I’ve been looking here on Mises.org and on Lewrockwell.com (a very poor search, heh) for articles mentioning the establishment of a national/official language. Unfortunately I didn’t find anything.
Basically, what I am looking for is the Libertarian view on creating a national/official language. Can anyone help?
Language is a very organic thing. It can spread, mutate and die. I find stupid to impose a language, the bare need to comunicate to be able to trade and such already forces the most “effective” language to spread.
I also think its a waste of time to try to preserve a language, if people dont care anymore about it, let it die, not much different from the whole GM thing.
Can anyone else help?
Well, I’m not sure what you’re getting at - you say
But, languages are by no means created - you’ll see that languages are a prime example of so called spontaneous order. Also, for anarchist libertarians the idea of an ‘official’ language is nonsense by definition - there can be no official anything in a stateless society. Here’s some notes by Mises tho :
/ duplicated post
Also, see Yeager’s paper “Are Languages Like Markets”
Sorry for the confusion, I should’ve been clearer.
Basically, my class had a little debate on whether English (or another language) should be made official, meaning removing other languages from instruction manuals, legal documents, getting rid of interpreters, and just having all of society revolve around one language, and anyone else should have to learn that language if they don’t know it already. As you can probably tell, a lot of the debate focused on immigrants coming into the country, then just not learning the language because everyone caters to them through interpreters, bi-lingual documents, etc.
Well, if the market caters to immigrants, tough luck for all the racist, narrow minded nationalists and other enlightened people. As to objecting to the government catering to immigrants I don’t think there’s any sound argument against it. I mean, everything the gov’t does is wrong. Discussing the value/legitimacy/efficiency/whatever of that particular action seems rather moot to me.