Renfrew and IE Overlords

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2000 7:20 AM

> At 12:55 AM 12/22/99 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>> The point was, e.g., the Russians do not speak Mongul, Turkic, Gothic, Greek
>> or Scandinavian - although all of these arguably represented the languages
>> of various "dominant elite" - these speakers all seem to have been
>> assimilated by Russian.

> On the other hand Romania speaks Romanian, a derivative of the language of
> a dominant elite that only ruled *there* for a short time.

> Persistance of one language or another in a multilingual community is often
> hard to predict.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Indeed it is: If one had visited Belgium in the third quarter of the 19th
century, one could have predicted reasonably that Dutch would disappear there
in the early 20th century, except for a few isolated rural pockets (Cf. Breton
etc.). In fact, all the elites and their environment spoke French, and no
education past primary school was available in Dutch.

What did happen? Dutch had a come back and is now the only official (and
actually spoken) language of the state of Flanders (60% of the Belgian
population), and of 15% of the inhabitants of the bilingual Brussels-Capital
Region (10%). While knowledge of French in Flanders, which was once pretty
general except among the very lowest social classes, is fading fast, and being
replaced by English.

> --------------
> May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com

Ed.