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Alternate America



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Fri Apr 08, 2016 8:04 pm
Werthan says...



I've had this idea for a while for a story about an alternate America. The biggest ethnic group in America is people of German descent but you don't have much German spoken in America. In my alternate America, German-Americans rule and German is the primary language. The Irish are the second biggest group, but I'm not sure whether they would have spoken English or Irish, and whatever their language is is the second biggest language. English is up there, as are some of the major Native American languages (probably Navajo is the biggest one) because really the whole point of this story is to depict a super diverse society and I'm having the Native Americans have thriving cultures and languages. I'm going to have to develop a bit of languages for the story like "American German" that I'm not really sure what they'll be like and I'm going to have to do a lot of research in general. The whole point of this story is an exploration of culture and identity. What kind of research am I going to have to do?
Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses: Stirb und Werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde

(And as long as you don't have
This: Die and become!
You are only a gloomy guest
On the dark Earth)

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Fri Apr 08, 2016 9:19 pm
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Rosendorn says...



On Native American linguistics and respecting Native Americans/modifying colonialism.

You're going to have to do one ton more research if you think Navajo is going to be the biggest overreaching Native American language in this drastically altered society.

Navajo is one of the only thriving Native languages in modern day because it had a purpose in WWII. Navajo Wind Talkers were incredibly valued for their "uncrackable" code that was really just naming things using preexisting words (I believe "grenade" was "egg", but I could be wrong— it's along those principles) and spelling them out in Navajo. Because it's not related to Indo-European at all, the code was a nightmare to deal with and saved many lives. As a result, linguistics had a huge incentive to preserve and expand the language, which most other languages just haven't gotten. In fact, they got the opposite (people trying to eradicate them), so Native American language diversity in modern North America is artificially poor.

This post gives some idea of the sheer variety in Native American linguistics that exist in North America. Iroquoian languages have 13, and that's not counting dialects. The Cree language in Quebec is at least two major dialects, and that's from my very loose research while I was in university. There are almost certainly more.

You can start with the wikipedia article about Native languages in the Americas, but know it is extremely simplified and in each region there is going to be lots more than what's said there. Also do note that article is mostly discussing language families, which are made up of multiple individual languages. In this image, the pink region on the Eastern side of the continent is the Iroquois language family, which, as mentioned previously, has 13 individual languages.

I would also take a look at this post, this post, and this post about the nuances in making it Native Americans are respected when you start modifying North America's colonialist history.

While none of those posts are exactly what you're looking for, they give you an idea of what, exactly, you're tackling.

As for other questions to ask yourself when approaching research for this project:

- When are you changing history to make your reality happen? Did you make it that Germans were the world superpower instead of the British, therefore everywhere Britain colonized is now German majority? Or did Germany dominate some time later? (Be very careful with this because Britain did some absolutely atrocious crimes when they took over most of the world, and Germany already has a very bad rap)

- How did colonization even work if you're showing a mostly preserved cultural tapestry? Did colonization exist? If yes, how did diversity get preserved? If no, how and why did they travel outwards?

- Have you changed England's relationship with Ireland? If so, how?

In general, you're going to be researching colonialism. Lots of colonialism. You'll have to understand why it happened, what it did, and how it influenced the development of society and diversity. You're going to have to understand power structures. You're going to have to know anthropology and sociology to a fairly sophisticated degree in order to both make plausible changes to history and to be respectful towards the groups you're presenting.

It's going to be a lot of research, and absolutely none of it should be taken lightly. Colonialism is a very painful history for hundreds of thousands of groups around the world, and those people deserve respect.
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Fri Apr 15, 2016 9:45 pm
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Kale says...



You will also need to do rather extensive research on the pre-colonial period of the United States. For one thing, Germany was never a colonial power in the continental regions of North America. The Dutch and Scandinavians, however, very much were, until the British drove them and the French out.

From what I recall, a lot of German immigrants were the result of hired soldiers going "oh hey these colonies are a pretty nice place. I think I'm going to live here" once the various wars of the time were over.

The history of Pennsylvania will be of particular interest to you since Pennsylvania historically has a huge population of German immigrants, with a fair number of people being bilingual even today, especially in the southern region of the state. At the very least, there's a fair amount of linguistic information out there since Pennsylvania is a linguistically unique region with a long history of diverse ethnic groups living in pretty close proximity without recourse to hostilities (despite historical rivalries and animosities).

Researching the Middle Colonies in general (of which Pennsylvania is one) will also be useful since they were all characterized by unusual (for the time) levels of tolerance. Considering you want diversity in your setting, fostering tolerance in the early days of the country will be really important.

Of course, you'll also need to research the politics of the time over in Europe, especially for Germany, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries (Sweden in particular), France, and Britain, as the latter four were the major colonial powers in North America.
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Fri Apr 15, 2016 11:49 pm
Snoink says...



My Irish ancestors came to America out west to mine for precious minerals. They spoke English.

When my great-grandmother (who has French-Canadian roots) was living in the early 1900s (she was born 1912, I think) she was living in Kansas in a community that spoke only French and there were places throughout the United States that were sort of like this in real life. So, there would be places where the languages were German, French, Spanish, and so on.

Speaking of Spanish... it seems weird to me, especially as someone who has grown up in California, that you would not have Spanish on that list at all. The California constitution was bilingual in Spanish and English and there's definitely a thriving Hispanic culture there!
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Fri Apr 15, 2016 11:58 pm
Vervain says...



On Spanish, mostly—I live in a bilingual, sometimes trilingual, area. English is the main "official" language, of course, because I live in the US, but Spanish and Haitian Creole are spoken just as often if not more often in private and professional settings. As you get closer to the city, Creole and Spanish dominate English by a fairly large margin. (It's kind of exciting, because I'm semifluent in Spanish so I can listen in on conversations and it's fun when I understand things coherently.)

On my college campus alone, there are five languages or more spoken on a daily basis due to the large proportion of international citizens in my area. So it's not really unheard of for there to be large pockets of languages that aren't English, especially in the Southeast and Southwest, when it comes to Hispanic peoples.

Spanish and native Mexican languages aren't exactly "new arrivals" in the continental US, either, as Spain colonized Florida and the Southwest was effectively Mexican for much longer than it's belonged to the US.
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