Welsh and Scots Gaelic are spoken in parts of the UK but there will be very few (if any) monoglot speakers of these languages in the year 2010. Possibly some elderly lady on a remote farm who left school at 13 with only rudimentary English.
I assume things are going that way with the Native American languages. How many Indians cannot hold a conversation in English?
But what are the implications for the languages themselves when the monoglot speakers dry up? By implication, modern speakers are also proficient in another widely-spoken tongue and this must lead to a "peppering" of foreign terms in everyday speech.....as can be heard in contemporary Gaelic conversations. Does it also mean that a lot of obscure terms fall into disuse?
In Holland, virtually everyone is perfectly capable of using English but obviously Dutch remains the functioning language of the state and its media. I'm talking more about minority languages under threat from the majority tongue.
I assume things are going that way with the Native American languages. How many Indians cannot hold a conversation in English?
But what are the implications for the languages themselves when the monoglot speakers dry up? By implication, modern speakers are also proficient in another widely-spoken tongue and this must lead to a "peppering" of foreign terms in everyday speech.....as can be heard in contemporary Gaelic conversations. Does it also mean that a lot of obscure terms fall into disuse?
In Holland, virtually everyone is perfectly capable of using English but obviously Dutch remains the functioning language of the state and its media. I'm talking more about minority languages under threat from the majority tongue.