Congeries of cross connected concepts
Dean Esmay has a post about India and its success. It is likely that India is doing better than the article claims, because frankly I don’t trust any economic data out of the country ahead of India in growth, China. Esmay uses this to argue against some specific claims about how nations develop. This post is about this claim (with which Esmay disagrees):
Countries can only hold together if they share a unified language and ethnic culture.
I would agree that this statement is too strong. But I think that a country can’t be successfu if it doesn’t have a standard language. In India, English serves as the standard language. It is not important for this standard to be a first language for any one. The key point is that if two random people meet and need to interact, there is a language they can use to do so. For instance, when multi-national conferences are held in Africa, English is used. That’s the difference between a standard language and a unified language.
I supported the English requirement effort, although that seems to have disappeared. My version was a bit less strong. It would have only applied to government and their agencies and would have done two things:
The goal would be to say, “if you know English, you can communicate with any government agency in the country, but if you don’t learn English no one is required to accomodate you”. Any agency could, if it chose, provide services in any additional set of languages. There is no good reason to prevent that, although lots of good reason to take that decision out of the hands of the courts and leave it in the hands of elected officials. Moreover, there would be no requirements of any sort on private entities. If some citizen wanted to run a Sanskrit only business and require all his employess to speak it, that would be perfectly legal. Or if a local city wanted to print its regulations in English and Spanish, that would be no problem. But that should be a decision of the voters, not a single judge.
