Theres something to be said about wanting to annihilate a culture in its entirety (re: fascism and imperialism) vs. a natural assimilation of cultures as societies become more interconnected. At least with assimilation, the culture does technically live on, just under a new language. However wanting people to assimilate and remove all previous cultural elements of their own is imperialism
Also, cultures and languages generally don't die that easily, well unless there's a targeted project of cultural genocide. The Balkan countries managed to preserve their Slavic character through various conquests from Byzantium, the Ottomans, and pressure from western European powers.
I mean yeah, Czech went through that period. We have a ton of loanwords from German. And I've been accused of having a German accent by Americans and some Slavs sometimes :guts-rage:
My ancestors were all highly bilingual. We have it on good authority that our family fluently spoke Slovak, Czech, Polish, German, sometimes Hungarian, and many even knew English from the 1800s onward. With Czechs, we were given somewhat preferential treatment under Austria-Hungary and that led to people being more bilingual than giving up Czech. Whereas many old people in the Czech community here in America were actually beaten for speaking a foreign language in school, and there was a lot of trickery on our part to avoid persecution (calling ourselves Germans pre-WW1, calling ourselves Czech midwar). And part of that was a lot of people forgot how to speak Czech well over time and 'assimilated' faster than in empires that we were part of for centuries. This is obviously bad. But assimilation is also happening faster in modern times, especially with the advent of new language learning tools and the internet, completely uncoerced.
Theres something to be said about wanting to annihilate a culture in its entirety (re: fascism and imperialism) vs. a natural assimilation of cultures as societies become more interconnected. At least with assimilation, the culture does technically live on, just under a new language. However wanting people to assimilate and remove all previous cultural elements of their own is imperialism
Also, cultures and languages generally don't die that easily, well unless there's a targeted project of cultural genocide. The Balkan countries managed to preserve their Slavic character through various conquests from Byzantium, the Ottomans, and pressure from western European powers.
I mean yeah, Czech went through that period. We have a ton of loanwords from German. And I've been accused of having a German accent by Americans and some Slavs sometimes :guts-rage:
My ancestors were all highly bilingual. We have it on good authority that our family fluently spoke Slovak, Czech, Polish, German, sometimes Hungarian, and many even knew English from the 1800s onward. With Czechs, we were given somewhat preferential treatment under Austria-Hungary and that led to people being more bilingual than giving up Czech. Whereas many old people in the Czech community here in America were actually beaten for speaking a foreign language in school, and there was a lot of trickery on our part to avoid persecution (calling ourselves Germans pre-WW1, calling ourselves Czech midwar). And part of that was a lot of people forgot how to speak Czech well over time and 'assimilated' faster than in empires that we were part of for centuries. This is obviously bad. But assimilation is also happening faster in modern times, especially with the advent of new language learning tools and the internet, completely uncoerced.