What do you think about protecting own language from ...

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What do you think about protecting own language from foreign influence?

Do you think that the law on protect national languages from the influence of other languages, eg. English, Russian, German etc ?

I am a Polish, and a student of library science

Recently I read that the current ruling party Law and Justice is working on a new law "On protects the Polish Language", apparently in France have similar language law to protect language French, the French even use French as the main language of air traffic control over France, although most other countries use English as the main aviation language xD

Our-right wing politician not like for exemple that journalist or other politician use English word briefing instead of our Polish word "Konferencja Prasowa - Press Conference"
These politicians are proposing to prohibit the use of foreign words in the media, which have their counterparts in Polish.
They wanted to remove all anglicisms, germanisms and russianism from Polish language

I talked about it with my Polish with my literacy Professor from my university what he think about this about this
He said he did not know exactly, he is pissed off sometimes these accretions from other languages, but this type of law stink a little "language fascism"
But what is fascist in the defense of mother language?

The French have a commission to preserve French. The Germans have something like that for German. Even within the English speaking world there used to be a nationalistic backlash against other kinds of English: in the Fifties the BBC tried to keep American terms out of BBC British English. That effort collapsed during the payola scandal: it just got so cumbersome to report the front page news about "radio rocknroll record commentators" who were "taking money from record labels" that BBC was forced to allow its announcers to say "deejays", and "payola" because those two words had become "unavoidable Americanisms".



I can understand trying to preserve a language of some small tribe that has no speakers younger than your grandparents. But worrying about the living language of a large nation state like Poland having foreign words seems kinda silly to me.

Take the example of the French. They have that commission whose whole raison d'etre is to act as soldiers to defend the French language from (let's face it)mostly from one particular hated foreign language..English! They feel that French is under siege by English, so they get all belligerent about it, and maintain this protracted campaign against this supposed invasion of English into the French vocabulary! Its all out of a misguided form of nationalism, and national esprit de corp! An estimated 29 percent of words in English are actually of French origin. So for the French to succumb, or to conform, to using English would only mean that they were conforming to themselves!

One shared national language seems like the best way to maintain national unity and promote cultural integration, I believe English should be the official language of the United States.

There never will be a "pure" language. One language is always "borrowing" from another. Language is a dynamic, ever changing entity.

In fact, Modern English, it seems to me, is almost as much a Romance language as it is a Germanic language. Old and Middle English are demonstrably Germanic languages. If you hear Old English being spoken, you would think the person is speaking an odd dialect of German. Middle English is similar; it still sounds very German, but there are many recognizable English words now.

We've had so many borrowings from the French since the Norman conquest. Many of these borrowings have been taken so much for granted by us that, at times, the French origin is lost. One example: "chair." Another example: "Forest." Both from the French.

And it is not so?
After that your beloved "Declaration of Independence" was written in English.
Or maybe I'm wrong?

My lecturer described the top-down attempts to adjust the Polish language as "language fascism", but I do not see this as anything fascist in this.

The D/I is written in English.So is the U.S. Constitution. But English was never legally declared to be the "official language" of the USA apparently. But it has always been the de facto official language though.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 10 Jun 2016, 9:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Languages change and evolve over time borrowing words, terms, and concepts, from other languages.

If the English language had been policed from the beginning as the French and the Germans are doing, and the Poles apparently want to do, then the language that we speak would be more like this example of the lords prayer:


Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum;

Si þin nama gehalgod

to becume þin rice

gewurþe ðin willa

on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.

urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg

and forgyf us ure gyltas

swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum

and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge

ac alys us of yfele soþlice

We'd be speaking a dialect of German, basically.

Not that there's anything wrong with German.

I know that English is Germanic language, the same as Dutch and German of course

Modern English is much less Germanic than the previous forms of English.

It's not far from being a Romantic language, if one really analyzes it.

I'm curious, Pawelk: Would you be able to understand something in Polish which was written, say, in 1400?

Polish has doubtless changed alot since 1400, but it hasnt borrowed as many foreign words as English has.

The irony is that the most feared language (feared by all of these linguistic nationalists like those in Poland) is English.

This is because English is the most invaSIVE language in the world today.

What is ironic is that English is also the most invaDED language in the world today. English has more words borrowed from other languages than does Polish or any other language. So succumbing to English is just succumbing to yourself and to the world's language.

Canada is officially bilingual - French and English. In the Province of Quebec, French is very protected. I wish our use of British style English spelling was protected. US English has been creeping in thanks to Microsoft and Windows default languages. And while the affectionate term for mother is often pronounced as "Mum" it's more and more spelled "Mom". (One of my special interests).

English does not "borrow" from other languages.

It leads them down dark alleys, beats them senseless, and then rifles through their pockets for loose grammar.

Japanese borrowed a majority of its vocabulary from Chinese or otherwise forms words using Chinese roots (the on-yomi readings of kanji). It has also borrowed a lot from English, and to a lesser extent Portuguese (since the 16th century), Dutch, and German.

It's remember my when i "Gimnazium - Middle school" classes with a foreign language, which in my case was the English language, I had to write an essay about my family, of course, in English. My English teacher was also a teacher of Polish but not in my class, in our schools is a common practice, so that principals can save by not having to create additional job places

Going back to my work out, we all liked this English teacher, because it was a great lady teacher, it was middle-aged lady, but she had a fantastic sense of humor, when i written that i love my Daddy and Mummy she pointed out in witty manner that the word Mommy is better since my mom is still healthy and very much alive!
And described difference between word Mommy and Mummy

It's hard to think that one little typo changes the pronunciation of the whole word
Unfortunately, I have a problem with that, so when I finished high school, which ends in Poland, final exams, called matura, for selected school classes with obligatory Polish and one selected foreign language,

I had opinions of pedagogical and psychological clinic, about the fact that I have Asperger's syndrome and that I diagnosed dyslexia and dysortography, so that I facilitate, I could write the exam on the computer, because my handwriting resembles Egyptian hieroglyphs and grammatical correctness, to be assessed more leniently.

By the way I wonder how many people here on the forum has a problem, dyslexia or dysortography?