Do you feel concerned with the extinction of lanuages?
Yes it's sad when a language dies out but that's evolution for you. Languages will only survive as long as people are willing to speak them, you can't force them down people's throats. The Irish goverment have tried and failed on that score.
Sometimes a language can recover from a lowly position (eg Hebrew) but more often than not it continues to dwindle once a critical point has been passed.
Ironically, often the biggest factor in a language's decline is the attitude of the native speakers themselves. Nothing harms a language more than the refusal to pass one's native tongue on to the children.
fraz Thu Nov 12, 2009 11:48 am GMT
Yes it's sad when a language dies out but that's evolution for you. Languages will only survive as long as people are willing to speak them, you can't force them down people's throats. The Irish goverment have tried and failed on that score.
Sometimes a language can recover from a lowly position (eg Hebrew) but more often than not it continues to dwindle once a critical point has been passed.
Ironically, often the biggest factor in a language's decline is the attitude of the native speakers themselves. Nothing harms a language more than the refusal to pass one's native tongue on to the children.
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Good point!
Have you wondered any deeper why even native speakers of certain languages even don't have incentives to have their own children speak their own tongue?
<<It is a duty of honour for every nation to preserve their own minority languages.>>
It isn't a duty of honour for France.
For France it's a duty of honour to preserve French and nothing else. With English invading our lives it would be absurd to revive languages that are already dead or about to die in France.
<i hate to see the dying of cajun french in louisiana. i am not interested in any snod comments about it either. i just hate to see it die out. it really is a beautiful dialect of french.>
actually I'd say more young people are learning Cajun French than did about 20 years ago so I doubt it will "die", but it won't really thrive either, probably freeze at around 10% of the Acadiana population. The thing is for so long it was something Louisiana tried to punish, and now they associate it with tourist dollars and are trying to regrow it. For example I did highschool in a Cajun French emmersion program while in the 60s my parents were punished for speaking French at school.
and yes we can communicate with French people, but they think we sound strange and old fashioned due to our rolled Rs and and some unique letter combinations and vowel pronunciations. I've been amazed though at how similar the French of Louisiana and the Acadian French in New Brunswick still are even after 250 years apart.
I think as long as major representatives of each language family, group etc remain intact it's not such a big deal if some minor language dies out.
For example, as long as Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian etc survive, it doesn't really matter if Sicilian or Occitan die out. As long as Russian, Ukranian, Polish etc survive, it doesn't really matter if Sorbian or Rusyn die out.
In an ideal world they'd all survive, but there are more important issues...
Shouldn't that be "les nuages"? Just joking a bit here. Yes, I'd be concerned about the extinction of clouds.
On the one hand, people want more and more constructed languages, but on the other hand languages are dying out. Linguists would do better to save the dying ones, but jmo.
I'm not going to do it. I didn't study linguistics and don't have the tools in my box to save them, but some of you probably do.
Sorbian
Sorbian is so peculiar and unique. If it died out it would be a great loss. It has some features that most Slavonic languages do no possess anymore. Each language is part of mankind's intellectual accomplishment and its disappearance is a grievous loss
<<Sorbian
Sorbian is so peculiar and unique. If it died out it would be a great loss. It has some features that most Slavonic languages do no possess anymore. Each language is part of mankind's intellectual accomplishment and its disappearance is a grievous loss >>
Not really. It only seems peculiar and unique because it is rare. But what if it were Sorbian that were spoken by 150 million people and Russian that were in danger? Surely Russian would be considered "peculiar and unique"?
who gives a shit if a language dies out theres got to be about 300 languages you might say so but your not gonna know every single one i bet in every country there is a (eg. chineese) person who speaks english but seriously i dont teally give a little rats ass
Linguistic diversity is more of a pain than a blessing I tell you. I have arisen from my ashes and traded my Spanish with English long time ago.
I hope both FRench and Spanish will be extinct soon