Cogs can think.

Well have I ever.

My new proposal for my bachelor’s thesis has found a home. I’m so happy right now, even Twiek was all confused. “Ey, I’m the one supposed to be jumping around aimlessly, running up walls, and climbing the couches, jumping onto tables and knocking over cups of coffee. You are upsetting the delicate balance of power here.” Sorry sweetie, normal service will resume in a minute. Or two.

Anyway, I’ll be diving into the attitudes people have towards minority languages. I’m going to compare the attitudes people from England (as in, England-proper) have towards Scottish Gaelic and Welsh to the attitudes people from The Netherlands have towards our very own minority language, Frisian.

The reason I want to dive into this is because in the past few decades or so, there has been a worldwide surge in interest in these minority languages, as people (rightfully so) realise that without the proper measures, these languages, and all the cultural information they have inside them, will vanish. Various governments have started promotional programs and the likes to promote the use of these languages. In The Netherlands, the use of Frisian has been promoted heavily since 1956, resulting in Frisian being a compulsory subject in schools, various cities and municipalties officially changing their names to the Frisian variants, and even the province of Friesland itself officially changing its name to Fryslân, the Frisian variant. The Scottish government has done similar promotion of Scottish Gaelic.

Now, if it turns out that the attitudes towards minority languages of people speaking the majority language are similar cross-culturally, then language unions can share methods of promotion on a cross-cultural level.

That’s the idea, in any case. It’s going to be a hell of a lot of work.