(I mean, at least in the Metropolitan area) Earlier I waited in line at a shop in Helsinki and behind me was a large group of schoolkids, all various people of colour and all speaking American English with each other. It’s a fairly common occurrence in Eastern Helsinki and makes you feel like you’re in the US or Canada
It’s interesting how quick things have developed just since I was a kid
I think it’s cool but it seems to cause Finnish boomers enormous existential anxiety of the Great Replacement variety
Is it really such a bad thing for so many working-class peoples’ second language to be a common one? Surely it’s a good thing for the working class of many countries to be able to speak directly with each other, rather than through intermediary translators working for media outlets who themselves work just for capitalism. And despite its country of origin, English is a highly adaptable language that lends itself well to a lingua-franca purpose.
Now I’m from a part of the world (
) where repression of indigenous languages was public policy for centuries, with an explicit end-goal of destroying indigenous culture. I’m very aware of that history. I’m speaking strictly about second languages here, I’m not at all advocating for forcing English as a common first language.
It wouldn’t be as big an issue if English wasn’t also a large source of foreign right-wing propaganda
imagine with me, if you will, a hundred a thousand a million small-to-middle-sized anti-Murdochs
be the source of foreign left-wing propaganda you want to see in the world
The US has been successful with propaganda without the usage of English for decades.
I’m not saying it’s bad- just something I’ve noticed