The death of language?

Stats:

6% of the worlds languages are spoken by 94% of the world's population
The remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the population
The largest single language by population is Mandarin (845 million speakers) followed by Spanish (329 million speakers) and English (328 million speakers).
133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people
SOURCE: Ethnologue

:sarcasm:

Hell, we can't even teach our own English... that or they don't want to be taught. I mean, the latest trope is, gen-Y has "no work ethic". Logical; companies don't reward good performance anymore. It's about lowering costs without the consequences. I can't blame our youth, one way or the other. Anymore...

If 133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people, either the definition of language must be different from how most people would see it, or the author is referring to academics who are experts in the remnants of dead languages.

In any event, it seems to me that the easier it is for the people of the world to communicate with one another, the better. Some languages will fall by the wayside, which if you view language as technology would make as much sense as any displaced technology disappearing from disuse.

"Among the ranks are the two known speakers of Lipan Apache alive in the US, four speakers of Totoro in Columbia and the single Bikya speaker in Cameroon." and "The death in 2008 of Chief Marie Smith Jones signalled the death her language".

Languages that were spoken by a tribe or culture that had kept a certain distance from others, but which, when regular interaction with others all speaking a much more popular language started, became a matter of choice, that fewer and fewer parents passed on to their children.

The example of Cornish, which was gradually revived during the 20th century, shows how a language can die down to just a few speakers. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_language

A displaced technology is generally displaced because it was inferior by an objective measure; saying languages are 'inferior', apart from 'more people speak that one', is a very subjective thing. And you may lose poetry, stories and parts of a culture with a language disappearing.

Many are native American languages. Cahuilla, the language of the native Americans who were in the Palm Springs, CA area long before the Anglo arrived, is one of these languages. The younger generation goes to school and learns English in the Palm Springs school district. There is no instruction in their native language, and only a couple of Cahuilla-English dictionaries or grammars exist. Tribe members in their 70's and 80's knew it as their first language; their children are bi-lingual but have little opportunity to use it; and for the grandchildren it is a distant second language that they only learn if they are really interested.

There really are actual living languages whose speaking populations have diminished so much that only a literal handful of people still speak them. The languages they use are every bit as much a real language as English is, and still used for their primary day-to-day lives.

I'm personally more disturbed by various plant/animal species disappearing forever than I am about some languages...

And like someone else pointed out above me, maybe the fewer languages that are spoken, the better for world understanding...which is hard enough without misunderstandings over language.

We can't even understand each other in ONE language as it is...


anyway, there it is. I don't care that some languages are disappearing, although they could be documented and archived or whatever.

I don't want my grandkids to only be able to see wild animals in a book...

:(

a couple hundred thousand droolers.

can come the (effective) loss of different ways of looking at things (ways of being), of understanding, of alternatives to establishment-"think"... of freedom of mind.

Consider, for example (or so I've read), the word Koyaanisqatsi: crazy life; life in turmoil; life out of balance; life disintegrating; a state of life that calls for another way of living.

How wise.

How appropriate.

*: Whether in the sense of the loss of entire languages, or the sense of just the loss from (/corruption of) common usage (comprehension) of important parts of (important understandings contained within) prevailing languages.

seeing that film, you certainly understand it afterward.

Terrific film. Other ways of seeing indeed.

I *speak* a number of dead computer languages. Their demise was seen by many as a good thing.

studied it for a while, but I had no luck in finding anyone in the area to speak with/learn with.

If you think find those who speak Esperanto is hard, try finding CORAL 66 users in the USA.

As a bit of an amateur linguist I find the great diversity of grammatical structures in different languages fascinating. From "Isolating" languages like English, Maori, and Chinese, to Agglutinative languages like Basque, Turkish, and Finnish, to Fusional languages like German and Russian, to Polysythetic languages like Ojibwe, Nahuatl, and Abkhaz.

He better get off his ass and start recording and writing down.

"language and identity, if people begin to think of their language as useless, they see their identity as such as well."

This, I think, is stupid. I find it kind of like saying "If 'American Idol' gets canceled, then I loose my identity as an American". Of course, if it did get canceled, I could care less.

If your Identity is so tied up in one thing, time to see a shrink.

Seems to me there's a lot more to a person then language. And if the kids cared, they could always learn it.

Sometimes, no one cares but you. I got my family history from my mother, traced it back to 1640. Talked to my two brothers and sister, they could care less.

If he recorded these languages, then maybe someday someone that does care can pick it up again.

:)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2726479

Sorry--best I can do is kick. Too late for a rec.