The future of languages 3

Just found, through this post of BJ Epstein, an old post on NYT, about how many languages will die in this century. Many, but not as much as I imagined.

“SOME 6,500 languages spoken in the world today. And, according to the 2000 census, you can hear at least 92 of them on the streets of New York. You can probably hear more; the census lumps some of them together simply as “other.”

Here the link

The future of languages 2

Just met online Mark Griffith and found this very interesting web-site where the future of languages is the central issue of the author. Here the key point raised by Mark:

“Linguistic minorities are communities of ordinary people whose native tongue is not their country’s main official language. Swedish speakers in Finland, French speakers in Canada, Hungarian speakers in Slovakia – and hundreds more – are linguistic minorities. Thousands of unique language communities are becoming extinct. Out of the world’s five to six thousand languages, we hardly know what we’re losing, what literatures, philosophies, ways of thinking, are disappearing right now. So?

We may soon regret the extinction of thousands of entire linguistic cultures even more than we regret the needless extinction of many animals and plants. The planet is increasingly dominated by a handful of major-language monocultures like Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Indonesian, Urdu, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Swahili, Russian, Cantonese Chinese, Japanese, Bengali – all beautiful and fascinating languages. But so are the 5,000 others!”

And here the link: http://www.otherlanguages.org/

The future of languages

Given the current pace of globalisation, emigration, mixed-languages couples and tele-learning, the number of spoken languages is drastically falling, but, on the other hand, the number of people who are fluent in more than one language is steadily increasing.

It is obvious (and sad, I know) than in 1000 years very few of the indigenous Brasilian languages will be lost (today still 200 are surviving, out of the 5000 estimate in the pre-colombian age).

It is also obvious that major languages as English, German, French, Mandarin, Japanese will continue to thrive. But what about the languages currently spoken by few hundred-thousands or even few millions people (as Danish or Catalan)?