As you know, I decided to join a party and become politically active in the real world. And while two weeks ago on the election Sunday we were watching the live stream with everyone from the party, there was a question coming up: "Who the fuck are the SSW?" Because this party got ONE seat in the parliament. Which is not a lot, but more than the FDP and BSW got. lol
Now, I knew this, because I spent a lot of time in my early childhood in Northern Germany, where the party is from. The SSW is the "Süd Schleßwiger Wählervereinigung". Which is a party from Northern Germany who is fairly left wing and stands in for the rights of linguistic minorities in Northern Germany.
You know how a lot of indigenous languages were almost eliminated by being forbidden and people forgetting them eventually? How we just barely managed to save some languages of the polynesian language families? Or how one indigenous language was literally saved through a dream quest?
Yeah, here is the thing: The world was a lot more linguistically diverse until fairly recently. Because not all what is France today spoke French for the longest time. Not every area where today folks speak German, spoke German 300 years ago. There were a whole lot more languages in the different countries.
Now, obviously, a lot of those languages are related to one another. Basically what happened was: Due to travelling being a whole bigger pain in the ass before trains and cars and stuff, so people more rarely travelled further. And because people were more isolated from one another, more people developed their own dialects, that over time developed into their unique languages.
In Northern Germany there are several languages that were kept alive over the years. Most notably Friesisch, especially as the Frisians do identify as their unique culture apart from the rest of Germany. Still, there is a lot of fighting for the language to be still taught in the local schools and such. Same goes for other languages and dialects that are being spoken in that area.
And the same is true for most European countries. Usually within the borders of each European country there are at least three or four unique languages, that are being spoken by some minority within the country, but have to fight to survive.
A lot of countries love to push for everyone to speak the same language within the "nation". But through this they often eradicate old languages, even though this is also a type of diversity that is quite valuable.
