Re: World Lingos

Marcus Smith wrote:

> Raymond Brown wrote:
>
> >Languages die very hard.  Welsh not merely survives, but has now gained
> >official recognition for the first time in centuries and there is no
> >shortage of people who want to learn it.   Gaelic, I understand, is
> >experiencing some sort of revival in the Scottish Highlands.  And Cornish,
> >which just struggled on to the last century has now been revived and there
> >are now some who have Cornish as their first language.
> >
> >Languages do not die easily.
>
> To the contrary.  Languages die very easily.
Not really.  It's both, and neither, because language life and death is almost
entirely dependent on extralinguistic factors.  If the circumstances favor its
presence, then it will generally stay, and vice-versa.  Atatürk's difficulties in making
changes to Turkish  testify to that:   when people already speak a language and
there are strong cultural, economic, and historic reasons for their use of that language,
it can be well nigh impossible to effect any real change on a population by government
mandate.  If people already think of language varieties as being lesser, for nationalist
or patriotic reasons for example, then government may perhaps speed up the
decay by institutional education systems.  This happened to the patois speech
varieties of French, for example.

Governments can, however, only speed up or slow down the spread of language,
not fundamentally change it one way or the other.

> The ones you mention are exceptions, not the rule.
Certainly.

> To see that, all you have to do is look at the
> linguistic history of the Americas.  Only half the languages spoken when
> Europeans arrived are still spoken.  This is not completely the result of
> massacre and genocide, but is due in large part to the opression of linguistic
> minorities.
Yes, in part, but also there are often strong economic forces driving language
use.  Since most people see language as a mean to an end, rather than the end
itself, they will tend to learn and use those language varieties which further their
needs;  RP English, for example, or the spread of Latin in Western Europe during
the Roman Empire.   In each of these cases, the prestige speech variety is picked
up because it affords the speaker a better material life, and can lead to the actual
extinction of their former speech varieties (like with Scots now, or many now
unknown Gaelic varieties on the continent then) which don't afford that
same advantage.

> There is no chance of reviving them in some Hebrew-like fashion,
> because they were largely unwritten and undocumented.  Even today many of the
> languages dying have poor documentation and virtually no written record.
That is certainly the case, which is all the more reason to lament their loss.

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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