language YouTube we need to talk there's something most if not all of us take for granted in how we talk about languages that is in direct conflict with the values a lot of us hold it's completely normal mundane and everywhere you look and it's dark when I told my wife the name I had for this video she was like that's overblown and I was like I don't think it is ultimately she came around to my way of looking at it so bear with me because what I'm going to say might sound controversial at first and
it may even make you angry but no I'm not attacking you dear viewer there are two related things that you'll see everywhere when you start looking in fact I'm guilty of them in past videos in some cases sponsors have these ways of talking about language built into their required talking points it's really everywhere so hear me out the use of flags to represent languages and the use of the term native speaker are both maybe things we don't just want to go along with yes they're everywhere and nobody thinks too much of them so it feels
like a weird thing to criticize but follow me here both have their roots in Nationalist and Ultra nationalist ideologies sometimes even outright fascist ideologies what and when we keep using this stuff we run the risk of normalizing that I know it's a strong claim and I know it sounds overblown dingo's cutesy little language Flags harmless right is this guy really equating the little green owl who sometimes makes threats on my family to Richard Spencer or Mr Hilter and over here is Mr Hilter good afternoon well sort of but not really more Napoleon than anything but
I can back it up so stick around if you're new to the channel I'm Dr Taylor Jones I have a PhD in linguistics and I'm a recreational language learner when I'm not professionally analyzing the nitoy details of the syntax phology interface or whatever I also do a lot of work around culture and communication here on the channel I talk about everything from the nuts and bolts of language learning to the social factors that affect language use and communication and I try to do so in a way that's entertaining and accessible and maybe a little spicy
today we're going to talk about language Flags native speakers and whether they're secret tools of ultra right-wing nationalistic ideologies I'm Dr Taylor Jones and this is language [Music] Jones this week's video is sponsored Again by my sense of righteous indignation in fact most of the sponsors I've had in the past specifically request that I use phrases like native speaker or native level that I use flags to represent languages and that I don't use scare quotes on Native and madeup flags that's because this is overwhelmingly the normal default way of talking about language learning it's what
people say do ask for and understand and honestly I'm as vexillological inclined as the next guy love me some good vexillology flags are but there's some problems with this approach so let's start with the flags using the flags of nation states as the result of consciously or unconsciously intentionally or unintentionally linking the concepts of language the people who speak that language and a nation state now nation states are relatively new they go back to the Treaty of West filia in 1649 and didn't exist before that and yes this is all related to what one user
called the window yeting of Prague on my video about gen Alpha slang I'm not saying National aspirations are always bad or that we need to abolish nation states or anything like that I'm just trying to go into this with a clear picture of the results here so one thing about nation state is that there's a people a nation of folk who are generally thought of as the quintessential essence of the nation state and this has some weird and unfortunate ramifications so we associate the French flag with French language but there was a wealth of languages
in what is now France during the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries it was only in the 1700s and 1800s that there was a process of Fran of France in which Parisian French was imposed on everyone else in fact France is carried out until very recently a series of policies that amount to cultural genocide now there's been a shift and some celebration of Braton and and nard and oxitan and other local languages but it's still a limited welcome if one is first and foremost a France one is permitted some local flare in so far as
it does not compete with laure Fran started at home these other languages are sometimes tolerated now that they're severely endangered but they don't have official Flags in any meaningful sense because flags are things that nation state and official organizations have by the way if you want to learn more about this there's a great book called the discovery of France I'll link below so in this case one language was imposed as a way of cultivating good citizens of a nation state and imposing that national identity in the Germanic States a different process happened where the language
was perceived as a main part of the glue that bound different people together but of course that's binding them together with one peoplehood one folkish kite by way of excluding the other The Foreigner in their midst and we don't just see language as divider but also National divisions as creators of languages linguists speak of the serbo catian language but bosnians serbians and croatians do not the flag thing just keeps playing into a nationalist or Ultra nationalist undercurrent one that equates one folk and one it's a short skip from there to one R and one furer
because other languages mark an inherent threat to the National folk it's no coincidence that the guy who coined apra is a dialect M an Army on float a language is a dialect with an army and a Navy is someone who spoke a language that did not have a nation state ultimately the majority of the speakers of that language were murdered because they were perceived and represented as an existential threat to National Purity this is why I absolutely loathe the Yiddish flags that I've seen around nobody's marching around with a banner with an olive on it
Conquering the countryside and creating new administrative units and so on and it takes the language of a displaced people who have a cultural and religious value of respecting the government and law of the land they reside in and gives them a national flag like their Basque separatist or something and to top it all off one of them uses an image of a sacred item that was looted when the last time they had self-determination was ended by Roman occupation before that item was probably destroyed I promised myself I wouldn't get into the the manura is in
the Vatican conspiracy theory in this video the Yiddish flags are just a weird flex but also what about Colonial languages and their descendants does it make sense to represent Puerto Reno Spanish with the flag and colors of Spain as I almost implicit did in my last video those are the actual hex codes for the official flag of Spain when I was talking about Spanish I don't think it does so then when I want to talk about Spanish I need to use a flag for a specific Nation that's simultaneously way too granular and also not granular
enough don't get me wrong flags are cool graphic design is cool but applying Flags to languages runs into some serious unintended implications the second thing is our Cavalier use of the term native speaker I'm sure some of you can already see where this is going but the use of the term term does similar work you might be surprised to hear that native speaker is not a well-defined term in linguistics it borders on meaningless you shouldn't be surprised since the same can be said of the word word but that's a separate issue the term native speaker
is more likely to have a social meaning than a scientific one we tend to mean things like they grew up in a speech community that speaks that language and it's a language that they're comfortable in and they think in they know the culture they don't say things that other people people might consider rookie mistakes they didn't learn the language as an adult and as a foreigner or at a minimum they don't give that impression and that last bit is the rub it's often more about people who conform to an abstract ideal of cultural Purity and
authenticity native is a highly specific word that implies its antonym foreign but languages and cultures don't really work this way most of the time is a child who speaks law at home and learns kahili at school a native speaker of kiswahili native level if their education is in Swahili and they use that for educated topics what does native level mean does it matter what language they think in these are valid questions and this is largely at odds with how language Learners actually want to experience the world we want to learn different viewpoints and cultures we
want to broaden our Horizons most recreational language Learners are not Ultra nationalists because that tends to go hand inhand with being a monolingual beta obsessed with ensuring the linguistic purity of your National folk so no I'm not calling dualingo fascist at least not for that and I'm not even saying you should stop saying native speaker but it seems to me that if we don't like the origins and implications of these things and they're not really doing what we intend them to it's probably better to just say what we actually mean so and so grew up
in N speaking French or French at school and nart at home or learned German as a child while living in heidleberg but only moved there at age six or whatever and look I get it having a recognizable icon on a language platform is just good ux but picking the flags of nation states it's not Ultra nationalist it's just lazy but man studying Persian Boy is it uncomfortable to have the post 1979 flag of Iran I can't go there they don't like me there and you know what I'm not so hot on the flag of the
Sha either anyway I know this isn't something I'm likely to change but it's been bugging me for a while now now let me know not just do you agree or disagree but also what's been bugging you in the language learning space this is your place to vent right in the comments if you like this video please like And subscribe and leave me that comment if you didn't you can still comment and tell me why YouTube thinks that you'll like this video and if you'd like to support the channel you can right here on YouTube with
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