Language Tempest At Orkut

Quirk writes "Reuters is carrying an article outlining an ongoing headbutting session between English-speaking users of Goggle's orkut and the Portuguese-speaking users of Brazil. The orkut site has more than 769,000 members; 41.2% are Brazilians and 23.5% are Americans. The sites are now mostly in Portuguese, and English-speaking users are complaining that the service is intended to be in English. Orkut is a service meant to develop by way of invitation, and the Brazilians claim since they are inviting their Brazilian friends it doesn't make sense to communicate in English. Brazilian internet users averaged an estimated 13 hours and 51 minutes in May, eight minutes more than for Americans."

Comments

Re:Repeat after me

[Distinguished Hero]

I find it a bit funny that you prefaced that statement "Multi-culturalism is ok" with "Repeat after me." It seems that a lot of people have convinced themselves of the validty of this statement without giving it much thought. Repeat after me: "We are all individuals."

Do you believe standards are bad? Do you think a million different "standards" should exist merely for the sake of diversity? For humanity to be productive, we have to standardize on a language we all understand, be it English, Portugese, or Esperanto. Besides, the idea that language is tied to culture is nothing more than moronic. Yes, fractured languages "preserve" cultures in the sense that they prevent people of different cultures from sharing aspects of their cultures and integrating aspects of other cultures more easily into their own. In other words, fractured languages create artificial barriers among people preventing the natural mixing of cultures that would normally occur. Personally, English is my third language, and I am more than happy to speak and write it (I also had to learn French as my fourth in order to appease those bloody Quebecers).

Now that that is out of the way, we come the the subject of culture itself. Multiculturalism shouldn't be about artificially creating a thousand small cultures; it should be about merging the best elements of cultures.

Finally, I'd like to address the often mentioned concept that "all cultures are equal." The moment you accept that "Nazis are evil" you accept that all cultures are in fact not equal. I'm certainly not saying that American culture is the ueber-Culture which should assimilate all others (I'm not even an American), not am I implying that American culture is the best culture by any means. I merely wish that we would put all this politically correct garbage behind us and examine the situation instead of ignoring everything around us and repeating to ourselves that "Multi-culturalism is ok."