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Future of Languages? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| 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 9 of 21 17 April 2010 at 2:06am | IP Logged | |||||
Technologically, we can maintain as many languages as we want. The issue is that the (rather new) concept of nations is killing off languages at a pace we could never have imagined a century ago. I recently met a guy from Cameroon who told me that the "dialects" are about to die, as French and English are increasing. According to Ethnologue, what he means by dialects are the 280+ languages spoken in Cameroon, which are likely to go extinct in the next two generations. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ManicGenius Senior Member United States Joined 5481 days ago 288 posts - 420 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, French, Japanese | Message 10 of 21 17 April 2010 at 2:11am | IP Logged | |||||
I really doubt that. Any colonization in this solar system would be in range of communications, therefore making it a possible to transfer entertainment/news etc within the matter of 12 minutes to Mars, a little over 5 hours to Pluto. (I'm not talking radio, I'm referring to some sort of laser communications. Laser communications to the moon would be negligible, but I seriously doubt any capacity of colonization outside of science labs or mines. Even then that's assuming we can actually successfully colonize those areas. So throwing the doubting aside, any colonization in this solar system will not create whole new languages, but would most likely end up making dialects of whoever has been settled there. Think the English accent morphing into the American/Canadian/Australian/South African accents. Something similar, just in space. But if you were to extend colonization to other star systems... Then yeah, unless we discovered some kind of Quantum Entanglement (Where two particles act exactly the same regardless of distance) communications system, then most likely languages would deviate. Even if we colonized Alpha-Centauri, all communications would take 4.37 years and even then considering we aimed the laser correctly. Not even counting the travel time, which would most likely not even be close to light speed, so... people frozen for 50 years, by the time they got to the next star and settled and beamed communications back... they'd be 55 years behind on how languages evolved. My head hurts now. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ManicGenius Senior Member United States Joined 5481 days ago 288 posts - 420 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, French, Japanese | Message 11 of 21 17 April 2010 at 2:13am | IP Logged | |||||
2012 is real and WILL happen. Will the world end? F*%# no. But the year 2012 is real and will happen. Same as the year 2010 is real and is happening, as well as the year 2011, 2009, etc etc etc. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Smart Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5339 days ago 352 posts - 398 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Latin, French Studies: German | Message 12 of 21 17 April 2010 at 2:19am | IP Logged | |||||
Of course, still anything to do with colonization or non-earthborn humans is sci-fi. And I could not possibly believe the world will end in 2012. I believe we need to stop wasting billions of dollars on space. Not a drop of money should go to NASA. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Smart Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5339 days ago 352 posts - 398 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Latin, French Studies: German | Message 13 of 21 17 April 2010 at 2:20am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm aware and that's exactly what I am talking about. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5447 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 14 of 21 17 April 2010 at 2:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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The stories we're writing today about language death and language diversity could just as easily have been written when Latin was sweeping across Europe, Arabic across Africa and Arabia or Persian and Turkic across Central Asia, if only anybody had realized there was a story to be told. But here's the curious thing: Latin is a dead language too, and yet it's one of the most powerful languages in the world still, with Latin words on the tongues of speakers across the Americas, Western Europe and large swaths of Africa.
The real story of language death is, in fact, language transformation. While we notice the passing of a language whose single remaining speaker is now gone, we don't notice Old Persian turning into Farsi, Dari and Tajik, don't notice Old Turki turning into Uzbek, Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz... And if Occitan disappears, subsumed by French, what's the story for language diversity? In the short run, you've got a language death. But in the long run, even if French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian kill off every other Romance language, that still means that 5 languages have replaced one (Latin). In the next millenium, as always, major languages will overrun minor languages. But at the same time, major languages will transform and fragment. Will we have as many languages as before? I don't think so, because mass communication and the global village make it harder for societies of a couple thousand people to avoid being subsumed into the largest nearby culture. But these same forces make it easier for loosely associated peoples to unite into a sustainable culture instead of having their individual societies die off one by one. That is, a tribe of 5,000 in the Amazon can't escape Brazilian influence, perhaps, but a country like the Ukraine or Belarus might just have a better chance of sustaining itself as an independent nation outside the Russian umbrella. So while a lot of little languages will die, a lot of middling languages will survive. What's more, we'll probably see Serbian and Croatian diverging, and maybe Romanian and Moldovan - i.e. changing world politics will both sustain and create new languages by allowing closely related speech communities to go their own way. Finally, as America and France grow still warier of empire building and maintenance and Latin American identy fragments, English, French and Spanish will certainly evolve and probably wind up spinning off a few new languages that may still call themselves by the old names but where the mutual intelligibility factors will grow more problematic. I'm already starting see this with Spanish where teachers in the school where I work use different names for even everyday objects depending on where they're from. A while back, there was a thread where somebody wondered how many languages you'd need to speak to communicate with 80% or 90% of the inhabitants of the globe. When people started running the numbers, it looked like he had his work cut out for him. Notwithstanding language death and worries about dwindling diversity, I don't think that living another 50 or even 500 years will make this person's task significantly easier. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Johntm Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5422 days ago 616 posts - 725 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 15 of 21 17 April 2010 at 6:00am | IP Logged | |||||
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6042 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 16 of 21 17 April 2010 at 6:57am | IP Logged | |||||
Living on the moon might not be science fiction. But living on a moon that is completely independent. One that is completely self sustainable/sufficient is science fiction. At least for now. A new "moon" language can't evovlve until the moon's inhabitants can live in complete isolation. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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