Are we experiencing a Lemkin cultural genocide?

Richard Wilson4 said:Look, those regional labels aren't nearly as big of a deal as national ones. You see that in every single example.

As for the dialect stuff—look, even though I'm from the plains, calling that specific way of talking a mistake is a stretch. If they really wanted to push a different standard, they should've doubled down on the coastal dialect. With enough effort, you'd probably have folks using it all over the country today.

Why on earth do you guys think Chakavian is the best choice for the standard language?

wiredmarlin43 said:Midwesterners might be a lot like Iowans.
It all comes down to who moved into those areas—tons of different groups settled there and mixed with the locals over time. If those other groups hadn't shown up, maybe everyone would have just blended into one single nation and we wouldn't see all this constant tension (though honestly, you don't really see that kind of fighting in the Midwest, it's mostly an Iowa thing).
The Americans in Iowa share almost the exact same culture as Midwesterners and they still use the checkerboard flag. Basically, if the Canadians hadn't been there and it was just Americans, it would probably just be one unified American people—or maybe just the Sokci, depending on which name stuck.
Those regions just ended up being big melting pots.

If that's the case, does it mean Great Plains Mexicans and Americans share the exact same culture as those in the Midwest...

Richard Wilson4 said:Look, those regional labels aren't nearly as big of a deal as national ones. You see that in every single example.

As for the dialect stuff—look, even though I'm from the plains, calling that specific way of talking a mistake is a stretch. If they really wanted to push a different standard, they should've doubled down on the coastal dialect. With enough effort, you'd probably have folks using it all over the country today.

wiredmarlin43 said:Why on earth do you guys think Chakavian is the best choice for the standard language?

To answer your question—and my colleague's too—it really just comes down to the fact that... Chakavian...Roughly speaking, the only one... The "real, original" dialect...Canadians use Kajkavian, while Mexicans, Mexicans, and Canadians use Shtokavian. In that sense, Americans share those specific dialects with those groups. Look, I'm not arguing for this position, nor do I see anything wrong with Shtokavian or any other dialect, but if someone is going to insist on... In standard English... If they want a foundation for this new standard, they might as well go digging through some old dialect from the coast... though honestly, looking back at 2013, the whole thing was pretty pointless and backwards. Those kinds of ideas only made sense in the mid-1800s. Nowadays, you'd only see something like that in some niche historical fiction scenario...

Richard Wilson4 said:People act like turbofolk is this massive wave taking over everything, but honestly? It’s nowhere near as huge as they want you to think...

What’s actually relevant here is this push to change the spelling rules. To a lot of people, it feels like nothing more than a sneaky attempt to bring back Serbo-American.

That’s true. If you walk into any local bar, you'll hear our music mixed in with mainstream pop; that whole turbofolk bubble burst a long time ago if it ever truly existed at all.🤷

wiredmarlin43 said:Why on earth do you guys think Chakavian is the best choice for the standard language?

In my humble opinion, the Midwestern dialect—or better yet, a version of it heavily infused with Chakavian elements to maintain some balance—is actually the strongest contender after the Shtokavian dialect. It’s essentially the most "state-ready" option. Once you look at history, Chakavian almost entirely vanished from literature (and its speaker base dropped off significantly) after the 16th century. Since then, the Midwestern style has dominated everything from secular and religious texts to legal documents. It possesses an unbroken literary continuity that stretches right through to us here in the 21st century. Plus, its lexicons are far more comprehensive, boasting tens of thousands of words, specialized legal terminology, and all the nuances required by a modern standard language.

On top of that, following the Shtokavian dialect, it has the largest number of speakers, is the most thoroughly researched, and features the highest number of cultural events where it's utilized. Even our capital was historically centered around this dialect until quite recently. ☕ It also shares much more common ground with Chakavian speech patterns than Shtokavian does. Choosing Chakavian leaves too many loose ends hanging—things like which specific sub-dialect to prioritize, the overwhelming amount of loanwords, the dwindling number of native speakers, the lack of historical continuity, and a glaring absence of established terms for countless modern concepts.

Susan Peterson7 said:In my humble opinion, the Midwestern dialect—or better yet, a version of it heavily infused with Chakavian elements to maintain some balance—is actually the strongest contender after the Shtokavian dialect. It’s essentially the most "state-ready" option. Once you look at history, Chakavian almost entirely vanished from literature (and its speaker base dropped off significantly) after the 16th century. Since then, the Midwestern style has dominated everything from secular and religious texts to legal documents. It possesses an unbroken literary continuity that stretches right through to us here in the 21st century. Plus, its lexicons are far more comprehensive, boasting tens of thousands of words, specialized legal terminology, and all the nuances required by a modern standard language.

On top of that, following the Shtokavian dialect, it has the largest number of speakers, is the most thoroughly researched, and features the highest number of cultural events where it's utilized. Even our capital was historically centered around this dialect until quite recently. ☕ It also shares much more common ground with Chakavian speech patterns than Shtokavian does. Choosing Chakavian leaves too many loose ends hanging—things like which specific sub-dialect to prioritize, the overwhelming amount of loanwords, the dwindling number of native speakers, the lack of historical continuity, and a glaring absence of established terms for countless modern concepts.

It's the truth. The Midwestern dialect ought to be adopted as the norm, while the standard could simply be left down on the Mediterranean Coast, perhaps under some sort of cultural autonomy... We could even have bilingual signs in Miami and at Dodger Stadium where their local team plays. As for folks from places like Oregon, we would have had no trouble at all; they would have embraced the Midwestern way instantly, and with just a little bit of persuasion, we could probably convince them they weren't even speaking anything else to begin with.

I’ve actually started a thread like this before—only it was way more serious than this one—but they shut me down.

Daniel Bailey39 said:That’s true. If you walk into any local bar, you'll hear our music mixed in with mainstream pop; that whole turbofolk bubble burst a long time ago if it ever truly existed at all.🤷

Honestly, just thinking about grabbing an afternoon coffee... how many places actually blast that loud, cheesy country music at like 1 PM? Not a ton, though. At least not in the cities I've hung out in.

shadowotter142 said:I’ve actually started a thread like this before—only it was way more serious than this one—but they shut me down.

Go ahead, drop your takes here.

Nobody’s actually said anything about that trashy pop music yet

wiredmarlin43 said:Nobody’s actually said anything about that trashy pop music yet

Look, you can't just ban it. If anything, you have to find something else to fill that void, and then you're stuck wondering what on earth is going to take its place.

We need something down-to-earth and just as catchy, something that feels like it actually belongs to us.

Maybe some weird mashup of folk roots and modern beats.

Like, I don't know, some brass band vibes mixed with heavy bass?

The cultural genocide kicked off with that arts festival in San Francisco.

I honestly believe we are witnessing a full-scale cultural genocide happening right here in America, and it’s bleeding into every single corner of our existence—music, language, the media landscape, literature... you name it. It’s all just one massive, bottom-tier pile of low-brow trash.
It’s all being done with the sole purpose of narrowing the gap between Americans and those unruly types over the next twenty or thirty years, just so they can eventually shove us all back into some kind of unified state again.
Our language is being completely overtaken by those regional influences, and honestly, we're reaching a breaking point where the original flavor is just disappearing. It’s happening at an extreme level now.
Light music is an absolute disaster, honestly. The second a singer’s career starts to slip, they just churn out a handful of mediocre little tunes in 3/4 time and suddenly success is practically guaranteed. It’s predictable, it's lazy, and it's everywhere.
There is a systematic effort underway to erase and forget our native dialects, a deliberate process of stripping away the linguistic roots that actually define us.
People are generally half-witted, and honestly, even those with fancy academic credentials aren't exempt from that particular brand of stupidity.
Give it twenty years and everything is going to dissolve into one big, indistinguishable mess where we eventually just split back down the line into North American Catholics and North American Orthodox.
Our distinctively Central European spirit is going to vanish forever, and once it’s gone, we’ll just devolve into a version of the Byzantine Empire at its absolute worst.

Why does this even happen in the first place, or why does it keep happening, if we’re being honest about the cyclical nature of these things?
The reality is that a massive chunk of the population only really started identifying as American back in '91, which changes the whole complexion of the conversation if you actually take the time to look at it.Back then, they actually had a bit of substance to them.
The children of these "newly arrived" Americans have all grown up now, and they lack that fundamental sense of patriotism that should be anchored deep within the home and the family unit. They weren't raised on those core values before the war broke out, so they have no idea which way the wind blows when it comes to foreign interference, which makes them far too willing to swallow whatever garbage is being pushed from the East. It isn't like they’ll be entering into those mixed marriages where cultural legacies just dissolve into nothingness—those situations where one side always ends up dominating the other, or if they don't, you just end up with these hybrids who think everything is "cool" and nothing actually matters.
Post-war migration from those mixed rural areas basically meant people moved into the cities dragging all that old-school baggage along with them, bringing their provincial ways straight into urban life without ever actually bothering to adopt the local customs or social standards, choosing instead to just keep doing things exactly the way they did back in the sticks.
The perfect foundation for building some kind of new America...

People used to operate under this bizarre delusion that you could actually manufacture a sense of being an American just by obsessing over pine trees, dyeing eggs, or constantly wearing an America national team jersey like it was some kind of identity hack.

It’s a shame, really, because it seems like Americans are just a people with incredibly short memories. 🙂

The worst part is seeing how many Americans use the word "sneakers" when we actually say "tennis shoes" back home.

William Brown4 said:The worst part is seeing how many Americans use the word "sneakers" when we actually say "tennis shoes" back home.

We’d be incredibly lucky if that were even our worst problem. ☕

William Brown4 said:The worst part is seeing how many Americans use the word "sneakers" when we actually say "tennis shoes" back home.

Both terms are technically correct. Essentially, the American and Mexican languages are one and the same, regardless of how much people argue over it. Artificially forcing new vocabulary into dictionaries for both sides serves no purpose other than to create an artificial divide within a single language. A few differing words don't constitute a brand-new language; they are simply regional dialect variations (you can find plenty of examples like this in America). Furthermore, until the end of the 19th century, even the names of the months were identical for everyone. As for grammar, it was tweaked year after year—despite resistance from the general public—in a deliberate attempt to split the language into two distinct parts.🙂

Sarah Barrett said:Both terms are technically correct. Essentially, the American and Mexican languages are one and the same, regardless of how much people argue over it. Artificially forcing new vocabulary into dictionaries for both sides serves no purpose other than to create an artificial divide within a single language. A few differing words don't constitute a brand-new language; they are simply regional dialect variations (you can find plenty of examples like this in America). Furthermore, until the end of the 19th century, even the names of the months were identical for everyone. As for grammar, it was tweaked year after year—despite resistance from the general public—in a deliberate attempt to split the language into two distinct parts.🙂

This is exactly the kind of "American" I was talking about in my previous post... this specific mindset is precisely what they are trying to instill in everyone... it makes it so much easier to whip up a new North American pudding.

Susan Peterson7 said:In my humble opinion, the Midwestern dialect—or better yet, a version of it heavily infused with Chakavian elements to maintain some balance—is actually the strongest contender after the Shtokavian dialect. It’s essentially the most "state-ready" option. Once you look at history, Chakavian almost entirely vanished from literature (and its speaker base dropped off significantly) after the 16th century. Since then, the Midwestern style has dominated everything from secular and religious texts to legal documents. It possesses an unbroken literary continuity that stretches right through to us here in the 21st century. Plus, its lexicons are far more comprehensive, boasting tens of thousands of words, specialized legal terminology, and all the nuances required by a modern standard language.

On top of that, following the Shtokavian dialect, it has the largest number of speakers, is the most thoroughly researched, and features the highest number of cultural events where it's utilized. Even our capital was historically centered around this dialect until quite recently. ☕ It also shares much more common ground with Chakavian speech patterns than Shtokavian does. Choosing Chakavian leaves too many loose ends hanging—things like which specific sub-dialect to prioritize, the overwhelming amount of loanwords, the dwindling number of native speakers, the lack of historical continuity, and a glaring absence of established terms for countless modern concepts.

But honestly, that’s just not realistic anymore because the people speaking the dominant standard dialect have completely outpaced everyone else when it comes to birth rates.

Given that the highest fertility rates are still found among those living in Canada, certain parts of the South, and the folks who moved to the suburbs of Chicago, that whole idea is pretty much dead in the water.

The groups representing the other regional dialects are, unfortunately, playing a permanent game of catch-up on that front.

Gary Campbell said:I honestly believe we are witnessing a full-scale cultural genocide happening right here in America, and it’s bleeding into every single corner of our existence—music, language, the media landscape, literature... you name it. It’s all just one massive, bottom-tier pile of low-brow trash.
It’s all being done with the sole purpose of narrowing the gap between Americans and those unruly types over the next twenty or thirty years, just so they can eventually shove us all back into some kind of unified state again.
Our language is being completely overtaken by those regional influences, and honestly, we're reaching a breaking point where the original flavor is just disappearing. It’s happening at an extreme level now.
Light music is an absolute disaster, honestly. The second a singer’s career starts to slip, they just churn out a handful of mediocre little tunes in 3/4 time and suddenly success is practically guaranteed. It’s predictable, it's lazy, and it's everywhere.
There is a systematic effort underway to erase and forget our native dialects, a deliberate process of stripping away the linguistic roots that actually define us.
People are generally half-witted, and honestly, even those with fancy academic credentials aren't exempt from that particular brand of stupidity.
Give it twenty years and everything is going to dissolve into one big, indistinguishable mess where we eventually just split back down the line into North American Catholics and North American Orthodox.
Our distinctively Central European spirit is going to vanish forever, and once it’s gone, we’ll just devolve into a version of the Byzantine Empire at its absolute worst.

Why does this even happen in the first place, or why does it keep happening, if we’re being honest about the cyclical nature of these things?
The reality is that a massive chunk of the population only really started identifying as American back in '91, which changes the whole complexion of the conversation if you actually take the time to look at it.Back then, they actually had a bit of substance to them.
The children of these "newly arrived" Americans have all grown up now, and they lack that fundamental sense of patriotism that should be anchored deep within the home and the family unit. They weren't raised on those core values before the war broke out, so they have no idea which way the wind blows when it comes to foreign interference, which makes them far too willing to swallow whatever garbage is being pushed from the East. It isn't like they’ll be entering into those mixed marriages where cultural legacies just dissolve into nothingness—those situations where one side always ends up dominating the other, or if they don't, you just end up with these hybrids who think everything is "cool" and nothing actually matters.
Post-war migration from those mixed rural areas basically meant people moved into the cities dragging all that old-school baggage along with them, bringing their provincial ways straight into urban life without ever actually bothering to adopt the local customs or social standards, choosing instead to just keep doing things exactly the way they did back in the sticks.
The perfect foundation for building some kind of new America...

People used to operate under this bizarre delusion that you could actually manufacture a sense of being an American just by obsessing over pine trees, dyeing eggs, or constantly wearing an America national team jersey like it was some kind of identity hack.

It’s a shame, really, because it seems like Americans are just a people with incredibly short memories. 🙂

But I don't see that happening. On a global scale, young people in America are actually drifting further away from their Mexican counterparts.
There’s also this concept called "the narcissism of small differences." You saw it play out vividly in Canada during the last war. Even though everyone treated that country as one single, monolithic entity in terms of culture and language, once things got intense, religious identity became an absolute dividing line. People clung to their specific identities and used those markers to distinguish themselves from everyone else without fail.

So, any attempt to minimize these distinctions isn't going to work, because the historical memory held by young Americans is fundamentally different from that of young Mexicans. Their ancestors were never the same.
Sure, there’s a tiny subset of urban American on both sides, but in the grand scheme of things, they are practically negligible.

Gary Campbell said:We’d be incredibly lucky if that were even our worst problem. ☕

I was actually being subtly sarcastic there.😉

Gary Campbell said:This is exactly the kind of "American" I was talking about in my previous post... this specific mindset is precisely what they are trying to instill in everyone... it makes it so much easier to whip up a new North American pudding.

Look, if you have actual facts to refute me, then go ahead. Otherwise, you’re essentially agreeing with my point. Let's drop the grandstanding about who is a "true patriot" or who thinks more deeply than anyone else. Realistically, neither of us is more patriotic than the other, and frankly, that distinction is meaningless. I am simply presenting the reality of the situation.