but Spain aggressively banned it and left Spanish-speaking settlers in a position favorable to gradually pressuring the local Portuguese-speaking population into switching to their language, rather than the other way around. Today, português oliventino is all but extinct. Something similar is happening in the north of Uruguay, which used to be effectively monolingual in Portuguese, its population having closer ties to neighboring areas of Brazil than to the rest of their country, but now speaks portuñol and is decidedly moving towards the hegemony of Spanish.

To sum up, it?s only a matter of time for Catalonia to become monolingual in Spanish. Besides, even though it?s true that European countries have a considerable dialectal variation at a much smaller geographic scale than most of the American continent, this can?t really survive in a modern world and is (not-so-)slowly disappearing. It wouldn?t be all that outlandish to find in a few decades a Catalonia largely speaking a form of Spanish differing less from that of Madrid than Nebraskan English may from other dialects spoken in distant areas of the US

In regard to the OP's mentioning how in Germany, it's not uncommon for people to have more loyalty to their state than to their country - that is doubtlessly because Germany is a comparatively new country, in that it was only united out of numerous principalities and kingdoms in the late 19th century. And besides that, there was more of a tribal affiliation connected to the various dialects. My dad's people back in the good old days a couple hundred years ago had come from the kingdom of Wurttemberg, but unlike their neighbors who spoke with a Swabian dialect to the south, they spoke a Franconian dialect in their home region of the Kraichgau in the northwest of the kingdom - and so my ancestors saw themselves as something different and apart from said Swabians. This was based not just on speaking German differently from their neighbors, but because those dialects can be traced back to ancient tribal confederations like the Franks and the Swabians/Alemanni, and that sense of belonging to such ancient groups survives doubtlessly today in Germany and other places.