Vlürch wrote:True, but that doesn't mean it should be celebrated
What is the harm in celebrating something both normal and inevitable if it's already happening?
and intentionally sped up in the way "diversity" is celebrated as an expression of tolerance or whatever.
Who is "intentionally speeding up" either language change or diversity?
Not using a loanword doesn't take anything away from the language itself or have any effect on other people's use of the language; if anything, it preserves the "purity" of the language, even if thanks to stupidity rather than a conscious choice to maintain the language's distinctiveness.
No language is pure, and depending on how well-established loanwords are, yes, not using them can indeed both take something away from the language and affect other people's use of the language. Even the very idea of doing this can do those things. Look at what happened in post-Ottoman Turkey, for example, where the scale of language reform was so great that one of Atatürk's own speeches had to be translated into modern Turkish three times.
So, if someone went out of their way to never use the word "kaveri", that'd in certain contexts reveal their antisemitism and help Jews in avoiding them so that they could avoid experiencing antisemitism.
I'm sure Jews in Finland would have plenty of other cues for identifying antisemites besides just what word they use for 'friend' in Finnish, thanks.
Loanwords can have destructive influence only if they're allowed to become integrated into the language as if they were native words, because the concepts are replaced by the introduction of the new word if the old word's meaning changes instead. This has happened in Finnish with "ystävä" (friend) becoming a deeper term, implying a deeper connection than just regular friends; it's obvious that a shift has happened from the related, derived terms like "ystävällinen" meaning just "friendly" or "kind", etc. In this case, it's not exactly destructive influence, but it is negative because it has probably reduced the ability of Finns to be friendly with one another (and it's common knowledge that we've never been friendly with anyone as a people), but imagine a hypothetical scenario where the word "kaveri" is replaced by an Arabic loanword as a result of rising antisemitism due to Arab immigrants and so-called populism. It wouldn't be harmful just to the handful of Jews living in Finland, but to the Finnish language and culture as a whole, because it would further reduce our ability to be friendly and alienate the concept even more.
I hope you had fun building your big ol' straw man there. Every kind of language you can possibly think of has loanwords, even sign languages, and has had them for hundreds or even thousands of years (inasmuch as the languages in question have existed that long). None of this has anything to do with how friendly people are construed to be; I'm not even sure it makes any sense to portray an entire nationality as either friendly or unfriendly since this is something that varies at the
personal level, not at the national level.
For what it's worth, a lot of people also use the English loanword "frendi" (or at least used to some years ago), but English loanwords aren't really loanwords since English isn't even considered a foreign language by a lot of Finns as far as I know; like, "everyone in the world speaks English, so it doesn't count", which is obviously not true, but honestly it makes sense because everyone anyone from Finland has to ever speak anything other than Finnish with does speak English.
So when one language is
already threatening your language so much that everyone has already given up trying to do anything about it, you're going to sit there worrying about some other language potentially threatening it instead because of immigrants who just recently arrived in your country? Yeah that makes sense.