Recent content by Abdominalz

I’m so glad that as a Liberal you oppose child labour.

So the idea that all African countries use their old colonial languages 'as a compromise language' is I'm afraid, not quite true. Many have indigenous African countries that are actually spoken by a majority, and therefore are perfectly viable as national languages. For example: In Botswana...

In OTL, between 1966 and 69, a report was published advocating a radical overhaul of Local Government in England - it called for the existing system that had existed since 1889 to be scrapped and for England to be divided into Provinces, which would in turn be subdivided into Unitary...

I personally don't think we need a POD as far back as 1066 to achieve this. All what we need is an England which during the age of nationalism espouses a staunchly 'Anglo-Saxon' nationalist variety that solidly looks back to Anglo-Saxon England pre-1066. This ATL nationalism would be largely...

In a way, the British, French, Belgian and Portuguese Empires in Africa died the strangest deaths in all of Empire-breakup history. In many ways it was a non-death. Compare it to the earlier 20th century deaths of the Ottoman, Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, where you saw actual...

Here's an interesting thought experiment. What if the post-colonial relations between Britain and former colonies in Africa and Asia were more like post-Soviet relations between Russia and the Baltic States. By that I mean: No Commonwealth or any 'post-colonial' organisation uniting the...

What the thread says on the tin.

Unfortunately, if we want an Independent Wales, and definitely a Welsh-speaking one, we need a nineteenth century POD and not a 20th century one. This book explains how and why: The book's main argument is this: That whereas in the rest of Europe, the period from the 1840s to the First World...

I agree, as a Brit living in Nanjing who had just been on a day trip to Suzhou Chinese cities in Jiangsu province are not that far behind Europe at all. In fact, everything's so much more modern with everybody paying with their phones (using this app called WeChat) than in the west and the...

Would you be the sort of parent who would give a crap?

Here's some questions to narrow it down: Would it make parents more proactive in deciding what they want their pupils to study, or would it result in most parents choosing the bare minimum? How would it affect a country's standing in the world if most of its teenagers and young adults had, say...

No literature, only functional language e.g.: how to write a newspaper article etc

What if in the 21st century, the government of any developed country (let's say the UK or Germany) decided to radically reform their secondary education by, say, announcing the following: Only National Language/Literacy and Maths classes shall be compulsory from ages 11-16 Other utilitarian...

Having Ethiopia not catch the communist disease in 1974 is a start. The Derg really was a double whammy not only the communism but also the civil war. But perhaps an earlier POD, have Ethiopia develop into a South Korea pre-1987 sort of dictatorship but without alienating Eritrea by removing...

Here's a question for you all: if Britain really were this multilingual, what do you think the effects would be on politics and national identity?