Young people, as far as I can observe (including the Vietnamese in my country), do not use language “freely” as just a “tool for communication”. They also use it as a “representation of another-than-national pride”, to paraphrase your words. By the way they speak, including their adoption of expressions from English, they signal and create cultural and social affiliations, and young people who are in search for their personal identity are very keen precisely on such symbolic language use. Giving an impression of being “free” in expression, they subject themselves to globalized English-language culture (and apparently Korean, too). This is how you can also interpret the situation that you have described using the other words, I believe.

Thanks, Jeff! You are raising important questions! There is no doubt in my mind that linguistic nationalism can sometimes be counter-hegemonic … just goes to prove the point that almost any generalization about language is meaningless; what we mean by “this is a language and these are its properties” is different not only across history but also across different local contexts.

Thanks, Frances! Great to see another language aficionado – I also like to learn languages because I find them endlessly fascinating 🙂

Thanks Professor Ingrid for sharing this remarkable podcast.
I agreed with Ian, the globalisation has had many effects on language positive and negative. However with the globalisation has allowed languages and cultures to spread more in the last couple years. At the same time it has taken other languages and cultures to the extinction. In other words, no everything has been black or white. Thus, the opportunity to be multilingual, learn more than two languages is not just a myth.

Thank you for sharing this podcast. This is a conversation worth thinking about. I have investigated the language phenomenon in China and found that multilingualism is also on the decrease. In the past thirty years, Chinese (Mandarin) in China has risen rapidly and has been used as the main means of communication in employment, education, service, entertainment, and daily conversation. With the implementation of the “Putonghua Promotion Movement” in the 1950s, the status and learning of Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian, and Zhuang languages have been threatened. An indirect impact is that the vocabulary of some local languages and minority languages gradually gave way to the corresponding vocabulary in the current Chinese. For example, the pronunciation is getting closer and closer to the Chinese, and a large number of new words are borrowed from the Chinese. In some minority areas, the development of various bilingual education programs may accelerate the rate of language transfer and loss. Some larger ethnic minorities have resisted the language challenges brought about by the spread of Chinese, while some ethnic minorities have caught the opportunity to protect their heritage.

References:
https://theasiadialogue.com/2015/06/12/multilingualism-discourse-and-identity-in-china/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288473225_Multilingualism_in_Greater_China_and_the_Chinese_Language_Diaspora

I am fascinated by Aneta’s earlier post on how countries were so acceptable and tolerant to multilingualism and I was surprised to see how people managed to communicate within those languages. From my point of view, even though we are living in such a globalized society, I cannot say multilingualism is better than before or past. I have seen or heard that people came from different countries (immigrants) from minority languages backgrounds have been discriminated against when they use their own languages in public or being told to use their language instead which is truly sad that acceptance of multilingualism is becoming narrow these days.