# Future dead languages



## MonsieurAquilone

I was wondering what opinions people had on the future of today's 'living languages'.  Are they destined to death...which ones?....does language evolve so there is no death, per se?

Thank you


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## vince

Suggesting any language as a future dead one will probably generate a lot of controversy and flames, since a lot of people tie language to culture and predicting the death of a language is tantamount to predicting the end of an entire culture.

With that said, I think the languages immediately threatened with total extinction are languages spoken in areas that have one national language that is exclusively taught in the school system and used in all public areas and government. Many of these languages are eventually abandoned as all young people converse exclusively in the national language and retain only a small bit of the language for use with grandparents. Even more at threat are languages that do not have standardized written forms, or are considered as "dialects" by the government and/or the language-speakers themselves, despite linguistic proof on the contrary.

So here are my candidates:
A ) Considered dialects by locals despite being linguistically further apart than many European "languages":
- non-Mandarin Chinese languages (Wu (Shanghainese), Yue (Cantonese), Min (Taiwanese), Hakka, etc.) in China
- Ryukyu languages in Japan
- Burmese languages
- certain Finnic languages spoken in the Baltic region

I did not include most European languages because they tend to be recognized as minority languages and may even be used by local gov'ts in the area
e.g. Breton, Welsh, Occitan, Walloon

B ) Unrelated languages abandoned for the national language:
- Ainu languages
- native American and Australasian languages

These languages I think will be pretty much extinct in the next 50 years.

In the very long term, I can predict that some major world languages will decline significantly in importance but won't be extinct (e.g. Greek in the past 2000 years)
- French
- German
- Japanese
- Russian


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## ronanpoirier

Well... I guess someday all the present languages will be extinct... but the one which I think will be gone first XD will be Italian... I don't know I just feel it. I odn't have any GOOd reason to say that but that's the way I think.

Portuguese may also disappears for two reasons: In Europe, it's not spoken in a great area and in Brazil I think it will change so much that it won't be Portuguese anymore :-S only Africa will last... but they have so many influence of Brazilian Portuguese, they will change too... and that's the end of the Portuguese language 

And if the human race exticts, then there will be no language at all XD maybe some dolphins and whales will envolve their capacity of communication


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## cuchuflete

Whatever 'XD' means, I suspect it is a leftover from some extinct language. If it is chatspeak, please save it for chat rooms.


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## ronanpoirier

XD is an emoticon such as  and . If I can't use them, so I hope you tell everyone which uses  and  to do not use them too! It is not my fault that the quick reply doesn't have these emoticons    which the regular reply have.


But that's not about the thread so I'll just leave another opinion: 

I think all the languages will someday die because the language is totally related to the culture. People make the language, if they change, the language will change too... or do you still dress and talk like someone from the 20's?


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## MonsieurAquilone

will english ever die, i do not want to create outrage, but is there a language that can surpass the life of English?


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## vince

who knows, it is too early to tell

it's like asking in the 2nd century BC whether Latin will ever die
It would be spoken for another couple hundred years, written as a lingua franca for the educated elite for another two thousand years, and evolved into different languages that are widely spoken today (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, etc)

I think that, notwithstanding some major world war that reduces the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia to 3rd-world status, English will remain the dominant world language for at least 150 years. Even if China rises to the level of the U.S., the fact that Mandarin is only spoken in one region won't allow it to become a lingua franca like English.


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## danielfranco

I believe the first languages to go will be the ones spoken throughout the South American rainforest.


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## chuff

I think that English is far too widely spoken to just become extinct.

In my view, I think that the language that is least spoken will die first.
Has anyone ever heard of the Voynich Script before? I think that was a good example, perhaps...
 I'm not certain.


...

XD


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## TimeHP

> will english ever die, i do not want to create outrage, but is there a language that can surpass the life of English?


 
Yes, you're probably right.
But I think that in Ancient Times, Romans may have had a similar idea. _Will Latin ever die? ..._
Now it is a dead language.
Who can be sure about the future of the languages? 
Don't forget that Chinese is the first language, not English. And Chinese people have just begun to be in international business...



> Well... I guess someday all the present languages will be extinct... but the one which I think will be gone first XD will be Italian... I don't know I just feel it. I odn't have any GOOd reason to say that but that's the way I think.


 
I think that Italian will never die because it is a beautiful language and in Italy people is not going to use English as a first language. Moreover lots of people in the world like our _opera lirica._

I really hope that all languages and all dialects will ever live. 
Ciao


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## tvdxer

MonsieurAquilone said:
			
		

> I was wondering what opinions people had on the future of today's 'living languages'.  Are they destined to death...which ones?....does language evolve so there is no death, per se?
> 
> Thank you



Many of today's present languages are in extreme danger of extinction.  If you go to Ethnologue (probably one of the best language resources on the internet) and do a bit of browsing you will find many languages that have only a few living speakers.  For example, take Nungali, which was spoken by _2_ in 1981...and since speakers of quasi-extinct languages are often old, there is a good chance that those two may have died, leaving nobody else to speak it.  

In cases like these, there is no evolution...the would-be younger speakers generally shift to another language, perhaps English in this case (I'm not sure).  The language simply ceases to be spoken.

This is different from, for example, Latin, which didn't so much die as split off into numerous dialects, which eventually became so distant from one another as to be unintelligible, and hence separate languages.  Will this happen to English or French?  I don't think so, because modern communication seems to prevent such a thing from happening.  Some think that due to increased mobility, for example, the diversity of American English dialects will be severely undermined in the not-so-distant future.


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## Savoir

Being a native Cantonese speaker, I don't think Cantonese will die, at least not in 50 years. There're more than 7 million people in Hong Kong, and there're many other Cantonese speakers in Guangdong province and all over the world. The first thing China immigrants do when they arrive in Hong Kong is to speak Cantonese, and their children become native Cantonese speakers. Besides, I've heard Cantonese is a very ancient language, even older than Mandarin. It, like many other Chinese dialects, has survived time. Why should/would they become extinct in 50 years?


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## macta123

I have heard Irish is declining at a rapid rate!! I am not sure. But Ireland has less Irish speakers(from Daily Use point of view).


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## Markus

Well, all languages change a lot over time ... we may call English now the same thing that was spoken 500 years ago in England, but we wouldn't be able to understand each other. If "English" is still alive in another 500 years but it's just as different again, can we really say it's the same thing we're speaking now? Also, since English is really coming into force as the international language, and because English is very flexible and doesn't suffer the problem of puritans legislating the language (i.e. French), I think that it is going to change even more rapidly in the future.


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## Outsider

MonsieurAquilone said:
			
		

> I was wondering what opinions people had on the future of today's 'living languages'.  Are they destined to death...which ones?....does language evolve so there is no death, per se?
> 
> Thank you


On your last question:

A language 'evolves' when it turns into another, or others. In a sense, Latin did not die; it's still alive in all the Romance languages. Old English is still alive in Modern English, too.
A language 'dies' when it ceases to be spoken, without leaving any descendents. Gothic and Dalmatian are examples of languages that have died.

Sadly (because I've always liked languages, in all their variety), I think that most of the world's languages are destined to die -- not just evolve -- in the near future. The world is becoming increasingly globalized, and human societies are organizing into nation-states, and then supranational federations. Preserving all languages, some of which are used only by very small communities, in states where there is a lot of poverty, is simply too expensive. Our leaders won't say it because it's politically incorrect, but letting most languages die off is the path of least resistence.


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## GenJen54

Many Native American dialects are at huge risk of dying simply because they are not being passed on to successive generations.  The tribal elders, many of whom are the last fluent speakers of these languages are dying and few tribal schools are teaching them.   Few children growing up on reservations today learn their native tongues. 

The upside to this (if any), is that linguists who have studied these languages do have many many recordings of them.  They simply are falling out of use.


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## Pivra

Languages spoken in Thailand that I think would become a dead language within at least 100 years
Lanna (Spoken in Northern Thailand by everyone but they have stoped using their alphabets and use our Siamese writing instead, but I guess it would take time for them to become a dead language)
Jawi (Spoken in the old Sultanate provinces and Brunei)
Mon
Hmong
Tai Dam
Akha


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## maxiogee

MonsieurAquilone said:
			
		

> I was wondering what opinions people had on the future of today's 'living languages'.  Are they destined to death...which ones?....does language evolve so there is no death, per se?
> 
> Thank you



Well, as there are no people who go through their lives without using som e langauge then there can be no death, per se - as you ask. However what does die are the concepts which were particular to a now-dead language, ones which had no exact translation into another language.
We are cultural creatures, and our langauges express that culture as it is perceived and expressed by a tribe/culture/civilisation. Losing a language means that something intrinsic to a culture has been lost to humanity as a whole, and may never be rediscovered.
This may not be bad thing. Irish is a dead-on-its-feet language. It is not really capable of independent existence in the world today. I don't know that it is anything inherent within it which will be irreplacable, but I think that it has been dying for so long that anything it possessed which was unique to it may well have been either culturally deceased as the people skipped from the mid 19th century existence to a late 20th century existence in the span of a few short years, or was since been adopted by English in that 'borrowing' way it assimilates words and concepts from other languages for which it has not yet come up with its own creations.

So yes, languages die. But they really only die when the culture which spawned them dies, and that is more to be worried about than the death of a language.


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## Vanda

GenJen


> Many Native American dialects are at huge risk of dying simply because they are not being passed on to successive generations. The tribal elders, many of whom are the last fluent speakers of these languages are dying and few tribal schools are teaching them


 
Same history, same story!  I´ve researched about it and found here some interesting things on languages in extinction, mainly here:

According to UNESCO a language needs to be spoken by 100,000 natives nearly, to pass from one generation to another.
The idioms *udihe, eyak and arikapu*, spoken in Siberia, Alaska and Brasil respectively, have the worst perspectives. Only 100 persons speak udihe, 6 persons speak arikapu and only 1 speak eyak, according to Worldwatch. 
From the 170 languages and dialects spoken by Brazilian indians in Brazil only 9 languages have more than 5,000 speakers: Guajajara, Sateré-Mawé, Xavante, Yanomami, Terena, Makuxi, Kaingang, Ticuna and Guarani. Around 110 languages have less than 400 speakers.  Guarani seems to be the most spoken with 30,000 speakers.
Here, too, very few tribes have teachers passing their languages to the new generation, although in some places we can see some effort towards that, but still very few, a grain of sand in a desert!


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## Outsider

According to Wikipedia, Nheengatu has around 30 000 speakers. It's an interesting language, having been the most widely spoken one in Brazil, centuries ago.


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## frenchtranslater

I think one of the only languages that will never die is hebrew. For a fact, hebrew is spoken on our planet for now more than 6000 years. 

Personally I feel alienated when people do not even know this language exists


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## vince

Savoir said:
			
		

> Being a native Cantonese speaker, I don't think Cantonese will die, at least not in 50 years. There're more than 7 million people in Hong Kong, and there're many other Cantonese speakers in Guangdong province and all over the world. The first thing China immigrants do when they arrive in Hong Kong is to speak Cantonese, and their children become native Cantonese speakers. Besides, I've heard Cantonese is a very ancient language, even older than Mandarin. It, like many other Chinese dialects, has survived time. Why should/would they become extinct in 50 years?


Cantonese will probably be the last non-Mandarin Chinese language to die out,  it probably has at least 100 years left, mainly because it is still spoken by almost everyone in Hong Kong. But its influence is steadily declining as people in Guangdong gradually switch to Mandarin and North American Chinatowns gradually switch from Cantonese (HK and Taishan dialects) to Mandarin. Soon HK will be the only place that speaks Cantonese, and as the rest of the Chinese world goes to Mandarin, it might switch too.

I urge that since Cantonese is the non-Mandarin Chinese language most likely to survive, Cantonese-speakers should work to promote it and develop a standardized written language that will survive even if the spoken language is abandoned. People should start writing in Cantonese for literature, journalism, and business instead of dismissing Written Cantonese as "just a bunch of slang and colloquialisms". This does not necessarily mean you have to stop writing Standard Chinese (based on Mandarin). Catalans take pride in their language, and read and write in it in addition to Standard Spanish (based on Castilian) so why can't the Cantonese? Thanks to active promotion of the written Catalan language by the Catalonian government, Catalan is alive and in no danger of extinction like it was 50 years ago. Can we say the same about Chinese languages?


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## Savoir

Mandarin has become a national language only since 1949. People from all provinces still keep their dialects and regional culture despite the national language. If they can't keep their dialects, I'd doubt they can keep their cultures too. I may be a living proof to tell you after 50 years, but no more than that. Many people do write Cantonese on forums, but opinion towards written Cantonese has not changed, so far. The world has been changing so fast since 1900. One thing for sure, the Mandarin and Cantonese we're speaking will be different from that 100 years later. However, at present, very few of we Cantonese speakers can speak Mandarin. There is little necessity and chance to speak Mandarin in HK, at present. There is the urge and necessity for Mandarin or dialect speakers to speak Cantonese, on the contrary. Therefore, the no. of Cantonese speakers is increasing.


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## vince

I think the situation is different in HK as I said before. People still speak cantonese, it's live and well, and way more popular than Mandarin. but the same cannot be said anywhere else in the Chinese world. Basically every young person in mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore is more fluent in Mandarin than their local language.

And it does not help that you are degrading their languages as "dialects". 
Nobody cares about how many dialects people speak, heck, I can speak Australian English, British English, Canadian English, Midwestern English and Southern U.S.-English complete with their accents and slang. But if that's all I speak, then I am UNILINGUAL since I only speak English. People in China may speak many "dialects", but then China has always been unilingual ---  everyone only speaks "Chinese"!

Only when people recognize that Wu, Min, Gan, Hakka, Yue, Mandarin, etc are languages in their own right will preservation of these languages be taken seriously.


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## Savoir

Vince,

I hope this will not develop into a fierce debate. I just want to clarify some points. You raised a good point- unilingual. Historically, Mandarin is indeed one of the Chinese dialects that became the national language. All Chinese speak their regional Chinese dialects but write the same national language, which unites the whole nation. I'm sure the many other Chinese on this forum will agree that we speak dialects but write one language. It's a typical Chinese thinking, and I'M NOT DEGRADING THE DIALECTS, NOR WILL I UPGRADE THEM TO THE STATUS OF LANGUAGES, SINCE WE HAVE ONLY ONE LANGUAGE - CHINESE, AND THIS IS WHAT UNITES CHINESE PEOPLE ALL OVER THE WORLD, TOGETHER WITH OUR CULTURE. 

One foreigner has asked me, "Why do people in Hong Kong think they are Chinese, and not Hong Kong people?" Despite their different nationalities, whether Singapore, Taiwan, Canadian or Hong Kong, Chinese all over the world still regard themselves Chinese, because of the unifying force of their  language and culture, despite their diff dialects.

Language, unfortunately, has always been involved in political struggles worldwide. Thus, the upgrading of dialects into languages can trigger  unprecedented political struggles and breakup of the Chinese empire, which no Chinese will be in favour of. Thus, the linguistic reality of dialects and languages cannot override traditional and political considerations.

Btw, Chinese is not the only language with so many dialects. The Indian language has many dialects, but the dialect speakers still consider themselves Indian speaking the same language, not languages.

Btw, English, whether American or British or Australian or Canadian, are comprehensible even to a non-native English speaker. One Chinese dialect, however, is incomprehensible to speakers of a different dialect. As I've said, linguistic reality is one thing, traditional belief and political consideration is another thing.

Geographical distance is an important factor in preserving and developing regional varieties of languages, such as the diff accents of diff American states. So the physical distances between the Chinese provinces will help preserve the regional dialects, whereas the unification of the written Chinese language since the Chun dynasty will keep Chinese unified, people and language.


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## Outsider

Savoir said:
			
		

> Btw, Chinese is not the only language with so many dialects. The Indian language has many dialects, but the dialect speakers still consider themselves Indian speaking the same language, not languages.


I agree with most of what you wrote, but here I must stop you -- what 'Indian' language are you talking about? India has dozens of different languages!

P.S. In any case, Chinese, with all its dialects combined, is still not the only language of China. Even in the past, the Manchu language was used by the dynasty with the same name, and it has no relation to Chinese.


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## vince

Savoir said:
			
		

> Vince,
> 
> Btw, Chinese is not the only language with so many dialects. The Indian language has many dialects, but the dialect speakers still consider themselves Indian speaking the same language, not languages.


Incorrect, Indian people regard their languages (most of which are closer together* than Chinese dialects) as LANGUAGES.

In fact, one of the defining moments of Bangladeshi independence was when university students walked into gunfire from Pakistani authorities to protest the suppression of the Bengali language in favor of Hindustani.

As long as people continue to view all Chinese languages as "ONE LANGUAGE", no one will take the preservation of Wu,  Yue, Minnan, and Hakka seriously. I urge you to change your thinking. You can keep calling the Chinese languages "fangyan" 方言 when you talk to Chinese people, but when you talk to non-Chinese people, please translate this term as "regional language", not dialect. Because outside of China, the term "dialect" refers to a minor variant of a language, mostly intelligible, that differs only in accent, slang, and regionalisms.

The death of non-Mandarin Chinese languages is near, please do not hasten it.


*of course I am excluding Dravidian languages like Telugu and Tamil, which are as distant from Indian as Korean and Uighur are from Chinese. I am talking about Sanskrit-related Indo-Aryan languages like Hindu, Urdu, Gujarati, Panjabi, Bangla, etc.


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## Korena

MonsieurAquilone said:
			
		

> I was wondering what opinions people had on the future of today's 'living languages'. Are they destined to death...which ones?....does language evolve so there is no death, per se?
> 
> Thank you


 
To add my opinion, I think that the Romance languages will stay "alive" and present in the future since they are the most used. Over 600 million people across the world use those languages. And Germanic languages have 450 million people speaking them all over the globe. 
I got my information at this website:
http://www.ielanguages.com/eurolang.html

-Korena


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## Outsider

vince said:
			
		

> You can keep calling the Chinese languages "fangyan" when you talk to Chinese people, but when you talk to non-Chinese people, please translate this term as "regional language", not dialect. Because outside of China, the term "dialect" refers to a minor variant of a language, mostly intelligible, that differs only in accent, slang, and regionalisms.


That is not true. There is no consensual definition of "language", not even among linguists.


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## vince

Outsider said:
			
		

> P.S. In any case, Chinese, with all its dialects combined, is still not the only language of China. Even in the past, the Manchu language was used by the dynasty with the same name, and it has no relation to Chinese.


You should not be calling Chinese languages dialects, because if Mandarin and Cantonese are the same language, so are Portuguese and Spanish, which differ much less grammatically, lexically, and even phonetically from the Chinese "dialects". The only difference is that all Chinese people write in the same Mandarin-based language known in English as "Written Chinese". (not exactly Mandarin, but its grammar and syntax and most of its vocabulary is). Many times, Chinese languages have their own DISTINCT written languages but they are always cast off in favor of Mandarin-based "Written Chinese", for the written forms of their own languages are viewed as inferior, local patois.


			
				Outsider said:
			
		

> That is not true. There is no consensual definition of "language", not even among linguists.



You see, from a layman's perspective who does not know Portuguese or Spanish, Portuguese and Spanish are, in their minds, as conceptually different as Spanish and Mandarin. Same thing with Swedish and Norwegian or Serbian and Croatian.

But if you attach the label "dialect" to a group of languages, then the general public sees them as variants not unlike British English and American English, which differ by accent, slang, and some minor vocabulary. (I believe this is the view that most Chinese people present when they explain to non-Chinese about their "many dialects".)

I find it amusing that some people find it impressive when a person lists that they are "multilingual: I understand Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Belorussian, Slovenian, Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian". Wow, a person who understands 12 languages? What a polyglot! No.

But tell someone that you know 12 Chinese dialects, no one cares because everyone knows you can pick up dialects from spending a week over in Australia or watching Aussie TV, learning the accent, the slang, etc. No effort!

That's why it is important that we view Chinese languages as just that -- languages, so that people will take them seriously.

If people stopped speaking Catalan or Galician, people will get upset. But no one will shed a tear when Hakka or Minnan die off 20 years from now. People just decided to learn to speak the educated dialect - Mandarin, right?


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## Bienvenidos

I believe that some languages will never die (especially those that are speaken by large groups of people). Just an example, Persian is one of the oldest languages still spoken in the world today; some historians believe it was spoken at the start of the 2nd millennium BC. It's influence has been vast: poetry, proverbs, etc. In fact, a large group of *English words *(English, now being a dominant world language) came from Persian! Thus, if it is still around today, and if other languages have been influenced by it, I think it will stay around for a long time. English will definately stay...I don't see how it could become extinct.

As for endangered languages, there are a ton of them, and it really is sad, because once a language is lost, it won't come back. We're lucky to know so much about ancient Latin, but most other languages that have died we know nothing about; sometimes we don't even know their names! However, I think that in some cases, it's inevitable for languages to die, and there's not much we can do to stop it really. 

*Bien*


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## vince

When a language stops being spoken everywhere, it is essentially dead. However, if the language had a standardized written form, this makes it harder for a language to die because it can always be learned again. Even if it does die (or is substantially less used), it can be revived, as in what happened with Hebrew. I think that a lot of languages that don't have standardized written forms, like Burmese languages, non-Mandarin Chinese languages, and many Native American/Australian languages, are in most danger of extinction.


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## Pivra

vince said:
			
		

> When a language stops being spoken everywhere, it is essentially dead. However, if the language had a standardized written form, this makes it harder for a language to die because it can always be learned again. Even if it does die (or is substantially less used), it can be revived, as in what happened with Hebrew. I think that a lot of languages that don't have standardized written forms, like Burmese languages, non-Mandarin Chinese languages, and many Native American/Australian languages, are in most danger of extinction.


 
When you say this, do you mean languages that don't have a standardized written form in their own alphabets or don't have a standardized romanized written form?


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## vince

In their own alphabets

Any kind of written record, so that it can be learned in posterity even if all native speakers die off.

e.g. we know (at least a little bit) what the ancient Egyptian language was like, how its grammar worked, etc. But we can only guess at what the ancient language of people in Lusitania (western Iberia) looked like before the Romans came in, because these languages were almost never written.


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## Outsider

vince said:
			
		

> You should not be calling Chinese languages dialects, because if Mandarin and Cantonese are the same language, so are Portuguese and Spanish, which differ much less grammatically, lexically, and even phonetically from the Chinese "dialects".


That would be true if languages were defined the same way everywhere in the world, but they aren't.

You are trying to impose your own orderly classifications on a stubbornly inordenate reality.


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## Savoir

Sometimes it is difficult to explain chinese languages and concepts to non-chinese.

Some basics: The term "Mandarin" is overused to represent the Chinese language, spoken and written. In fact, "Mandarin" refers only to the spoken language used in Beijing and the areas around it. The national language and the proper name used in China since 1949 is "Putonghua", 普通話, meaning common dialect.

"Mandarin" refers also to the common dialect and official language used in Taiwan, but the name used there is 國語, meaning national language. Since this term has a political reference, it is a controversial term.

There used to be only 1 common writing system used in China, the traditional characters. The term "traditional characters" has only come to existence with the invention of "simplified characters" since 1949. When foreigners talk about learning "mandarin", they are referring to "Putonghua" and "simplified characters" used in China, as opposed to the Mandarin accents and traditional characters used in Taiwan.

In fact, written Chinese has undergone much revolution and evolution since 1900 with the modern written chinese movement advocated by modern Chinese characters, who helped the use of modern written Chinese by writing. There may be a written cantonese movement in the future, who knows? Some people even suggest romanization of the chinese language.

The chinese translation of regional dialect is 方言。We never use the term language 語言 for  Wu, Min, Gan, Hakka, Yue. No Chinese will call their dialects "languages". It's a well embedded ideology native Chinese are born with. We won't call our dialects regional languages 地方語言.

The reason why Mandarin is becoming more common in Chinatown than Cantonese is the increasing no of China immigrants, as opposed to a majority of HK immigrants before. As China is gaining in international status and influence, so is Mandarin.


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## MonsieurAquilone

Would politics have anything to do with the 'extinction' of a language..?


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## vince

Outsider said:
			
		

> That would be true if languages were defined the same way everywhere in the world, but they aren't.
> 
> You are trying to impose your own orderly classifications on a stubbornly inordenate reality.


In order to compare two different situations, a single classification system must be used. However, in choosing a particular classification system, you will lose consensus with the people from one, the other, or both situations. I have simply chosen my system to correspond to the Western linguistic criteria of "mutual intelligibility".

I could go by the Chinese system in that languages are defined by written language: if two languages do not have independent written languages and therefore must conform to a single written form, then the two languages are dialects, whether or not the written form matches up with the spoken language. In this way, all Sinitic Chinese languages are dialects. Modern Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean are not dialects because their written forms are clearly distinct and exhibit the vastly different grammatical structure of their languages, however Archaic Japanese, Archaic Vietnamese, and Archaic Korean were dialects of Chinese, solely because they relied on writing in Classical Chinese but with Vietnamese, Japanese and Korean pronunciations of the characters*. This despite their spoken forms sounding nothing like any Chinese language, having no genetic relation. (See: Japanese Kanbun and Vietnamese Chu Nho)

Should Chinese people forget about writing Chinese characters and start writing in a phonetic alphabet, all the Chinese "dialects" would instantly become languages, since the absence of (largely) non-phonetic Chinese characters would make keeping one written language senseless for such divergent spoken forms. (Why would a Cantonese person write "chi" for 吃 like Mandarin-people do, when a spelling like "hek" would make 1000x more sense?)

*I am referring to the earliest stages of East Asian literary history, even before the Japanese manyogana and Vietnamese Chu nom where Chinese characters were used for phonetic value or moved around to suit the Vietnamese and Japanese written languages. I am referring to the time when everyone wrote in Classical Chinese, the grammar and syntax was basically the same from Vietnam to China to Korea to Japan but the written language was "proper" to each country in that its pronunciation was modified to fit the local language (Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese)


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## Pivra

I think politic plays big part in making a language extinct.

Eg. 

Canada's French, Scottish, Welsh, Manchurian, Belarussian, Latin, Burmese languages, Native americans' languages, these examples of languages that depend on how they are treated by the majority population.


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## MonsieurAquilone

That is a good point. What impact linguistically may have resulted across Eastern Europe due to Soviet rule?


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## ireney

Politics play a very important role. Reviewing the history of the language of the Pomaks is a good example. It also shows the importance of a writen language since it is only in recent years, after Greece  decided to right some of the wrongs of the past that an effort to 'create' a writen language has been made and the movement is considered essential in preserving the language.
 (I won't provide you with any links since, according to which 'side' a site belongs to, you'll read a different story about them).


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## panjabigator

frenchtranslater said:
			
		

> I think one of the only languages that will never die is hebrew. For a fact, hebrew is spoken on our planet for now more than 6000 years.
> 
> Personally I feel alienated when people do not even know this language exists



I was under the impression that Hebrew, as a spoken language, was only recently revived.  However, Im very happy that it is growing in Popularity!


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## Pivra

maxiogee said:
			
		

> Well, as there are no people who go through their lives without using som e langauge then there can be no death, per se - as you ask. However what does die are the concepts which were particular to a now-dead language, ones which had no exact translation into another language.
> We are cultural creatures, and our langauges express that culture as it is perceived and expressed by a tribe/culture/civilisation. Losing a language means that something intrinsic to a culture has been lost to humanity as a whole, and may never be rediscovered.
> This may not be bad thing. Irish is a dead-on-its-feet language. It is not really capable of independent existence in the world today. I don't know that it is anything inherent within it which will be irreplacable, but I think that it has been dying for so long that anything it possessed which was unique to it may well have been either culturally deceased as the people skipped from the mid 19th century existence to a late 20th century existence in the span of a few short years, or was since been adopted by English in that 'borrowing' way it assimilates words and concepts from other languages for which it has not yet come up with its own creations.
> 
> So yes, languages die. But they really only die when the culture which spawned them dies, and that is more to be worried about than the death of a language.


 
 How about cultures without their own language such as American? They dont have their own language but still their culture is very distinct from the English culture.


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## panjabigator

I think politics plays an enormous role in the survival of a language.  

1) Occitan.  From what I have read, the language is NOT supported by the French government, as as expected, is not being passed down as much to the youth, instead favoring the French language.  

2) Punjabi.  According to Ethnologue.com (really good site!!!), between eastern and western Punjabi there are about 80 million speakers (its the seventh most spoken language in Canada and according to an uncredible site like Wikipedia, the 10th most spoken language in the world...but I dont believe it as much as I'd like to ).  Pakistan has most of the speakers, however Punjabi is NOT official there, but Urdu is (grumble...grumble).  Then there is this dumb stigma that Urdu is more refined that Punjabi and so parents will only teach their child Urdu and not Punjabi.  In India, some Hindu Punjabi's do the same with Punjabi, prefering Hindi.  The end result is that the youth may understand the language, but generally have a negative view of it and prefer there more refined language ().  I dont really consider this a dying language though, but westernization is causing English to be more popular than any regional language.


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## panjabigator

Pivra said:
			
		

> How about cultures without their own language such as American? They dont have their own language but still their culture is very distinct from the English culture.



The American culture is an amalgamation of all the cultures of the world...we have people from everywhere...

well...I take it back.  I do not think "foreign" cultures are very sustainable here...living here entails assimilation and most immigrants, I feel, are not sucessful in maintaining language and culture for generations.

I know Spanish is very useful here, but I wonder how sucessfully it is being passed down to the 3rd or 4th generation....sounds like a new topic


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## frenchtranslater

Pivra said:
			
		

> How about cultures without their own language such as American? They dont have their own language but still their culture is very distinct from the English culture.


 
If one has to look at the question, what are future dead languages, that person needs to look at the entire picture. One must look at languages and their ethnic background and at dialects and their ethnic backgrounds too. American english is a dialect derived from 'Formal' England's English. Every culture has its own language, every region and ethnic group have their own language. Therefore, technically, when the American culture will die, its dialect will also die.


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## MarX

MonsieurAquilone said:


> I was wondering what opinions people had on the future of today's 'living languages'. Are they destined to death...which ones?....does language evolve so there is no death, per se?
> 
> Thank you


 
Well, some small languages are definitely going to cease to be spoken, even though there might be literature in it.
A good example are all the non-French languages within French territory, including Tahitian.


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## Outsider

Indonesia has many minority languages -- how are _they_ doing?


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## MarX

Outsider said:


> Indonesia has many minority languages -- how are _they_ doing?


 
I think many minority languages in Indonesia are going to die as well. Or at least strongly influenced by Indonesian.


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## Hal1fax

I don't think Polish will die....Poland wasn't a country for 123 years and just appeared all of a sudden...I think if the nation has pride for their culture the language will last.


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## Bilbo Baggins

All languages will eventually die out. In a thousand years we´ll be communicating through clicks, whistles, and grunts.


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