How quickly can the language of a place change?

May 11, 2023 12:21 PM

Throughout history, when towns/cities were invaded and annexed by different countries, how long would it have taken the inhabitants to learn the new language?

Have been reading about history and started to wonder about the places that got invaded and changed hands from one country to another.

Even fairly recently in WWII where parts of France were absorbed into Germany. How long would it have taken the French-speaking people of Strasbourg to begin conducting daily life in German?

I use that as an example but would be interested in any similar examples from any time period.

Would people have had to intensively learn the new language? Would they continue speaking the old language and maybe only use the new language in official settings? Were people in the list maybe quicker at picking up new languages?

posted by iamsuper to Society & Culture (20 answers total)

The question you'd have to ask first is how much of a mishmash of both languages the locally used language is already.

The difference between German and French is of course greater than between German and Dutch, but in several places crossing the border between the Netherlands and Germany just gets you a slightly different version of Lower Saxon, and I can point you to a Schoolstraat 10km deep in Germany where it would actually have to be named the Schulstrasse.
posted by Stoneshop at 12:34 PM on May 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

It depends on whether the people stayed. In Eastern Europe after World War II many border changes involved mass forced population movements, importing people who already spoke the 'correct' language.

On the other extreme Silesians have mostly stayed put and they still speak, well, Silesian, despite being owned by Czechia, Austria, Germany, Poland and other permutations for centuries. Right now they're bilingual in Polish but there's a roaring revival of Silesian literature.

Between those, it usually took as long as it took the original adults to die out.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 12:48 PM on May 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Agreeing with Stoneshop that most people in contested areas are already bi- or even multilingual. People go across the borders all the time, for trade and holidays and general stuff. They speak both languages and often also a local dialect that is so different from the official languages that it might as well be its own. That dialect will often survive anything, whereas the main language changes because of schools. Children grow up with the new main language, and will be speaking it fluently by the age of 7 or 8.
That is certainly true for your example of Alsace, where I am pretty sure most people still speak French, German and the local dialect. And English, for tourists and media.
Earlier, dialect would be spoken at home. This is being challenged by the media situation, where people have constant access to global media. Some kids prefer to speak the main language even though their parents speak dialect at them.

But, in general, Europeans speak at least two languages relatively fluently. Now it's often their native language + English, but when I was a kid, it was most often their native language + that of the closest neighbor. So in eastern Denmark, most people spoke or could at least understand Swedish, and in western Denmark, most people spoke or could understand German*. The public schools taught Swedish, Norwegian, German, French and English. The schools still teach a variety of languages, but there is a wider choice. You can learn Spanish, or Mandarin, or Italian. Russian was an option, but I'm not sure it is now.

* as a curiosity, the dialects in North Germany/South Denmark and in South Sweden/Bornholm are almost incomprehensible to other Germans/Danes/Swedes. They have their own communities, across borders. The dialects are not the same across borders, but they are closer to each others than the official languages.
posted by mumimor at 1:07 PM on May 11, 2023 [11 favorites]

There really can't be a definitive answer here, because the circumstances around these language changes range from forced assimilation to laissez faire to outright encouragement of the retention of the original tongue.

As a laissez-faire example, the Brits took over New Amsterdam (where they spoke Dutch) in 1664. But Dutch persisted for a long time. It was used in Albany for official municipal purposes until the late 1700s. Until 1833, there were still sermons being preached in Dutch at Reformed churches. President Martin Van Buren, in upstate New York, spoke Dutch at home with his wife (who died in 1819). Dutch hung on in pockets until the late 1800s, more than two centuries after the area was added to the British empire. (And remember that it was surrounded by other English-speaking colonies.)
posted by beagle at 1:25 PM on May 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

Some Eora and the Darug peoples learned to speak English well within a couple of years of colonisation by the British in Australia, never having heard the language before. Bennelong was close to fluent within four years, when he toured England in 1792 before returning to what we now call Sydney. Most Australian First Nations people spoke multiple languages anyway, so learning another was not that difficult.
posted by Thella at 1:35 PM on May 11, 2023 [9 favorites]

Strasbourg is not the best example, because it was already used to speaking German. The -bourg should be the obvious giveaway, but the Stras- is another fairly well-known German word, strasse, street. Strasbourg has gone back and forth for a while, and most inhabitants had probably been bilingual for a long time regardless of war.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:38 PM on May 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

As a laissez-faire example, the Brits took over New Amsterdam (where they spoke Dutch) in 1664. But Dutch persisted for a long time. It was used in Albany for official municipal purposes until the late 1700s. Until 1833, there were still sermons being preached in Dutch at Reformed churches. President Martin Van Buren, in upstate New York, spoke Dutch at home with his wife (who died in 1819). Dutch hung on in pockets until the late 1800s, more than two centuries after the area was added to the British empire. (And remember that it was surrounded by other English-speaking colonies.)

Theodore Roosevelt understood some Dutch and had a Dutch overlay to his accent. An elderly lady in the New York State hamlet I grew up in had the same sound to her voice.
posted by jgirl at 1:42 PM on May 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Very often, in premodern times, people didn't learn the conquerors' language. E.g.: the English didn't switch to French, the Mesopotamians didn't switch to Persian, Greek, or Latin; the Chinese didn't switch to Mongol or Jurchen/Manchu; the Greeks and Slavs didn't switch to Turkish; the Indians didn't switch to Persian or Turkish (the working languages of the Mughals)...

Peru was conquered five centuries ago, and these days there is mass education in Spanish, but Quechua is still spoken there, and indeed has the largest speaker base of any Native American language.

Which may lead you to wonder when languages do get replaced. E.g. Latin, Arabic, Chinese, and Quechua did spread into their empires. There are a number of factors, including the density of conquerors vs conquered, how much settlement is going on, and which culture the children of mixed marriages are considered to belong to.
posted by zompist at 2:03 PM on May 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

Back when this sort of thing was happening on the regular in Western Europe, it's also the case that many/most inhabitants of an area mostly spoke a local dialect that didn't change when the "ownership" of the area changed. In Italy, for example, Italian didn't become the most common language spoken in the home until some time in the 1980s--prior to that time it was dialect.

ETA: Grumble. I see mumimor beat me to the punch with a better explanation.
posted by slkinsey at 2:26 PM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Maybe a bit of a special case, but there is a significant amount of people in Quebec that don’t speak any English at all, centuries after England ‘took over’ (including my paternal grandparents). Of course, Canada did institute two official languages.
posted by mephisjo at 2:54 PM on May 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

the English didn't switch to French,

For the common people, this is true. Interestingly the ruling classes mainly spoke French for a very long time and it was the Hundred Years War (between England and France) that cemented the ascendancy of English.

Similarly, Welsh is still the first and main community language in many parts of Wales, although everyone is bilingual except very young children. Many English speaking areas in Wales (such as the valleys), are English speaking primarily because people moved there from England for work, rather than because the people stopped speaking Welsh.
posted by plonkee at 3:17 PM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: It can also depend on whether the government tries to "encourage" that change or not as well, and the means they might use to do so.

There's a poignant short story, The Last Lesson, about an earlier instance of French territory being subsumed into German control; it's from the perspective of a boy in the Alsace region of France, on the day before his school has to switch to a 100% German language curriculum. His French teacher is trying to make the most of his last chance to teach the kids French. You can tell from this story that Germany may try to enforce German-only, but there may still be some French spoken here and there.

For even stricter "speak this language or else" government moves, we have England trying to eradicate the use of Irish in Ireland. They first banned English settlers in Ireland from using Irish in 1367, and also made it illegal for the original Irish to speak in Irish with said English settlers. Then in the 1500's they outlawed the use of Irish in the Irish parliament, and then even stricter bans got placed on Irish use in the 1700s, with a fine each time someone spoke or wrote Irish in court. However, these were only bans on Irish use when it came to official government business - it wasn't like there were roving bands of police out arresting dudes who were just shooting the breeze in the pub in Irish. Still, between a whole lot of English people moving in and being in charge, and the English being all the teachers and such, it lead to an erosion of Irish fluency to the point that about only 2-5% of Irish people now have any fluency in Irish at all.

And for EVEN STRICTER "speak this language or else" government moves - we have the US and Canadian governments forcibly taking Native American and First Nations children and forcing them into boarding schools, in an effort to forcibly assimilate them into the dominant culture overall; through language, but also through other cultural signifiers. That did very swift damage.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:56 PM on May 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

New languages can be introduced very quickly but the old ones typically take a lot longer to die out. For example in Scotland the Scots language was minoritized and repressed (often violently) for the best part of 400 years, but to this day most Scots still know and use at least a handful of scots words even if many don't realise that Scots is even a language (and separate from gaelic).

Would they continue speaking the old language and maybe only use the new language in official settings?
Yes this code switching is very common.
posted by Lanark at 4:28 PM on May 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Palestine is a fascinating example of this, in the forced transition into Hebrew - which did not actually exist as a spoken language when the takeover started. The timescale is approximately 1900-present, although by the time I met Hebrew, in 1970, it was well-established and had pretty much the grammar and a good part of the vocabulary it does now. But the process is ongoing, although resistance is ongoing, as well.
posted by Shunra at 4:55 PM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Around three generations in Singapore to be nearly all English-speaking.
posted by moiraine at 5:36 AM on May 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's not even necessary to have invasion or military policies -- in some cases social pressure and perceived cultural value will suffice.

Brussels went from a predominantly monolingual Dutch-speaking city to a majority French-speaking city over two centuries, with the bulk of the change happening between the 1880s and the 1960s.

This was caused by the social prestige of French in Belgium and its use as the exclusive language of administration, government, media, culture and education. (The linguistic situation in Belgium today is quite different, to say the least.)
posted by andrewesque at 6:50 AM on May 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

The residential school system, where children are punished for speaking their own language works very well for stamping out a language. It is, of course, genocide. You can easily end up with grandparents who didn't speak the invader language at all until they were adults and grandchildren who don't speak the original language. Part of the way this works is because the residential school system breaks family bonds and leaves everyone so traumatized that if they succeed in reconnecting after children are released from school they end up reinforcing each others trauma.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:58 PM on May 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Brussels went from a predominantly monolingual Dutch-speaking city to a majority French-speaking city

That wikipedia page is a mess. Don't those guys have moderaters? (I know, I know). Anyway, Belgian history is complicated and I am not going to be a judge of which truth is truthiest, but I will say that the consolidation of nation states during the 19th century in general was not what we have been told it was.
Today, the official languages of Belgium are Flemish, French and German, and you have the right to speak any one of them in all official contexts including the entire education system (though I don't know how strong German is at the university level). Other European countries only have one official language, but many have more, and in those that are officially monolingual, more languages are spoken and have parallel school systems. And, as mentioned, everyone all over the EU certainly learns English, often French and sometimes more languages at school, including dead languages. It's fairly common to have some rudimentary Latin.

As slkinsey wrote above, well up in the 1980s, most Italians spoke dialects, not Florentine Italian, and some of those dialects were absolutely separate languages. I spent time in Sardinia during the -80s and -90s, and Sardinian is not in any way Italian, but luckily for me most people were bilingual. My Italian teacher was from rural Veneto, and while her dialect was within the general frame of Italian, my Italian was as if I had learnt English from Li'l Abner. Cute, though.

There were in general very few nation states in Europe where the people spoke one language (including dialects) and felt they were part of one culture before the end of the 19th century. When Kierkegaard wandered the streets of Copenhagen, 25% of the population were German speaking, and there were four large German churches. Another very large group spoke Norwegian, but I don't remember the numbers. Then there were, in order of appearance, people from Iceland, Swedish, people from the Faeroes, Yiddish speaking Jews, Dutch immigrants and French Huguenot refugees. Royalty spoke French or German, depending on the fashion of the day. Everyone could understand all the different languages and dialects to a degree, but at least at a trading level. People with origins on the west coast spoke a North Sea dialect that was common across England, Scotland, Norway and Denmark. In my family history Sephardi Jews were seen as more sophisticated than Askenazis, so being fluent in Portuguese or even Turkish was cool, at the end of the 19th century. My great- great- grandparents went to Afghanistan for their honeymoon overland, and were able to communicate most of the way.

What I am saying is that the whole combo of language and nationality and identity and state is a mid- 19th century thing (it was invented earlier, but really took off with the many revolutions of 1848 and -49 and consolidated during the 1870s to WW1). It's not a god-given law.

Even today, with EU and all that, these facts are controversial. My eldest went to German school, and when I asked the history teacher to include documentation of this in the material, he told me he couldn't. Not because he disagreed about the facts, but because the school board might get angry.

To draw a circle: I have not lived in Belgium, but someone or other from my family has lived there most of my life from I was 15 til relatively recently, and I am well aware of the conflicts there. There was a terror attack at "our" local supermarket once, by Flemish nationalists in a Flemish-speaking area. Why? Well, I suppose they felt the town/suburb was being taken over by "multiculturalists". Which it wasn't.
I propose that Belgium is a country that is not well suited as a monolingual ethno-state, in part because few European countries are, and in part because of its geography, which amplifies that. And in part because it is the seat of several major international institutions.

Oops. I guess I got a bit heated up. I hate nationalism.
posted by mumimor at 11:45 PM on May 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

Best answer: Thank you EmpressCallipygos for linking to that story about the last lesson in French. It mirrors what one of my relatives has said about the experience of growing up in Alsace just after WWII. My relative spoke of fearing that she could get her family into trouble by speaking French or the Alsatian dialect out in the community.

As for your question, iamsuper, I think others have already answered the question, but I wanted to reiterate that, at least from what I know about my family history, that French, German, and Alsacien/Elsässisch were/are all deeply embedded and entwined historically (not just in dialect, but in family names and place names), and so the shift probably felt less dramatic than in places where military or colonial takeovers were more violent and abrupt.

Interestingly, the relative mentioned above was just one generation after my grandmother, who left Alsace in the early 1900s to immigrate to the US. My grandmother had grown up bilingual, but with German as her preferred language. For her parents, Alsace was French for their their childhood, then German in adulthood. For her parents' parents, half their adult lives were German before French.

I am very curious about the effect on various generations, and how they related to their mother tongue. While my grandmother and her siblings favored German, my great-Grandmother preferred French. Whether this was due to family ties and micro-cultures in Alsace, I have no idea. I would love to know more about this.
posted by amusebuche at 6:35 PM on May 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

A friend of mine at work is from India. He said that in his town everyone spoke the local language (not Hindi), and they learned English as a second language in school. He goes back every year on vacation. He said that now they teach school in English and that they teach the local language as a separate class. So, of course, none of the kids are really learning to speak it. He's in his 40s, so that's probably like a 20 year transition.

(He said that he once heard a blonde Caucasian woman in San Francisco speaking the local language of his home town and he almost cried--it turned out that she had lived there for a while and was speaking to friends who were from there).
posted by eye of newt at 12:36 AM on May 15, 2023 [2 favorites]