Looking at the percentages on the Transhuman table to roll on for languages, I can't help but see that Eurocentrism was alive and well in hypercapitalist/criminal selection processes. People who spoke Polish, Dutch, Swedish and Italian get 1% each, but Malay, Telugu, Marathi, Thai, Gujarati, Jin and Min Nan speakers, all of whom individually outnumber each of those listed 1%ers today in global speakers (except Italian on some surveys, which still places under Malay even on those), get lumped in with the roughly 20,000,000 members of transhumanity for whom "Other" is their native tongue (not to mention a few languages such as Bhojpuri that are counted as Hindi by some language polls and Lahnda that are listed under Punjabi by some language polls, which also exceed 2/4 of those 1%ers, but we can probably assume they're counted under Hindi and Punjabi respectively).
On the European front though, I'm still surprised Dutch and Swedish got in ahead of the more commonly spoken European languages of Romanian and Ukrainian, who I found myself double-taking to look for on the chart when I saw Swedish on there (and Swedish gets beat out by many more European languages, I found out when I checked it out, including Bavarian, Bulgarian, Czech, Serbo-Croation, Hungarian, Greek, etc) so maybe the Western Europe bias against Eastern Europe maintained itself [i]as well[/i] in these selection decisions. This all not to mention the variety of languages from Africa that beat out Swedish, from Yoruba to Berber to Amharic to Chewa and many more (and even Quecha Maya in South America has more speakers globally than Swedish)! I think Sunward does go into a little blurb about how Africa was largely passed over, but it's nowhere more apparent than looking at Swedish getting a place outside that 2% of "Other"...it's haunting!
Of course, there's always just the changes that happened in the century or more between now and then! Still, it makes me feel like figuring out an Argonaut hab dedicated to language preservation or an anarchist reclaimer cell dedicated to sending missions down to Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and wherever else they know from demographics there must've been more survivors passed over in favour of some rich Swedes.
R.I.P. to the casualties of hypercapitalist and organized crime, including the Thai people who remained unconquered by colonialism. *sheds synthetic saline tear analogues that rusts these clanky eye sockets*
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Languages/The Fall
Fri, 2014-02-14 18:30
#1
consumerdestroyer
Languages/The Fall
Sat, 2014-02-15 04:08
#2
GreyBrother
's far as i know, it's pretty
's far as i know, it's pretty good explained in the languages sidebar in the corebook on why it is this way.
Sat, 2014-02-15 09:23
#3
Kojak
Perhaps I'm being overly
Perhaps I'm being overly charitable in my interpretation, but I assumed that had more to do with which nations had the resources to get more of their population out during the Fall.
—
"I wonder if in some weird Freudian way, Kojak was sucking on his own head."
- Steve Webster on Kojak's lollipop
Sat, 2014-02-15 12:39
#4
consumerdestroyer
Well, there's also the
Well, there's also the indentures from poor nations who managed to escape, for one, but the wealth of the nation doesn't explain quite why if India and Pakistan managed to get a ton of Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, etc. speakers out they didn't manage to get a lot of Telugu, Marathi, Sindh or Gujarati speakers out (or Pakistani Pashtun speakers, for that matter), nor why China didn't manage Jin and Min Nan in the numbers Europe managed the Swedes (or why Europe managed so many Swedes over the other EU members with more speakers, like the Greeks or the Romanian or the Hungarians or the Ukrainians and the list goes on and on).
And remember that global language speaking figures [i]include[/i] people in Europe, North America and other diasporas, so when you talk about Malay or Thai especially, you're talking about populations of speakers that outnumber speakers of Swedish in the diaspora [i]alone[/i].
Sat, 2014-02-15 20:24
#5
Kojak
We don't know what social
We don't know what social changes those nations underwent in the years between the present and the Fall, but undoubtedly the slow ecocide of the planet caused a great deal of social upheaval. Perhaps such upheavals account for these things.
—
"I wonder if in some weird Freudian way, Kojak was sucking on his own head."
- Steve Webster on Kojak's lollipop
Sun, 2014-02-16 08:24
#6
Salrantol
As far as Swedish goes, I
As far as Swedish goes, I think the fact that they are a significant part of a major post-Fall faction (Titan) contributes meaningfully to their inclusion on the list.
Sun, 2014-02-16 12:11
#7
Smokeskin
In the countries where they
In the countries where they speak multiple languages, it is my understanding that the trend goes towards the small ones losing influence as the society advances. Ie. young gogetter moves to from village to big city to study, speaks official language at college then at work. Has kids, decides to raise them mainly with the official language but still teaches them the village language. His kids doesn't pass it on to their kids.
The small languages are probably still spoken in certain places at the time of the Fall, but those people aren't the ones with the clout to get off Earth in significant numbers.
I'm not really sure what is being critized here? That the mechanisms of power are unfair in the way they don't get a proportionate number of people from each language group off Earth? That the EP authors made a mistake by overlooking certain languages?
Sun, 2014-02-16 14:42
#8
consumerdestroyer
You misunderstand, smokeskin!
You misunderstand, smokeskin! It's not a criticism!
It's noting that some languages (and some entire populations), despite being globally spoken in greater numbers (and existing in greater numbers demographically), didn't managed to get preserved in proportionate numbers, indicating that (for example) more Swedish speaking and Polish speaking transhumans were saved than transhumans from the provinces of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat, despite the Swedish diaspora and Sweden combined with the Polish diaspora and Poland not exceeding any one of those provinces in population (again, just as [i]one[/i] example). They leave [i]why[/i] open to the GM, so it can reinforce whatever the GM finds most grim about the game and provide unique adventure hooks. Perhaps those provinces were utterly wiped out and dominated the by the TITANs, or glassed out of necessity by their own government because of widespread TITAN activity (or both)! Maybe it was hypercapitalist inequalities. Maybe it was criminal organizations bumping people, perhaps even criminal hackers that the PCs can find out about who literally hacked global or national egocasting priorities on behalf of their orgs or as individual hackers...for a price. Maybe by the 22nd century, those languages suffered cultural erasure [i]completely independent[/i] of the TITANs or The Fall. Maybe a combination of any of those, or something else I haven't considered here. I'm basically saying, "Awesome! Character motivations, immersive flavor, game secrets, grim realities, tragic turns, hopes crushed, and all the other themes and messages of the game in microcosm [i]just in their treatment of languages[/i]!"
Sun, 2014-02-16 14:49
#9
consumerdestroyer
btw: they aren't "small
btw: they aren't "small languages", or at least if they [i]are[/i], my point still stands that (for example) Dutch, Polish and Swedish are [i]smaller[/i] than (for example) Malay, Telugu, Marathi, Thai, Gujarati, Jin and Min Nan.
Sun, 2014-02-16 17:00
#10
Smokeskin
consumerdestroyer wrote:btw:
I meant small relative to the country in which they were spoken. The people who are well off are likely to speak the official language, and it is mainly those that got off planet. Those big languages you mention, many of them are only spoken in very poor regions, and those people got eaten by the TITANs.
Sun, 2014-02-16 17:04
#11
Smokeskin
Wow, come to think of it, the
Wow, come to think of it, the Fall was like a fanatical social darwinist's eugenics programme. Everyone who wasn't really smart or really connected or really rich just had so little chance of making it.
Sun, 2014-02-16 19:03
#12
consumerdestroyer
or really exploitable as an
or really exploitable as an indentured workforce.
Mon, 2014-02-17 01:51
#13
Smokeskin
Not or, it is and exploitable
Not or, it is and exploitable.
"You need an indenture for menial accounting? Let's see, I have a bank branch manager and a senior accounting partner on sale this week."
Mon, 2014-02-17 11:48
#14
consumerdestroyer
Smokeskin wrote:Not or, it is
It's not exclusionary, it's and/or. I said or just because your "and" was already included under the privileged getting to leave. The core book makes clear in more places than the language sidebar that the pre-Fall population in space included both (my italics/bolding) "those that were carried into space by countries and hypercorps with aggressive space programs [i]or by the large populations of poor laborers [b]and informorph refugees that followed[/b][/i]" implying that either languages and populations arrived in space because of privilege that existed well Before the Fall as well as during the Fall, [b]or[/b] you were part of the poor masses that arrived in space because of their desperation BF [i]as well as during the Fall[/i].
Mon, 2014-02-17 12:11
#15
Smokeskin
Yeah, you're right, the
Yeah, you're right, the backstory isn't that selective on who got off planet. It's been a while since I read it.
Still, the upper class got way more tickets off than the middle and lower classes, didn't they? Does it say how many got off in total, including into cold storage?
Mon, 2014-02-17 12:48
#16
consumerdestroyer
Nah, like I said, they left
Nah, like I said, they left it vague enough that each GM might have a slightly different answer to that. I think it probably depends on unique situations. Like, for example, certain governments probably tried to enact systems that disregarded the personal wealth, like first-come-first-serve or demographic selection algorithms or whatever you want to dream up (whether because of legit policy or suddenly heroic/suddenly guilt-ridden gov't officials/gov't work-a-days doing the data entry/what have you), and I'm sure even more governments were far more callous than that. A lot of tough choices got made, and I imagine them being made in very different ways, and even where those ways were similar, I imagine in some instance those identical decisions were made for very different reasons. It's a stressful time, the end of the world is.
Tue, 2014-02-18 18:39
#17
uwtartarus
consumerdestroyer wrote:Well,
The NAC colonized Titan, so they got more numbers out. The other Indian languages should probably be included, and Cantonese and Mandarin are the big Chinese languages.
I heard that every month, another unique language dies off. So maybe in the 21XX year of the game, a lot of the smaller language groups disappeared?
—
Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
Tue, 2014-02-18 18:47
#18
consumerdestroyer
Well, I don't plan to include
Well, I don't plan to include Telugu, Marathi or Gujarati in space, but I [b]do[/b] plan to include reasons why that's the case when and if my party gets around to doing reclaimer/other return-to-Earth missions. I'm working on what happened in the three Indian states where those languages are heavily used, and I plan to have each one with a different emphasis amongst the intersection of reasons why (and given that they all border each other, obviously I'll have each one's primary emphasis effect each of the others).
As I said to Smokeskin, I don't think they "should" have been included, it's not a criticism of the game design. It's awesome that I have some additional inspiration to present themes and motifs to my players!
Fri, 2014-02-21 08:16
#19
SnowDog
I don't have my books with me
I don't have my books with me ATM but is it possible that Swedish includes modern day Norwegian, Icelandic and perhaps even Danish languages? Curiously I noticed this, too being a Finn and found at that Finnish was not listed either (granted, there are not too many Finnish speakers even today).
Perhaps Anders Sandberg has something to do with inclusion of Swedish? :)