Languages that could become endangered or die

[Mycernius]

I have just been looking at Lexicos thread about 'Language Extiction by 2060?'
and it has got me thinking, especially the post by Duff o dosh

if languages go extinct japanese will be one of them do to the popularity of learning other languages in japan. all people do is talk about korean, chinese and english.

It seems with the dominance of English on the world could put healthy languages into the endangered zone. It has already done this to local native languages in North America and Australia. It strikes me that only languages that are widely spoken outside their native country could resist the onslaught of the English language. There only two or three that I can think of that can achieve this, one being Spanish and the other Arabic. What I would like to know are which languages that appear to be healthy today could be classed as endangered in the next 100 to 150 years. Also in the future with only a handful of dominant languages being spoken could they merge together and form a new language. Already a lot of languages borrow from others and these words eventually become part of that language. English is one example of how different languages can merge to become a seperate one ie: Germanic based + Latin based = English.
As Duff o dosh said Japanese could become a dying language in 100 to 150 years time as more natives take to learning English. It could even happen to Chinese. After all there are more than one spoken language in China. English is becoming the common language within the country, as it is in India ,for easier communication between different language groups.

[lexico]

I haven't been to the topic for a while, and basically I have no idea what I think or what I should think about it. But your rephrasing the idea gives me a chance to think differently.

The basic idea was that the current 5,000-6,000 languages will be reduced to about 100 or less within two generations for the simple reason that

1) Parents are spending less and less time with their children for enough language and culture to be transmitted to their children. Unabomber Ted Kazinski (sp.?) also spoke of 'mother deprivation' due to strengthened state/corporate control on women in the guise of feminism.

2) With the school institution being the primary means of education, politically weak or outnumbered minority languages will quickly face insufficient transmission and marginalization within two generations.

3) The remaining 100 or fewer languages will also merge their boundaries, compete for dominance, leaving a handful of live languages that will be redistributed over the globe.

Two factors that might have an impact on this language extinction phenomenon:

A. Transition from fossil-based, exploitation-based, growth-oriented economy to sun-based, equilibrium-based, homeostatic economy would prefer smaller cities, minimum transportation, and localized production-consumption cultures.

B. Whereas internationalized economy prefers verbal communication in a common language, the localized cultures might just do with written communication via the internet. This might leave the spoken medium intact from language colonization.

If the low environmental stock of fossil fuel can effectively put enough pressure on our production-consumption ideology for it to transform into a new, sustainable priciple, then the increasingly localized future societies might have a better chance of preserving more of the languages than what are now predicted to disappear under the classical exploitation model of economy. Of course, English or some other common means of potentially global communication would not be necessary, and even it were so, with enough people fluent in their native tongues in the spoken and in English in the written, languages in clusters of say 10,000 speakers and above might have a much longer life than predicted in the other 'Language Extinction by 2060 ?' thread. How will it be ?

edit: You have interesting points that I haven't given proper attention, Mycernius. Let me return to those shortly.

[ralian]

Although English is not an easy language to learn due to its irregularities, probably it will stay.
I just remembered that in the movie "Blade Runner", the detective spoke street language. This language is a mixture of Spanish and Asian languages.
I wonder such new language will emerge... Maybe in 200 -300 years time?

[lexico]

n the movie "Blade Runner", the detective spoke street language. This language is a mixture of Spanish and Asian languages.
I wonder such new language will emerge... Maybe in 200 -300 years time?

Interesting scene you quote; I almost forgot that part of the movie.

Let us suppose that Americans from N & S Americas have a lot of business/tourism/teaching/etc. to do in Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, HK, or Hanoi and take up roughly 20% of the population for a long period. Each would start copying words, expressions, accents, and tiny bits of grammar from the other. Eventually they would speak a pidgin crossed from English-Portuguese-Spanish-Japanese-Korean-Mandarin-Shanghainese-Taiwanese-Cantonese-Vietnamese or a select subset thereof.
Any kids born into those pidgin speaking cities will become native speakers of whatever pidgin ! Sounds exciting, doesn't it ?

[bossel]

Any kids born into those pidgin speaking cities will become native speakers of whatever pidgin ! Sounds exciting, doesn't it ?

For the definition I learned, as soon as a language has native speakers (IE becomes a mother tongue) it is no pidgin anymore. Merging 2 languages doesn't constitute a pidgin either, AFAIK.
Several pidgins derived from English, but English itself has never been a pidgin.

For the general topic of language extinction, I can't really see the problem. It seems people put too much importance in language. It's just a communications tool.
When languages die out, that doesn't mean that any related culture follows suit. It's more probable to happen the other way round: when a culture dies, the related language dies as well. Although, it does not have to be like that. Languages can survive a culture, a culture can survive a related language.

[lexico]

For the definition I learned, as soon as a language has native speakers (IE becomes a mother tongue) it is no pidgin anymore.

True. Technically it would become a creole with the first baby babbling its first words in the pidgin vocabulary of the parents. Creole would be the correct word.

Merging 2 languages doesn't constitute a pidgin either, AFAIK.

If the merging isn't artificial as in Esperanto, then doesn't a natural merging of two natural languages involve pidginization/creolization ?

English itself has never been a pidgin.

Sorry, I disagree. Let me dramatize a kitchen scene in circa 1066 Britain with fake OE and NF neither of which I know.

a Norman steward: Apportez moi une vache.
a British cook: A vixen ? Do you eat vixen in Normandy ?

Norman: Non ! Une vache ! *going down on all four, mooing*
British: Fox in the mating season ? o_O

Norman: Non ! Un boef ! *making two horns with the hands*
Britsh: Ah, cow on the hoof, is that how you Normans call it ? Boyf ?

Norman: Oui, et non. Bo-o-e-ef.
British: Hm, sounds like be-ef to me.

Norman: Eh...bien ~. *is vexed*
British: So beef it is, coming right up. Jack, go kill me a cow for our new lords !
*humph, they call cows beef ! How uncultured compared to us British !*

In all practicality, there was a pidgin stage after the battle of Hastings in and around the Norman communities who had to mingle with the Anglo-Saxion Old English speakers to get their services. Kids growing up in the pidginized Old English-Norman language environment became speakers of the creole which lost much of the inflection rules of either OE or NF. But it would be too low of the English to admit they had a stage of pidgin and creole; those are only for the culturally backward pacific islanders ? :rolleyes:

[lexico]

if languages go extinct japanese will be one of them do to the popularity of learning other languages in japan. all people do is talk about korean, chinese and english.

I believe all those talks about other languages are being conducted in Japanese ? If indeed the trend is established that Japanese be the intermediate language of language learning, then just that can be enough cause to keep Japanese alive; but there should be other reasons as valid as that.

It seems with the dominance of English on the world could put healthy languages into the endangered zone. It has already done this to local native languages in North America and Australia. It strikes me that only languages that are widely spoken outside their native country could resist the onslaught of the English language. There only two or three that I can think of that can achieve this, one being Spanish and the other Arabic.

The dominance of English language alone seems to have a weak foundation by itself unless it is already well established as the preferred language of communication. Interpreting English as the Anglo-Saxon or British people by blood may have more substance than language alone, yet still lacks something. The superior material technology and economy that drives people to move around and negotiate superior deals, whether forceful or diplomatic, seems to have made both the English nation and language successful imo. As for other wiespread languages, how does Chinese fare, either Mandarin or Cantonese ? They have the higher ethnic barrier, yet that may change with time.

What I would like to know are which languages that appear to be healthy today could be classed as endangered in the next 100 to 150 years.

Should economic blocs bring speakers of two languages together for intensive, long-term interaction, and there is even a slight preference due to population ratio or certain priviledged stutus, the minority or underpriviledged language will lose out in the end.

Also in the future with only a handful of dominant languages being spoken could they merge together and form a new language. Already a lot of languages borrow from others and these words eventually become part of that language. English is one example of how different languages can merge to become a seperate one ie: Germanic based + Latin based = English.

Two or more languages merged in the !st generation of speakers are pidgin, 2nd generation and after speaking it as a native tongue is creole; the pacific islands have experience pidgin/creole English earlier in history in the 19-20th century. (year ?)

As duff o josh said Japanese could become a dying language in 100 to 150 years time as more natives take to learning English. It could even happen to Chinese. After all there are more than one spoken language in China. English is becoming the common language within the country, as it is in India, for easier communication between different language groups.

Although some degree of normative statement, and all its varieties of Chinese and non-Chinese lanaguages are often mutually unintelligible, China's people have achieved a high degree of communication ability in Mandarin throughout the regions often on top of the local languages. Mandarin has already taken firm roots as the mutually understood language, also called beifang putonghua �k�����ʘb or guanhua ���b. If the political unity is dissolved and conpulsory education in Mandarin is discontinued, highly unlikely at the moment, then English might become an option for the peoples of China.

edit: Sorry about the misspelling, duff o josh !

[Wang]

Language extinction is only a real danger for the languages that are spoken by fewer then 100,000 people which is about 90% of all the languages in the world.
However Japanese language is one of the largest and most used of all languages. Ofcourse it will survive together with other major world languages.


Linguists estimate that there are 6,809 "living" languages in the world today, but 90 per cent of them are spoken by fewer than 100,000 people, and some languages are even rarer – 46 are known to have just one native speaker. "There are 357 languages with under 50 speakers. Rare languages are more likely to show evidence of decline than commoner ones," Professor Sutherland said.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0515-05.htm

[duff_o_josh]

i wish one of you would have typed my name correctly. another thing isnt china working hard to have english as a second language by 2008 for the olympics?

[lexico]

I looked around for "second language" "English" "2008 Olympics" but couldn't find a meanigful match. Since Japan and Korea have considered haveing English as the 2nd offical language, there might have been similar plan for a 2nd language in China, though.

What is true is that English will be the standard language for international participants and international guests. That can be done without having Englsh as a second language. They are training/recruiting people to serve as interpreters during the games.

[duff_o_josh]

I looked around for "second language" "English" "2008 Olympics" but couldn't find a meanigful match. Since Japan and Korea have considered haveing English as the 2nd offical language, there might have been similar plan for a 2nd language in China, though.

What is true is that English will be the standard language for international participants and international guests. That can be done without having Englsh as a second language. They are training/recruiting people to serve as interpreters during the games.

hmm, all i know is that currently( in the last 2 years) china has been hiring english teachers like crazy. I have read some job postings saying that it was preporation for the 2008 games.

[Duo]

I hope that we don't have any languages die out in our modern era.... it would be a loss to civilization and to the overall culture of mankind.

[Brett142]

Cornish - I couldn't even believe it was a real language

[sparkey]

Cornish - I couldn't even believe it was a real language

Cornish did die, already. It's hard to say when, although I think its total extinction happened circa 1891, when John Davey died. Its current status is strictly as an academically revived language, with several competing standards. It's tough to call it a living language at the moment, and that will probably remain the case unless the revival has greater success and standardization over the course of time.

Why did it surprise you that it is a real language? The history of the British Isles shows pretty clearly that Brythonic was displaced by English, and split into regional dialects that became their own languages (namely Welsh and Cornish).

I've started topics that deal with the Cornish here and here.