This is my family. Sadly, the language dies with my generation. My father speaks this dialect of Spanish... or at least, he used to. We moved to Northern California when I was very little. But, if we had stayed in New Mexico, my cousins don't speak it either. I asked Dad why he didn't teach me. "What would I do? Speak it to myself?" I took Spanish in high school. My father really couldn't help me, some of the basic phrases were different. As more immigrants moved into our area, Dad connected with them and started to learned the more modern Spanish to communicate with them.
I mean, this dialect formed because Northern New Mexico was so isolated. The Manhattan Project changed a lot of that. Suddenly, Los Alamos labs and Sandia labs connected New Mexico with the rest of the world. It wasn't as isolated anymore.
People have told me I could learn it, but I've tried. It's hard when I talk with my family, I'd rather have an adult conversation now rather than basically a preschool level one to learn the language. They say to really learn it, you have to immerse yourself. I lived with my grandmother for several months once while working at Sandia Labs. She insisted on speaking English with me, she was stubborn about it, and I was having a hard enough time understanding her in English.
Let me leave you with a funny story. My uncle had hired a contractor to help with his house. The contractor spoke common Spanish. And he angrily confronted my uncle in Spanish: "You stole my belt!" or at least that's what my uncle heard. "[You stole] mi cinta!" However, in New Mexico "cinta" means belt, but in Mexico it's short for "cinta métrica" or tape measure. (or so I'm told, I don't speak Spanish!) My uncle assured him he did not steal it and went ahead and gave him one of his own.
> My father speaks this dialect of Spanish... or at least, he used to. We moved to Northern California when I was very little. But, if we had stayed in New Mexico, my cousins don't speak it either. I asked Dad why he didn't teach me. "What would I do? Speak it to myself?"
I have the same reasoning. I speak a language that is not necessary anymore even in the place my parents came from, since the national language and English are what official business is done in.
My grandparents taught me the language, but none of my cousins have a similar grasp of the language. I still speak it with the older generations in my family, but they do not live near me to interact often enough with my kids, so I would effectively be teaching them a language they will have no use for by the time they are adults.
Disclaimer: I only learned about the New Mexico Spanish variant today and my experience is limited to OP's article plus 2 YouTube videos. That being said:
I think that if you want to, you could learn "standard" Spanish and still have an understandable conversation with you family. At least for me (I'm Mexican) the people in those videos were easier to understand compared to the average Cuban Spanish, for example, which is one of hardest variants for me.
And the differences in vocabulary is something you'd have to face regardless of the language variant. For example, I usually call a belt "cinturón" except for martial arts belts which I always call "cinta", but right now I just searched for "cinta negra" images and all the results were black adhesive tapes and black ribbons.
But yeah, doing so would take many years of "talking like a preschooler", there's no escape from that.
As a native spanish speaker these are completely understandable, I wouldn't even call them a "different form of Spanish". Sure, they occasionally use a word or structure I wouldn't, but it's all very clear. No more different to my ears than variations in the language from country to country.
> average Cuban Spanish, for example, which is one of hardest variants for me
Interesting. Do you have some sample videos of what's difficult? I don't find Cuban Spanish at all different, but I did have a few Cuban friends growing up so perhaps my ear is used to it from that.
As a non-native spanish speaker I find it quite easy to understand, no more difficult than my mexican gf grandfather, and much much easier than spanish people from andalusia.
Sadly all too common even with popular languages. I ask my dad why he never taught me Spanish and he just "didn't really think about it". Such a wasted opportunity for free goods.
I was having a related discussion with my wife about why our nephews weren’t taught Spanish as a first language (we live in Texas, their dad is bilingual). Frankly, having English as your first language gives you a much higher advantage in life in the current zeitgeist. There’s no incentive to learn RandomLanguage first, but there is every incentive to learn English first.
I'm not really sure that's how it ends up working in reality though if you have exposure to English through school or childcare. We taught our kid Chinese first. He's now 2, almost 3, but he's equally good in both languages, maybe a little better in English at this point since he goes to school every day. So by 3 years old he's just as good or better than his peers in English but also is a native speaker in another language. I can see how a parent might think they are putting their kid at a disadvantage by not concentrating on English but language just comes so naturally to these young children.
Nope, learning multiple languages from the beginning has been shown to have many benefits. I speak both my native language and English at native levels, simply because I learned my language at home and English in school. Only teaching English is really a waste when you live in an English speaking country, as the child will automatically pick up English through school and friends.
>Nope, learning multiple languages from the beginning has been shown to have many benefits.
More to the point: Speaking multiple languages expands your ability to express and describe everything, which leads to having more variety in your lines of thought. Different languages have different ways of thinking, thus speaking multiple languages nurtures an open mind.
Same. I've immersed in Japanese for 10+ years and lived in the country. I grew up monolingual, and after that experience I felt like my brain "expanded". I think being able to understand concepts that didn't even exist to me before did that.
For example, I remember after finding out what "tsukkomi" and "boke" are in Manzai I started seeing it play itself out in English conversations with my friends. It's kind of weird seeing a concept play out that was there the whole time, but you re-shaped your thinking to observe and categorize it.
> Nope, learning multiple languages from the beginning has been shown to have many benefits.
Anecdata: I'm a native English speaker but as a little kid I was completely bilingual in French (dad was a USAF officer stationed at a NATO base in rural France; my sisters and I did our first few years of school in the local village schools). I've long had the impression that native fluency in both languages had benefits; it certainly gave me easy A+ grades in high-school and college French classes, but otherwise I couldn't begin to articulate what those benefits might be.
These days my French is pretty rudimentary, but my wife and I like to watch some English-subtitled French TV series on Netflix and Acorn, e.g., Call My Agent,Candice Renoir, and Munch; it's fun to recognize idioms and sometimes not even need the subtitles.
I disagree. I learned Japanese to a fluent level as an adult and it gave me a whole new world of perspective. Knowing how many thousands of hours that took me, it would have been great to get that perk for free.
Besides, my mom speaks only English anyways. I don't know any bilingual kids I grew up with that ended up having a hard time with English.
New Mexico Hispanic culture is quite different from a lot of the rest of the US. And the rural areas were very isolated for a long time. So it has some other interesting historical Spanish cultural variants. A couple:
New Mexico is also home to a bunch of different Native American languages and cultures, many of which did not have the trauma of being forced to move to new land and thus have a different relationship with their history.
(This post feels clumsy of me, apologies if as an outsider I mis-characterized something.)
We also have Genizaros (a kind of Spanish corruption of the word Janissary). They're descended from Native American slaves who were freed by the Spanish in exchange for settling on frontier outposts.
New Mexico's a strange place. Technically "New" Mexico is older than regular Mexico by over two centuries in that New Mexico earned its name as early as 1563.
That is getting so tiring. How are normal people supposed to navigate in this world where normal words[1] and expressions are constantly being re-analyzed as fascist dogwhistles?
My general impression, possibly out of ignorance, has been that there have always been lots of these and people (read: me) were just unaware of them. Some, like this (and "88" on usernames) are sometimes (often?) legitimate but have also been used as dog whistles... and fascism stains everything it touches.
Indeed, it's the fascists and bigots who appropriate words and employ ever shifting rhetoric to avoid being labeled as fascists or bigots and to try and conflate their ideology with as many pre-existing ideas as possible who are to blame for this linguistic treadmill, and not the people who point out that dog whistles are real.
In the same way security researchers are not responsible for security vulnerabilities, but may take heat for pointing them out.
That being said, just because they try to appropriate the terms doesn't mean it has to work. They can be reappropriated back to their original meaning.
The vast majority of it is just to rustle the jimmies of people who use terms like fascist. The more butthurt people get about it the more you'll see it happen. They're not actually fascist dog whistles. It's them signaling to each other that they're not one of you.
That is not true. They use these terms among themselves to denote things. Their opposition is not intended audience at all.
Moreover, when unopposed, nazi and antisemitism do not die out. Instead, they get stronger and larger in numbers. It is an actual ideology and those who believe it are actively trying to spread it.
Same way you navigate everything else, by paying attention and making frequent and small adjustments as you acquire new information? You chose a good metaphor: selecting a straight line and expecting not to deviate from it is not "navigation" in any useful sense.
FYI your comments were probably flagged because it's a fresh account. I've seen it with entirely innocuous posts from brand new accounts before.
You're right that it's not antisemitic but you've got some details wrong (that kinda make it sound antisemitic as it happens). They specifically hid their identity to flee the Inquisition, it's not some kind of ongoing deception. They generally don't identify as Jews or worship at temples or practice Judaism but have fossilized customs light lighting the candles on Saturday evenings and such. Sometimes people convert to Judaism to reclaim that aspect of their heritage.
But it's easy to see how the idea of Jews as deceptive plays into antisemitic narratives, no?
Nah, some green accounts do have some sort of “shadowban” until they get vouched but they usually just appear only as [dead]. I’m pretty sure [flagged] comments are specifically user flagged, but correct me if I’m wrong.
This is my dialect! We’ve always attracted linguists because of our unique mix of cultures. For instance, we have lots of words for turkey - guíjalo/guajalote (and various combinations of the two), pavo, ganso real, cócono, and yes, even torque.
In Spanish from Spain, both being a clown or just a random dude. (No seas pavo, don't be a clown), and "oye, pavo, ¿dónde vas?" (Hey, dude, where're you going to)?
Reminds me a bit of Louisiana French (technically two closely related dialects of Cajun French and Louisiana Creole). French was the dominant household language in the state until the 1920s when it was banned from being the primary language in public schools by the state government. This ultimately started the first in a slew of segregational choices by parents with regards to their kids' schools: some were incensed that they were being stripped of their heritage and sent their kids to French speaking Catholic schools. People were urged to "speak White," which was code for "speak proper English." In turn, the Catholic schools stopped teaching the local dialect in favor of Standard French. When the state also demanded that the Catholic schools teach English, students couldn't understand their teachers and were often beaten for failing to make progress in class. The state ended up with half a generation of children who could barely understand what they were being taught. As a result, parents stopped teaching their kids to speak their native language, which was replaced with English. Today, most of us from the area speak English but will mix in language from the old Cajun / Creole dialects of the past.
Did you know that the X-Men's Gambit has pronounced the word "cher" incorrectly every single time he's ever used it in mass media? From Shreveport to Grand Isle, we pronounce it "sha." Usually used as a term of endearment for a male to a female, we also use it when we agree with anyone with the phrase "Mais yeah, cher!"
I don’t feel that this is a bad thing. Not being able to speak and understand each other’s languages just helps increase conflict due to less empathy. While there are cons to less spoken languages, overall the world would be better off with less spoken languages.
A language is a map to reality. More languages means more maps, more conceptual models, more strategies of existence.
Consider this: each additional language improves humanity's capacity to evolve and shift, a particularly valuable trait considering the pace of environmental and socioeconomic change. More languages increases the likelihood that humanity will continue to survive and maybe even thrive. (Reality one hundred, one thousand, and ten thousand years from now will each demand different models or languages.)
That only applies imo if the same individual learns multiple languages; not even half the world is bilingual. The cons that come with increased conflict outweigh the benefits imo. It is way too easy to “other” strangers if you don’t share the same language and general culture. It’s already bad enough when people do share the same language and main culture.
Zoom out a bit. How many iterations of civilization have we seen over the past 250k years? A lot. Language is the architecture of civilization, with each iteration of society dependent on the structures of vernacular to take its shape.
I am personally doubtful that humanity will be able to succeed for more than a few hundred years as a mono-culture. It needs variance (multiple languages) and experimentation (new languages) to evolve and respond to change.
My argument is not about individuals speaking multiple languages, it's about different groups of people adopting different models of reality and trying them out.
Language is pretty foundational to culture. When you lose a language you lose more than a way of speaking, but also the subtleties and emotions behind the "shape" of certain words, not to mention those words that reflect something so unique to that culture that you can't really translate them. The death of a language is the death of a world.
Saying there should be fewer spoken languages is frankly a very unempathetic thing to say.
>not to mention those words that reflect something so unique to that culture that you can't really translate them
You've inverted the role of language. Language is what we use to communicate the things we feel, we gain essentially nothing from the words themselves. Even when you think you're communicating something very specific with the words you are using, there's little reason to believe that the person on the other end of the conversation really gets what you're trying to communicate. In a practical sense, you can easily communicate, but these deep, almost mystical, meanings you're implying... it's just not really something that can be known.
The is the point of the indeterminacy of translation illustrated by W.V. Quine.
And there's the cost of keeping a dying language alive.
You're basically asking people to sacrifice their lives to a less useful language, a mere social utility, so you can maintain a sort of "cultural linguistic zoo" ... and yes you are by this analogy relegating them to the role of animals in a theme park.
Think of what that entails: "No, you can't be taught in the language that will get you into university and get you the best jobs. You must dedicate a significant portion portion of your life to something we already know is a dead end for you personally, because we have decided that it is more important that a legacy tool be kept alive than that you prosper as a person."
This Spanish has similarities with the one used in some areas of Chihuahua Mexico (south of New Mexico) specially at the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains. It makes sense since many original Hispanic New Mexican families have consanguinity with old Chihuahua families.
Traveling to Europe for the first time last year, my eyes were opened to how many languages there were that you don’t typically hear about in the mainstream. It surprised me to learn there were other languages in Spain other than Spanish (and that the Latin American dialect had key differences to the European one). Likewise that “Italian” is not the main language spoken by many people in Italy, which apparently has at least a few related but different languages (Neapolitan, Veneto, etc.) in use.
Closer to home, I see my Asian American friends who never grasped the language of their original culture being frustrated that they cannot pass down the language to their kids. A couple we are close with is a Taiwanese husband and Korean wife. The husband knows virtually no Chinese and the wife knows virtually no Korean. They want to teach their son both, but can’t.
I suppose this is the start of the process of how we ended up with the current generations of say, Italian Americans or German Americans or Irish Americans who mostly lost the ability to speak the language of their ancestors several generations ago.
Each parent only speaks to the child in their own language. That is all.
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The children of immigrants lose languages because their parents are ignorant of basic pedagogy (in most cases the parents just raise the kids in English, then get mad they don't magically know the language they were barely exposed to.)
Presumably, they think they should have full conversations with each other in Korean and Chinese to expose the kid - however as a baby understands that they speak all 3 languages, the baby would default to the most common one (English).
The key here is to establish boundaries of language use e.g.: "I speak Chinese to dad. I speak Korean to mom." The parents should not respond to the child in English - they have to preserve the boundary to encourage the kid to use the other languages.
If one of them uses English with the child, it will greatly weaken or ruin the effect. Adding cartoons, other speakers etc. for these languages helps but isn't as fundamentally necessary as this. You can even add multiple nannies which only speak their own language to the child. (There is some amount of regular exposure needed, but that's not an issue for 2 parents.) The child will pick up English from other children and tv.
As I said, the husband cannot speak Chinese. The wife cannot speak Korean. They both speak only English. They’ve already lost the languages in their generation, thus cannot pass it down to the next.
If the grandparents lived close, that could sort of be an option, but apparently they do not.
Interesting. I've lived in NM -- mostly northern -- for over 20 years now. I minored in Spanish and continue to strive to improve my mediocre fluency. I take multiple trips to the Sangre de Cristo area every year for camping and fishing.
And yet I don't recall ever having heard of a discrete NM dialect.
It's sad, but how many languages have we lost over the centuries? How many variations of Italian or French have we lost due to migration?
As a Deaf person, this is readily apparent in local flavors of ASL. I noticed this with deaf people I came into contact with at RIT as a student there. There were many slight variations. You could tell who were new to the school, or those who's been there for a while. The ones new to the school were still doing it the way they learned at home, and the ones who has been there for 2-3 years were signing in a similar style. It was interesting to see.
Language is a living, constantly evolving, thing - you can't 'preserve' it any more than you would preserve a living tree in a book.
>It's sad, but how many languages have we lost over the centuries?
I don't know about languages, but for dialects, I think the answer is the same as the number of people who have died over the centuries.
No one speaks a language exactly like anyone else, so ultimately, every person has a slightly different dialect. There's no way to preserve them all. Your analogy about preserving living trees in a book is apt.
My stepdad’s parents moved from New Mexico to California but never taught their kids Spanish because they didn’t want them to have an accent. Was a thing in the 50s, I guess.
I’ve always found it amusing they grew up six miles from each other but met in California.
It’s like how Portuguese is just a Spanish with a heavy accent. And Italian is just accented Latin.
There are recognizable words but the meanings are entirely different - English between America and Australia used to be this way (we since have crushed Australia with Hollywood so hard that it’s now closer enough).
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Flamebaiting? So it’s ok when people are talking about NPR or Twitter, but not being against promotion of non-English language in the US? Come on..
On a side note: I’ve requested for my account to be deleted multiple times. Requests have been denied. Until then..
Never would I conduct personal direct attacks, but I will speak my mind.
I’m more than happy to point out more than a dozen terms violations of others within the past week that seem to go untouched. Either moderate all based on terms or don’t.
Consistency in moderation is impossible because there are far too many posts for us to read them all. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
People always feel like the mods are against their team when they get moderated, but that's an illusion. We don't track (or care) what users' views are. We care when they're breaking the site guidelines, which you have been doing repeatedly.
I can only find one record of you emailing us about deleting your account. It looks like I replied to you 10 minutes later and you never responded.
Native Spanish speaker here, giving two observations. First, it's not unusual to aspirate the "s" sound in Spanish spoken in the Caribbean countries, particularly if it precedes a consonant, hear several examples in [1]. While this is reserved for informal colloquial speech, it is not an indication of social class. Second, I realize there is a gray divide between what constitutes a dialect and what is just regional accent and slang, but I only hear the latter in the examples given in TFA. I'd expect a lot more differences, bordering on unintelligible, before I call it a dialect. Maybe I'll change my mind if I hear more examples of New Mexico Spanish, but for now, it just sounds like some peculiar word choices and not a completely different dialect,
> I'd expect a lot more differences, bordering on unintelligible, before I call it a dialect.
I'm not sure if I could help you with examples since it's my father's tongue, not mind. But I assure you, he found it very difficult to communicate with other Spanish speakers in California. However, he did have a much easier time talking with someone that grew up in the Philippines!
I do remember very distinctly that my dad did not know the word "dormir" or "to sleep" and the word he had started with "ad" but I don't remember it.
> but for now, it just sounds like some peculiar word choices.
Remember, the area is changing. The Spanish that's being spoken in New Mexico is altering to match the wider world. If you want older dialect, you really do have to find people in their 50's or older.
Or maybe a dialect I've never heard of even, the Philippines is an incredibly linguistically diverse area. A woman I know from the Philippines grew up speaking 5 languages.
This phonetical change occured in Ancient Greek. For example, the root helio- "sun" stems from earlier sawelio-. This change also occured in French, for example, the French word for "forest" is now pronounced without -s- and at some point it had -h-. This sound change occured in Sanskrit, where final -s became -h
It's called debuccalization and it's very common in many languages.
There's a bit of "accentism" in Spain. Speaking with a southern accent will (wrongly) mark you as "lazy", "uncultured" or "unsophisticated" to some people.
I was born in Castile, so I usually speak "accentless" standard Spanish, but my mother comes from Extremadura, just a couple hours drive to the south, and when I speak to her I involuntarily switch to the extremaduran accent. I don't notice it but other people hearing me for the first time are shocked by the sudden switch.
Extremaduran accent has the same aspirated x and s mentioned in the article, so for "This is Extremadura" I'll tend to say "Ehto é Ehtremaura" to my mother and "Esto es Extremadura" to other people. Another curiosity is that many of the original "conquistadores" (Cortés, Pizarro) hailed from Extremadura.
Of course it's just another variety, but it's the one equivalent to the Received Pronunciation or "BBC English". People also tend to consider it the "original" one because, well... the language started in Castile.
Up until a couple decades ago, if you wanted to have a career on national TV, radio or as an actor, toning down any other accent and switching to Castilian was a requirement, or at least would help a lot. Nowadays not so much, but still happens enough that in Spain a Castilian accent is perceived as "not having one".
Slightly off topic but your reference to being accentless reminds me of a time as a 14 year old visiting my American cousins for Ireland.
My slightly younger cousin’s friend found the way I pronounced things as well as some of my vocabulary to be very funny. When I pointed out that he also had an accent he almost almost wet himself with laughter, so absurd was the idea to him that both of us had accents rather than the one of us who didn’t sound American.
I've noticed strong shades of this in various dialects of Caribbean Spanish too; I didn't know there was a name for it much less a possibly correlated colonial origin.
> How can you extract a value judgment from how someone speaks?
I mean it’s not exactly uncommon. I have the luck of having a southern U.S. accent and I’ve been told (mostly by people from outside the US in fairness) that they were surprised I wasn’t a raging racist.
It's using pronunciation to infer regional/class origins, and it's widespread in most languages. See for example southern accents in American English, which can be associated with rednecks.
Every language group has a hierarchy of accents, often roughly corresponding to wealth. There is usually a prestige accent used by the wealthy, and which the upper classes mimic. And everyone looks down on rural people, marked by their accent.
It's worse in some places than others but it's practically universal.
Interestingly, I have often seen in movies with hillbilly characters dubbed to Spanish, their accent is dubbed in andalusian accent. I alway found it quite offensive.
It shouldn't be. Most of the people who went from Spain overseas was from Andalucia, the South American accent came from the Southern Spain. Also, lots of spelling traits in Southern English from the US map 1:1 to Andalusian Spanish, such as omiting vowels between consonants and speaking really fast.
Ah, sorry, I guess I was droopy. I meant consonant between vowels:
Reventado -> Reventao
Colocado -> Colocao
On vowels between consonants, maybe "tarántula" -> Trántula spelling it really fast in a hurry.
But what I meant with the Andalusian accent being really fast and omiting vowels, they do in a way pretty close to the Southern US English accent.
Also, the Andalusians got a lot of arabisms (more than former Spanish) such as zaguán, babuchas, alcancía, alhaja, alcoba... the same way the Southern US English got lots of borrowings from Spanish.
When you get away from the coasts and start dealing with domestic companies you'll start to find many people in those spaces will exaggerate their regional accents. A guy from Chicago wants you to know you're dealing with a "real" Chicagoan. A guy working out of Port Fourchon might really want you to believe they just rose from the swamp to take your phone call.
But I guess I was under the impression what was meant was a small area of southern Spain and its language was more heavily affected that loanwords. Perhaps structure too not just using words for items that didn't exist in the Old World.
It's always sad to see dialects die, however unless you're trying to decrease migration between neighboring countries (such as Israel speaking Hebrew) it seems like a good thing. In the case of New Mexico, it's a US state and I don't see an advantage in keeping it around.
> unless you're trying to decrease migration between neighboring countries (such as Israel speaking Hebrew)
Say what now? Israelis don't speak Hebrew to "decrease migration", they speak Hebrew because it's their ancestral language with a greater than 3,000 year history.
Although I agree in that there's certainly room for debate, it's a fact Israel has strict immigration laws, many of these laws are focused around keeping local Muslim populations out while bringing global Jewish populations in, and when Israel was founded millions of Jewish people from the neighboring countries (namely Egypt and Saudi Arabia) moved to Israel. They could have spoken a local language or even a European one, but they decided to learn the (at the time extinct) language Hebrew was because it was unique to Jews, and this was a Zionist country and movement.
There was no such thing as a "local language" there. They spoke a very wide variety of language - one article collected 40 different languages spoken there.
Mandatory Palestine was not a country at that time, and had nothing unifying it.
The reason all those migrants switched to Hebrew is that it was the only common tongue among all of them.
Why in the world would they pick a European language? If anything maybe Yiddish, but as you write there were lots of people from Arab countries who didn't speak it.
But everyone knew Hebrew. It's really the only language that made sense. And it was not extinct, everyone knew it. Maybe it wasn't their cradle language, but everyone could make themselves understood in it.
You have this weird subtext that the place was Arab and Jews came in - that's not accurate at all, Jews never left Israel (Palestine). The migrants joined existing Jews.
The migrants moved there with explicit plan to create dominance. The dominance did nit happened through kumbaya happy agreement of everyone that one language is known by all.
They moved there after hundreds of years of not living there. It was homeland of someone else and they made it their own. But the process was not friendly. Anti-semitism in those other places was also very real .. but the homeland itself was a new place for massive amount of those people and peoples got pushed out.
There were always Jews there, and they didn't push anyone out - the land was very sparsely inhabited. The incoming Jews bought land like anyone would when they move someplace.
The Arabs responded with massacres, instead of just living near their new neighbors. If they had not done that history would be quite different.
Whiel there were always some Jews, most of the Jews living there moved there after 1900, as many of the surrounding Kingdoms (particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia) had become increasingly antisemitic and forced them out. Israel's current location wasn't even the only place considered, they also looked at a place in Africa, and this was possible because most people were immigrating there and it wasn't a generational homeland.
This reminds me of the bog people I met who live on a lake in floating mud huts. They’re all complaining that their children move away to go to school and live in cities etc.
Is the bog life really worth preserving? You basically just want to preserve these weird cultures for the sake of it, not because anyone benefits from it. Obviously children want electricity or to speak an actually used language rather than follow the meme culture. Why should we force them to suffer just to preserve that suffering?
Preserving the culture and language doesn't lead to the things you are describing. Those results are separate.
Examples you should look to are how French has been preserved and protected in Montreal, Creole in the South, Catalan in Spain, on and on. Those places have managed to preserve their language and culture while also improving their standard and quality of life on par with modern western standards.
