Tiste, you said :
"Tiste Friday, October 29, 2004, 17:52 GMT
to nic:
-Breton , ENDANGERED
-Catalan , ENDANGERED
-Channel Island French ( I'll bet you don't even know what that is ... ),
ENDANGERED
-Occitan (spoken by elderly people, kids don't care anymore...),
ENDANGERED
-Basque , POTENTIALLY ENDANGERED
-Dalmatian ( I'm talking about the dialect , duh....), ENDANGERED
-Romansch , ENDANGERED
-Francoprovençal ( All the varaints are spoken by the elderly ) ,
I have many breton friends, they all speak breton in family, Catalan is spoken in Spain by all the catalan people and less in France as 1st language, occitan is spoken by my family i must admit i have difficulties to speak it but i understand it ; basque is absolutly not in danger as the opposite of catalan it's spoken in France and in Spain, franco-provençal is dead in the Lyon area but not in Savoie and absolutly not in Italy.
I don't see because you are belgian it makes you a specialist about languages spoken in France or Spain, as a french person i don't know anything about languages situation in Belgium.
Belgium and France and Spain are different countries
Nic,
amic, deves admetre que la lenga nòstra a desaparegut de la vida cotidiana dels occitans uèi. Ta familia es un cas excepcional perque aquò's fòrça dificil trapar de locutors naturals. Dins mon vilatge d'origina, sonque los de mai de 80 ans sabon encara la lenga.
You must admit that our language already has disappeared from the every day life of the occitan people nowadays. Your family is an exceptionnal case because now it is very hard to find out native speakers of the language. In my ancestors' village, only those who are more than 80 years old still can speak it.
I'm sorry guys, I guess you we're right ( I double-checked and I did find some mistakes in my list of endangered languages, so I have to apoligize )
I went to Bretagne ( in the area of Roscoff ) last year, and I didn't heard a single soul speak Breton ! But there we're a lot of signs in breton , like kreiz-ker , da bep tu etc...
Roscoff is situated in the ' so called ' still breton speaking area ...
( could someone inform me about the situation in Briton ?)
sorry got the word Britanny mixed up with "the britons" ...
Vincent,
I admit the situation is not very good but when i was at school we had the possibility to learn occitan like you can learn english. My grand parents (they are old) speak to me in occitan and sometimes in french.
Tiste,
I am not breton but some of friends who are told me, the Bretagne is divided in 2 linguistics countries : the gallo which is a mix of breton+french language and another part where people use to speak pure breton language which is very close to the welsh one.
vincent,
Where are you from?
I could be wrong , but I think Occitan is something like an overlap between French and Spanish ...
I would rather say that Occitan is a link between northern Italian dialects, French and Catalan. Based on what Vincent wrote, it has some similarity to all of the above, but also a peculiar flavour of its own. A flavour I like, by the way...
Very interesting statement, Gee ...
Does a language stop along with it's country border ? Or is there considerable overlap between languages ?
-> There's a Dutch village near the border of germany , where they speak a local dialect . People here say it's a Dutch dialect, while the villagers of the neighboring town , which is located in Germany say there dialect is in fact German. Their dialect don't even differ
Nic,
la familha de mon paire es del latz del Velai, actualament dins la region Auvernha. Ailai la situacion es fòrça marrida per la lenga nòstra, i a sonque un mainatge dins la calandreta del Puèi de Velai. Mas quand t'escrivi es en occitan estandard, dins mon dialecte aquò serià diferent.
My father's family is from Velay, an old province belonging to the Auvergne region. Overthere the situation is worse for our language, there's only one pupil in the "calandreta" (private-associative school which teaches mainly in occitan) in Le Puy en Velay (chief-town of the Haute-Loire district). When i'm writing to you i do it in standard occitan, using the dialect of my region it would be a bit different.
i think it's wonderful because as long as i am still alive the linguistic world will remain as it is today, and all my language learning will not be in vain. sure some languages will die out a century from now and english will take over the world, but not before i die, so what do i care? i try to keep things in perspective.
try to embrace the impermanence of things a bit more. then you will enjoy things more. and finally, the dread of languages dying out, English taking over the world, and all that nonense: it will all become meaningless and trivial.
i think it's sort of neat to conceptualize the history of world nations as a description of which languages lost and won.
in other words, if the english language wins, then the world will cutlurally have been conquered by the british and all of western europe. please don't let this be so. :(
> there language
Should be THEIR language . Sorry, I make these small mistakes a lot.
The entire world speaking English !? That's like I would be losing my identity !Your native language should be something to be proud of !