I’ve been thinking a lot about this article in which a native Irish speaker describes the difficulties negotiating interactions with strangers, working out what language to greet them in, how to handle mixed-language situations:
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I’ve been thinking a lot about this article in which a native Irish speaker describes the difficulties negotiating interactions with strangers, working out what language to greet them in, how to handle mixed-language situations:
0 reposts3 likes
We have nice game-theoretic models of this. You can change the information structures, e.g. introduce badges indicating willingness to speak minority languages, or payoff structures, e.g. increase the cost of switching, but it’s hard to negotiate and the dominant language almost always wins out
It's exclusionary of bilingual speakers of a minority language not to default to the dominant language in the presence of monoglot speakers. It is *far worse* of speakers of the dominant language to expect them to do so. This is seldom appreciated and the entitlement involved needs to be stigmatised