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Languages Die Out | ||
Tags: Endangered Language | TV | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6665 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes  Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 17 of 20 04 November 2011 at 12:47am | IP Logged | ||
I strongly disagree: The value of a language does not only consist in the literature it has produced. Linguistic textbooks are full of examples from obscure languages that show how languages can express concepts in different ways. Linguistic diversity helps us to understand general patterns that govern language, which will become much more difficult if the number of languages is reduced. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Remster Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4805 days ago 120 posts - 134 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: German, French | Message 18 of 20 04 November 2011 at 10:43am | IP Logged | ||
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It depends, languages that are spoken nationwide won't disappear in the near future.
They might change though.f Honestly, languages dying out is a natural proces. It's sad when it happens, but there's not much you can do about it. A language spoken somewhere in a remote rainforest won't be missed, even though it might've been a fun language. Some linguistic people will miss it, but if it's hardly known, there won't be much of an impact. Now I would be curious what would happen if someone made English disappear overnight. Although that would mean I'd go back to being monolingual... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Superking Diglot Groupie United States polyglutwastaken.blo Joined 6643 days ago 87 posts - 194 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 19 of 20 26 January 2012 at 5:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Keeping a language alive that has below a certain number of speakers is not dissimilar to trying to keep a species alive that is down to its last 10-20 members. In the case of species, there is just probably not enough biodiversity to keep the line going, and in the case of languages, there is just not enough going on there to avoid a collapse. Two Tagish speakers, no matter how fervent they are, are going to have a devil of a time keeping their language alive in the middle of an English and French-speaking country such as Canada. Which language are their children going to learn? I think history shows us that they're going to speak what their peers speak, not what their parents speak.
Language loss is not good news, no more than species loss is -- however, oftentimes it's unavoidable and the only thing we can do is document them and save them as history. Trying to revive them often seems like no more than a vigorous upstream swim. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6105 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 20 of 20 18 February 2012 at 7:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Clumsy wrote:
"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." You may interested to read this article from the BBC - Digital Tools to Save languages Facebook, YouTube and texting are being used to preserve and promote some of the world's endangered languages. There's even an iPhone app for Tuvan (spoken in Mongolia and Siberia). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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