dominic.borcea

@dominic.borcea@piefed.social

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China’s new language law to criminalise advocacy of ethnic minority rights⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

There are language schools, but I can’t find any details about full education being available in a minority langauge.

I mean… Belgium literally has three different full-fledged education systems in flemish, french and german; all of them with their own curricula, schools, universities, etc.

Due to their similar language they are mostly bilingual and can relatively easily understand each other.

This is just flat out wrong??? Finnish and swedish are not similar languages and they’re not mutually understandable. A finnish speaker cannot understand a swedish speaker. Swedish is a germanic language, Finnish is blood uralic, its not even part of the indo-european family. Perkele, mita vittua?!
Did you just go “oh, they’re both in the north, they sound similar to me sooooooooooooooo”

Spanish is the only official language in Spain, only autonomous regions are allowed to have their own official languages per the constitution.

By definition its not the ONLY official language if areas in the country have extra official languages.
The very constitution of the country allows for co-official languages.

And overall it makes sense that these minority-language schools are present only in particular regions. Why would you want to have schools for language X when there’s not a consistent minority that speaks language X in that area in the first place? Complete waste of resources.
And naturally you can’t have schools for every minority, especially with modern-day migration, but its not economically feasible to have a school where only 3 kids can attend.
If would’ve just said that not every minority in Europe gets its school, I would’ve agreed. That much is clear. But that is a very different point from the one initially made.
The dominant model in Europe is certainly not one similar to the one China is pursuing, in fact I’d argue that there’s few EU member states that come close to that. And the ones that spring to mind are the Baltics - Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia - which is an entirely different bag of chips and a whole conversation to be had about how right or wrong they are to pursue something like that in their present geopolitical context.

and Finnish have the same status as Swedish in Finland due to language similarities

Please, stop saying that. The two languages are not similar. That’s not the reason for their status. Its because Swedish imperialism. They occupied Finland for centuries. To help you better understand, percentage-wise the similarity between Swedish and Finnish is CLOSE TO 0% (ZERO)

There is a strong push to encourage foreign languages as secondary

Strong push? I don’t agree with this framing. It makes it seem like its just beginning, like only now we’re moving in that direction. When the reality is that its completely normalized across most if not all EU member states.
Teaching at least one foreign language is a long-term standard of the education system of EU states.

In 2023, 89% of pupils in upper secondary education in the EU were learning English as a foreign language: this share was 96% in general programmes and 80% in vocational programmes.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China’s new language law to criminalise advocacy of ethnic minority rights⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

That’s already how it works in most (might be all) of Europe.

What Europe are you talking about??????? Because its definitely not in the Europe I’m in.
Minority people are very much entitled and do use their native language in schools and universities.

Belgium has dutch, french and german as its official langauges, each region teachin in the region’s langauge. Minority language communities have their own full school systems. Finland’s nationa languages are finnish and swedish; swedish-natives have the legal right to FULL education in their native tongue. There’s Swedish-langauge schools all over the country. Spain - basque, catalan, galician. Similar shit. Switzerland - german, french, italian and romansh - all national languages. Even the french, who go crazy about their language shit, still have breton and basque language schools. Romania, hungarians being the largest minority, there’s lots of hungarian-focused schools. German as well. Ukrainian, serbian, slovak, turkish. Uk - welsh, gaelic, and irish. Sweden - sami, finnish, romani and yiddish. Italy - german, french and slovenian.

I could talk all day. Not only is the opposite the reality about Europe, its definitely how it should be and its one of the things that Europe and the EU do right.