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Languages Die Out | ||
Tags: Endangered Language | TV | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6659 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 9 of 20 01 November 2011 at 11:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The problem is that lots of the languages that will die out are spoken by only a very small number of people--maybe a few dozen, maybe a few hundred. Even many of us who want to learn these languages will have problems finding learning materials or people to speak them with.
I see many European and Asian languages surviving for quite some time. I don't know enough about African languages and their situation to make any reasonable guess about their futures. Indigenous languages of the Americas, Australia and the Pacific may well be the most likely candidates for extinction. If languages die, it's because the people who speak them believe that other languages are more useful. Ultimately, it's not up to those of us who speak English or Mandarin or any other "big" language to persuade speakers of "smaller" languages to hang on to those languages. As long as people who speak endangered languages see value in maintaining them, those languages will survive. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cpnlsn Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 6173 days ago 22 posts - 29 votes Speaks: English*, French, German | Message 10 of 20 03 November 2011 at 6:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the modern world allows more opportunities to document languages (wikipedia,
youtube) as well as instances where declining languages can be supported if there are enough speakers through cultural action (eg provision for bilingualism in Wales). One can become too anxious about this. English isn't going to displace national languages, even relatively small ones, though for a number of reasons English has become a 'lingua franca'. If it wasn't English it'd be another language. While quite small national languages will survive simply by virtue of there being a community if 'native' speakers and linguistic space (education, TV, politics, books...) the danger exists of much smaller dialects simply dying out with the last native speaker. At the very least one should attempt to document as many of these languages so their literature, poetry can still be read. Documenting can be important as a means of creating viable 'space' for a language community. I think this is so important because language is such a spectacular human creation. Nevertheless, and in spite of all reasonable efforts, languages and dialects are always going to fade out of existence. Often the threat isn't coming from international use of English but standardisation eg to French, German etc, isolating minority languages/dialects. A final point would be that one way languages die out is by becoming too big and splitting off, having different, similar descendants (eg Germanic languages, Latin and romance langs) and one day that could happen to English! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6582 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 11 of 20 03 November 2011 at 7:30am | IP Logged | |||||
It already has; just take a look at Singlish. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| strikingstar Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5173 days ago 292 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese, Swahili Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 12 of 20 03 November 2011 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
I would say that Singlish is English that has been filtered through a Chinese funnel and mixed with words from languages/dialects like Malay and Min Nan。It has split off from English (much like other English creoles like Tok Pisin.) However, in the absence of the influence of competing languages, would this split still have occurred? Ari, since you know Chinese, you would recognize that Singlish sentence structures parallel Chinese structures to a large extent. An example sentence: You yesterday got watch this show or not? （English: Did you watch this show yesterday?) This sentence drops tenses (did) and uses "yesterday" to refer to the past. In Mandarin, the equivalent sentence would be 你昨天有看这部戏码？Translated word for word, 你=You，昨天=yesterday，有=got，看=watch, 这部戏=this (noun counter) movie， 吗=expresses the nature of the sentence as a question, hence the use of "or not". Similarly in Canto, the sentence would be rendered as 你琴日有冇睇呢套戲呀? (Nei caam yat yao mou tai nee tou hei ah? Sorry I don't know jyutping.) As can be seen, word order in Singlish is largely similar to word order in Chinese. I think you would have an easy time learning and understanding Singlish. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6582 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 13 of 20 03 November 2011 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, surely French was influenced by Gallic languages, Spanish by Iberian languages and so on. No? The changes in English as compared to other Germanic languages are very much influenced by French. What is happening to English in Singapore is similar to what happened to Latin in France, though at an accelerated pace. There are lots of local Englishes in places like Africa and the Caribbean. Local Englishes are still relegated to an "L" status, and people write and speak "proper" English in formal and international contexts. But hey, that's just what it was like with the vernacular Latin variants that developed into the Romance languages, no? During their development, Latin continued to be used alongside the local vernaculars in formal and "international" situations. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| strikingstar Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5173 days ago 292 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese, Swahili Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 14 of 20 03 November 2011 at 7:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Ahh, but how different would modern French and Spanish be from Latin without the
influence of the Gallic and Iberian languages? Maybe I'm just being pedantic, but when cpnlsn mentioned "languages becoming too big and splitting off", I had something along the lines of a Protestant/Catholic or a Sunni/Shiite split in mind. However, if Singlish were the language equivalent of Protestantism or Catholicism, it would be like saying it split from Western Christianity because of Islamic influences. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6582 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 15 of 20 03 November 2011 at 8:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
A bit pedantic, maybe, as he (she?) specifically mentioned the Romance languages as an example. A language splitting up without the influence of outside languages would have to be a hypothetical example, as such a situation doesn't really exist in the real world (or at least hasn't for many centuries). And then it wouldn't be a "way that languages die" at all. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5178 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 16 of 20 03 November 2011 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I got an idea.
making a big library, both with text and recordings. speakers of endangered languages would be invited to write as much as they can, and contribute to the library. then, even if they will dissapear, people will have enough info to make them alive again, or at least it would useful to scientists. In Poland the language of Karain people is endangered, only 100 speakers or maybe less (most of them in Lithuania). but I think it's not only my idea, I have found a website, that has Religious recordings in a big deal of languages! even Sibe (dialect of Manchu, only few thousand people know ) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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