Dying languages

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Andreas Frey | Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Every two weeks a language dies out (last accessed on May 1.9.2024, 11.24, XNUMX:XNUMX p.m.)

“The extinction of small languages ​​is almost impossible to stop. But would their disappearance even be a loss? …

Of the 6 to 000 languages ​​in the world, at least half are threatened. A quarter are spoken by fewer than a thousand people, and some languages ​​are spoken by just one person. 

Linguists must hurry to find out more about the connection between language and thought. The death of small languages ​​is probably unstoppable. There is only one example in history of a successful revival of a language: that of Hebrew." 


It would be interesting to know at what point a language is considered a small language (threshold). The above article speaks of several tens of thousands of people remaining who speak the language, down to just one remaining person. It is noted that 6 million people now speak Hebrew as their mother tongue.

It is doubtful whether a few million native speakers will be enough to actually keep a language alive. It will certainly be interesting to see when the intelligentsia begins to move away from their own mother tongue. Even more interesting is the question of whether this is already happening with German.

Some languages ​​will be able to continue to exist (see Latin) but will hardly develop any further and will therefore become useless for everyday life.

It would only be worse if such languages ​​degenerated into pure “feed and fecal languages”: “mit scharf” — but already today without dative and genitive.

[https://iiics.org/h/20240901094800]

Addendum 2.9.2024

Andreas Frey today with the article “Is German dying out?“ and confirms that many intelligent people in Germany have already switched to English; especially the high achievers from outside. For them, learning German is not worth it, as the local population hardly understands even more complex sentences in German anymore — ergo, it is becoming increasingly rare to be able to have a reasonable conversation with natives in the local language.

And he asks the linguist Martin Haspelmath Finally: “Would you regret it if the German language died out?”

“Sure, but no language has ever survived for sentimental reasons. Nothing lasts forever.”


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