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Understudied European languages | ||
Tags: European Languages | Rare Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6103 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 25 of 85 05 January 2012 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'd like to highlight Romanian. 25 million speakers but only 337 speak or study it on HTLAL.
It's a shame because it's such a beautiful sounding language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 26 of 85 05 January 2012 at 11:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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That's interesting. Here in Russia Italian is very popular, more so than Spanish really (of course Spanish is far less popular than in the US). Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Armenian are all taught at my former uni.
The downside of teaching various languages is that in many cases the student has no choice. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Alanjazz Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4813 days ago 65 posts - 129 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese | Message 27 of 85 06 January 2012 at 12:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Serpent - I don't quite understand your point. The downside of teaching various languages is that in many cases the
student has no choice? Do you mean that it is too bad if a given language is popular in a country learners won't have other options because of this language? (like English/German/Spanish/French in many cases) Thanks. Edited by Alanjazz on 06 January 2012 at 12:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| birthdaysuit Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4815 days ago 48 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Swedish | Message 28 of 85 06 January 2012 at 1:55am | IP Logged | ||
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I agree on Italian. I think it's a language many people would like to speak, but said
people often choose Spanish over it (probably due to the myth about how easy it is to learn). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 29 of 85 06 January 2012 at 6:22am | IP Logged | ||
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5044 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 30 of 85 06 January 2012 at 7:23am | IP Logged | ||
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A lot of the languages listed seem to be from the point of view that the number of speakers or the number of learners is qualification enough for a language to be dubbed understudied.
However, imho it seems very logical that languages that have fewer speakers are studied less, simply because the majority of learners aren't on a course of polyglottery, but rather follow the more natural reasons of studying languages to which they have a relationship. For instance family or friendship ties, physical or linguistic adjacency of your friendly neighboring country, which are generally correlated to population of native speakers. Failing that most "normal" people tend to go with popular languages, popularity of which is largely correlated to the number of native speakers or economic/tourist potential which also is indirectly tied to population numbers. Having said that it seems to me that understudied languages would be languages where some measure (for simplicity sakes let's say percentage or ratio), says that a language judged by its popularity measure (let's say number of natives) is underrepresented in some measure of learners (for instance those who try or those who succeed). It doesn't seem to be fair to call a language understudied simply by the measure of who studies it outside the context of how many should realistically be studying it. Has anyone come across any studies that calculated or taken into account all the numerous variables that go into defining the language popularity? Please cite any such endeavors, or feel free to do back-of-the-napkin math yourself if you'd like. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 31 of 85 06 January 2012 at 7:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Actually it is not unexpected that Portuguese has fewer learners than Spanish. In the USA they have a lot of Spanish-speaking 'Latinos' within their borders, but not nearly as many who speak Portuguese. In Europe Spain is both bigger and receives far more tourists than Portugal. Outside Europe you could expect a more equal distribution of learners, but there will probably all in all be fewer of them.
In Europe I would say that Ukranian definitely has fewer learners than you would expect from its population, and the same applies to Romania. But it seems that even the Ukranians themselves partly prefer Russian, and it is a relatively young nation which receives few visitors. Romania has some minorities, but here it is mainly the lack of economical punch that matters. One thing that may have lessened the number of learners is its reputation as a weirdo among the ROmance languages. So people who already have learnt one 'Western' Romance language, for instance French, Italian or Spanish will be more inclined to learn one more language from that group than Romanian. Some European are little studied because of dwindling numbers of speakers and few sources to learn from - and the Celtic languages belong here. Albanian, Latvian and Lithuanian have each a country with a population that actually speak those languages (although there are many Russian speakers in the Baltic countries), but until recently they were more or less inaccessible for people from Western Europe so we haven't any traditions for learning them. Besides they represent other families within the Indoeuropean languages so you would expect them to be difficult to learn. I'm not aware of the number of people who study Modern Greek, but my guess is that there are more who try to learn to read Ancient Greek than students of the living language - the writing system may be part of the explanation for that (only theologians don't fear their first non-Latin alphabet). But you can't blame this on lack of speakers or low visitor numbers, so I would certainly see Greek as been an understudied language. And finally we have the Non-Indoeuropean languages. Maltese, Basque, Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian all have a reputation for being difficult and exotic, and having learnt one won't help you much with the others. Within Europe we have also have Turkish, - well the fact is that we have lots of workers from Turkey, but many in reality are Kurds, who have their own language. But in spite of this caveat those who study Turkish have easy access to native speakers, TV/radio and written texts which should make life easier for them. But we have never had a tradition for learning Turkish, and we hardly know about Turkish culture from the Ottoman period so those who study languages for cultural/historical will be more inclined to learn one of the traditional favorites, like French or German, where they know what to expect. And those who might study Turkish for professional reasons have to compete with perfectly bilingual second or third generation immigrants. There is however one ominous fact more to take into consideration, namely that all European language are severely understudied compared to English. The persons who choose films for TV or for cinemas all speak English, so it is just so damned easy for them to buy one more series or single film from USA or England instead of one from for instance Albania or some other 'underrepresented' country. And this will of course lessened both the number (and budget) of productions in there AND the activity to sell them abroad, so this vicious circle is not likely to be broken soon. Inside each European country there may be a reasonable amount of cultural activity, but exchanges between the countries are secondary compared to the tsunami of Anglophone stuff. Some may like this, many don't care, and those few who would like a bit more variation haven't got a chance to change the situation. Thank heavens for the internet, which permit us to bypass the usual channels to get our daily ration of linguistic diversity. Edited by Iversen on 06 January 2012 at 4:27pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Gallo1801 Diglot Senior Member Spain Joined 4900 days ago 164 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), Croatian, German, French | Message 32 of 85 21 January 2012 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Albanian. Small, relatively isolated, and has not close relatives.
Celtic Languages. Overshadowed by the national languages. Romanian. Emigrant nation, they easily learn other peoples' Greek. I hardly ever hear about someone studying Modern Greek. Turkish: As Iversen pointed out. And it's not Indo-European. Slovenian, Macedonian, Bulgarian. Tiny places. The slavs are usually outshined by Russian, but no one ever says "I'm studying Slovenian!" or "Let's sign up for Macedonian this semester." Czech, Slovak, BSC, and Polish all get some love. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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