There are around 7,000 languages spoken in the world, but that number is shrinking. Unesco estimates that half could disappear by the end of the century. So how are languages lost, and what does that mean for the people who speak them?
There are around 7,000 languages spoken in the world, but that number is shrinking. Unesco estimates that half could disappear by the end of the century. So how are languages lost, and what does that mean for the people who speak them?
If the language stops being spoken then there are no people who speak them, and asking what something means for those nonexistent people is kind of weird.
I’m thinking that the loss of distinct languages in active use is not necessarily a bad thing overall. It means more people can communicate with each other more widely. By all means document these disappearing languages as much as possible before they’re gone, but there’s likely a good reason most of them are disappearing.
Gaeilge (Irish) is barely spoken because of Britian banning it, if people give up on speaking it it means a massive loss of an important piece of Irish culture.
There’s a saying: tír gan teanga, tír gan anam, meaning a country without a language is a country without a soul. A native language to a country can be an integral part of its culture.
This belief is called the “just world fallacy”. Sadly, the world is not just.
Most of these languages are disappearing due to colonialism. People’s traditional ways of living have been forcibly upended by capitalists and state governments, who have seized the commons around the world, and by colonialist policies such as residential schools. No longer able to support themselves using their traditional ways of living, people have been mde into wage slaves who must compete on the market to survive. That means using English or another widely-spoken language. Indigenous languages are much less useful to capitalists, and so gradually they wither and die.
We are at risk of killing 95% of the world’s languages, on top of the incalculable cultural damage that goes along with all of this, just to prop up a single way of being: liberal nation states. It is reprehensible beyond words.
Just because you have none who speaks your language, doesn’t mean you’re dead or don’t exist. Language is lost in pockets, not all at once. Communities dwindle until it’s just a few, then practicality of life makes them use their language less so language can even die while multiple speakers still engage in dialogue, of that dialogue isn’t in that language.
If there’s someone who speaks the language then it isn’t lost yet.
I suppose it’s interesting to muse about what it means for the last person to speak a language before it becomes lost, but that’s still just one person so it’s kind an abstract, academic concern.
Okay…
I speak – badly, but I’m fluent with my limited vocabulary – Low Saxon. Fuck I can do with it but embarrass supermarket cashiers whose skills are worse to non-existent. I could pass someone who knows the language perfectly, a true native speaker without the burden of generational gap in native proficiency, be asked for directions – and never know we could have talked in Low Saxon because the default language is the local Standard German.
It means that a mode of expression is dying. For us, as a people, it means that the natural expression of culture, of our modes and habits of interaction, is diluted due to the overwhelming influence of Standard German.
All this talk about “probably deserves to die”, “languages can’t be lost before there’s no people who speak it”, whatnot… point of interest: Do you happen to be monolingual.
There is nothing academic about it, this is as much a question of humanism as there is.
I don’t think I understand what you’re trying to get at, here. Are you implying that it’s not possible for people to speak more than one language?
Surely less languages means the chance of overlapping a language with someone else goes up?
Not really because there’s only a limited set of Lingua Francas and, say, Mali turning away from French in favour of e.g. English won’t make French disappear.
Yep…