There are more than 7,000 languages. The number of people speaking English, Spanish and Mandarin continues to grow, but every fortnight a langauge will disappear forever. The Economist’s language expert Lane Greene explains why.
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Irankarapte
iishu
Dydh Da
I don’t speak those languages. In fact very few people do. They’re used only by a handful of people, and all those languages are in danger of extinction. There are more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world today but about 1/3 of those have fewer than 1000 speakers and according to UNESCO more than 40% of those languages are in danger of extinction.
In fact every fortnight one of the world’s languages disappears forever. When you say dead language many people think of Latin, but Latin actually never died it’s been spoken continuously since the time of the Caesars, but it changed very gradually over 2,000 years until it became French, Spanish, and other Romance languages. True language death happens when communities switched to other languages and parents stopped raising their children to speak their old ones. Then the last elderly speaker dies the language is unlikely ever to be spoken fluently again.
If you look at this chart which measures the world’s languages in terms of their size and their state of health you can see that most languages are ranked in the middle. English like just a few other dominant languages is up at the top left hand corner it’s in a really strong state but if your language is down here in the bottom right hand corner of the graph like Kayupulau from Indonesia or Kuruaya from Brazil you are in serious trouble.
In the bad old days governments just banned languages they didn’t like but sometimes the pressure is more subtle. Any teenager growing up in the Soviet Union soon realized that whatever language you spoke at home, mastering Russian was going to be the key to success. Citizens of China including Tibetans as well as speakers of Shanghainese or Cantonese face similar pressure today to focus on Mandarin.
Once the language is gone well it usually goes the way of the dodo – just one language has ever come back from the dead – Hebrew. It was extinct for two millennia but Jewish settlers to Palestine in the early 20th centuries spoke different languages back in Europe and they adopted Hebrew on their arrival as their common language. It became Israel’s official language when the country was fully established in 1948 and now has seven million speakers. Now Hebrew is the world’s only fully revived language but others are trying. Cornish, spoken in southwestern England, died out two centuries ago but today there are several hundred speakers of the revived language.
Practicality aside human diversity is a good thing in its own right. Imagine going on an exciting holiday only to find that the food, clothing, buildings, the people and yes the language was just the same as back home. Oliver Wendell Holmes put it well “every language is a temple in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined”. Moving that soul of the people from a temple into a museum just isn’t the same thing.
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Go Catalan! Go Occitan! #NotSpanishNorFrench
Romania speaks all language
0:39 you hear that? Every time you play Fortnite, a language dies. Overwatch doesn't kill languages. Overwatch is the best.
I am disappointed dinosaurs were not to blame.
They become extinct because of global elite snowflake SJW cucks who don’t know that Muslims and socialists caused every war and disease outbreak in history! Right, Russian Troll Squad?
I was in Europe.
The place looks like Rockville.
You didn't actually explain why. The series "The Adventure of English" demonstrates why languages die, without actually saying it: English is a dynamic, accumulative mechanism for enabling rich communication. It is EVOLVING, and as such it's pushing out less evolved languages. Evolution is a process of adaptation, in which fitness for purpose weeds out the less adaptive. English's "fitness for purpose" is its ability to allow us to communicate effectively and most expressively. It's simply a better tool, so it squeezes out all its competition.
Latin remains a living language, although one mostly spoken within the Roman Catholic Church. The number of speakers might not impress, but the cultural infrastructure is solid and the will to perpetuate the language remains strong; also, it is widely studied as an auxiliary language. So long as that continue: the language is not dead.
every time u play fortnite one language dissapears
People are dying due to war, terrorism, crime, drugs. Women and girls are on a regular basis being abducted and trafficked around the world, than forced into prostitution and you are concerned about endangered languages. These languages cannot resolve a single real world problem.
Brilliant.
Brilliant.
你嘅傻鱉會畵中國地圖嗎？臺灣哪去了？
Unlike species, which die unvoluntarily at the hands of man, languages nowadays (apart from a few culturally repressive places) usually die because of conscious (and often well-founded) decisions by its speakers to not use it any more or not teach it to their children. The network effect determines that the fewer speakers a language has, the less useful it is – and thus the less motivation anyone should have to learn it.
The world may become slightly poorer in oral traditions and written literature with every language that dies, but the people who let it die become greatly richer in communication and knowledge about the world.
This is globalisations and we won't be able to reverse the trend (nor should we, in my opinion)!
Azul fellawen, thanks for the video. Like my language Berber/tamazight is still suffering from panarabisme repression. If our language won't be taught at primary school ,the only way to save it is to get our autonomy or independence
If all humanity spoke one language it would be awesome.
The video doesn’t really explain why more and more languages are becoming extinct. You cannot explain this phenomenon without also asking how the great diversity came into being in the first place. Why would the process of increasing diversification suddenly get reversed? Is it only because of the British Empire + the Internet…. 🙂 there must be some deeper structural things going on here…
This is so interesting!!
I had no idea there were so many languages still
I sepak basque. An incredible lenguage with over 1.00.000 speakers that is spoken on the north of Spain, but not in Spain. In the basque country. No one knows where it comes from. Is one of the oldest lenguages in the world.
Why there should be a multi-language? If billions of people who spoke one language,why can't be it as a global language?
I speak a little Cornish! He pronounced 'dydh da' wrong btw
The language of Gematria, when God merged letters with numbers. What year did that merge occur?
We live under Gematria every day and have named them "programmed events." WHO's running that dam'd Gematria program?
oooooOOOoohhhhhhHHHhhh no ENGLISH is going to die the next morning …………………
May I know from where words came? Who made them…
Can anyone find the graph shown at 1:27? It has to be somewhere on the internet