listen to the latest jeromecast about a coal mine island, and why people lived there.

a few years ago, i heard a story about a chinese musician who was touring in europe. i don’t remember the story perfectly, but i believe it was a woman, and she was being interviewed on a german talk show on television. it went something like this:

tv host: i’m asking you some controversial question about china.

artist: ok.

tv host: please consider this question very carefully. this is a very important show. we have approximately 10 million viewers.

artist: hmm. if you had 10 million viewers in china, you’d probably be canceled.

i don’t know if this story went exactly like this, or if the story is even true. if anyone has a link or confirmation of that story, please let me know in the comments. but that same story came back to mind last week, as i was discussing the status of cantonese in china (recently protested) relative to the future of the finnish language.

me: finnish will probably die in about 50-100 years. (nb: i didn’t mean that it would completely die, but that it would go from being a strong national language to being kind of secondary language and that finns would generally speak english more)

him: that would be shocking. it’s a language rich with history and culture.

me: isn’t cantonese also?

him: well, maybe, but it’s just a dialect.

me: how many speakers does cantonese have? around 100 million, right?

him: maybe. maybe less. (nb. turns out it’s less, closer to 25-50 million by various estimates)

me: finnish has 5 million speakers.

him: oh.

that was his reaction, based on our conversational evidence of 100 million speakers. so why do i think finnish will have such a struggle? well, first of all, finland has already had a wave of nokia immigration recently. that’s made life in helsinki in english completely possible. couple that with europe’s upcoming demographic problems, and english will just continue to gain strength as the lingua franca. i hope i’m wrong, but it puts a light on critical population masses and the perspective you might have on it, coming from different backgrounds.