Yeah, the geography certainly plays a role - much like it does for Britain having ~30 miles of ocean between it and the rest of Europe.
But the broad trend in the States has been a narrowing of languages. Like, a century ago there was national distribution for newspapers printed in German. Those started disappearing during WW1 and were completely gone by the end of WW2. And, of course, that is dwarfed by the number of First Nations languages that have been driven to the edge extinction, if not outright extinguished already.
I think if Lemmy wants to have less of a US bent to topics and perspectives, then they’ll have to follow ich_iel’s example and stubbornly commit to a language that isn’t english. The way how the internet collapses geography, conversation trends toward orbiting the densest population of monoglots.
It is a self reinforcing system, and the same reason that English has become so widespread worldwide.
Increased communication across wider areas promote common languages to be more accessible to more people, so in the case of the US this means each time people communicate it is more likely to be in English. Sure, some stupid laws have helped out too but this is a trend that was going to happen in the US for the same reasons English is increasingly used worldwide, but we don’t have a national language that English is being added to to promote being bilingual. Quebec has been fighting the trend though legislation since it was happening there as well.
Even regional dialects of English are being homogenized within the US. It is less likely for people traveling across many states to be unable to understand a regional dialect as was fairly common before cheap long distance communication.
Yeah, the geography certainly plays a role - much like it does for Britain having ~30 miles of ocean between it and the rest of Europe.
But the broad trend in the States has been a narrowing of languages. Like, a century ago there was national distribution for newspapers printed in German. Those started disappearing during WW1 and were completely gone by the end of WW2. And, of course, that is dwarfed by the number of First Nations languages that have been driven to the edge extinction, if not outright extinguished already.
I think if Lemmy wants to have less of a US bent to topics and perspectives, then they’ll have to follow ich_iel’s example and stubbornly commit to a language that isn’t english. The way how the internet collapses geography, conversation trends toward orbiting the densest population of monoglots.
It is a self reinforcing system, and the same reason that English has become so widespread worldwide.
Increased communication across wider areas promote common languages to be more accessible to more people, so in the case of the US this means each time people communicate it is more likely to be in English. Sure, some stupid laws have helped out too but this is a trend that was going to happen in the US for the same reasons English is increasingly used worldwide, but we don’t have a national language that English is being added to to promote being bilingual. Quebec has been fighting the trend though legislation since it was happening there as well.
Even regional dialects of English are being homogenized within the US. It is less likely for people traveling across many states to be unable to understand a regional dialect as was fairly common before cheap long distance communication.