9 ms·

List of languages by time of extinction

98 points by sndean 10y ago

avodonosov 10y ago
Sooner or later we will end up with only one language on Earth - it's very likely I think. (if we survive long enough)
- jdimov9 10y ago
  Not a chance. For any globalisation / unification force there is an equal and opposite force pulling towards autonomy / authenticity / diversity. Language is a very core component of human identity.
  - avodonosov 10y ago
    For globalization in general - very possible you're right; if speak about aspects other than language I would probably agree. But language is changing constantly; all languages are influenced by surrounding countries / cultures, and by those which lead progress currently. I think every day need of communication and convenience will define the result. And this list, I think, is an evidence of that tendency.
  - djKianoosh 10y ago
    thats why it's best to have both. one de facto universal language, and people can still maintain their local language. that way everyone in the world only has to learn two languages and people dont have to waste their time learning 3-6 languages
    - kwhitefoot 10y ago
      Who does that? Most people learn only their own language. A substantial number learn one other language, generally English. My own experience (bi-lingual Brit living in Norway working with people from 17 different countries) suggests that a very small proportion go beyond that. I'm excluding those who have a smattering of another language such as most Brits like me who had to take French and Latin at school but never got beyond being able to ask for a beer in a bar. Some of my Polish colleagues can get by in Russian as well as English but not many of those under 30.
      - GuiA 10y ago
        > Who does that? Most people learn only their own language. In 2002, the AP reported that 66% of children worldwide are bilingual. There are probably fewer people who speak a single language than 2 or more. http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/06/19/language.glance/index.html?_%2520s=PM:US http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/06/19/language.glance/index.h...
      - djKianoosh 10y ago
        anecdotally I know several europeans where they know at least their language + english + at least one of (french, german, spanish, italian) brasilians I know typically know english and portuguese and they dont want to admit it but usually they know spanish. they just prefer brasilian or english. overall if we just all agreed on english as the universal language (imperfect as it is) then it would save so many smart people so much time from needing to learn and translate between so many languages. just from an efficiency perspective alone, humanity would see a major benefit, I believe.
        pyrale 10y ago
        > overall if we just all agreed on english as the universal language (imperfect as it is) then it would save so many smart people so much time from needing to learn and translate between so many languages. > just from an efficiency perspective alone, humanity would see a major benefit, I believe. I'm always surprised to see people accustomed to the world of computers say this kind of things. We know computer languages have different strengths, and we're often advised to learn some languages, not for the professional impact, but for the abstractions they teach. In this context, I can't explain how people miss the fact that learning multiple languages is an enriching experience. And it is not only an abstract theory, considering the loan words every language has. It is not only a matter of opening your thought framework, but also a matter of what ressource you have access to : the english language as we know it is very recent, and as a consequence, most of the world's intellectual output has been written in foreign languages. A world that switches to a single language as fast as we do is inevitably burning bridges with most of its knowledge. Don't try to save smart people from diversifying their views, it's a bad idea.
  - pierrec 10y ago
    >For any globalisation / unification force there is an equal and opposite force pulling towards autonomy / authenticity / diversity. I think it might be more correct to say that for every globalisation / unification force, there is an equal and opposite teapot in free orbit around the sun.
- empath75 10y ago
  English is already pretty much a lingua franca for most of the world.
  - vbernat 10y ago
    Not sure. Compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world (at most more than a billion) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinophone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinophone (more than a billion).
    - hx87 10y ago
      English is much more common as a second/third/... language.
      - vbernat 10y ago
        Both links contain figures about non-native speakers. And it seems that native/non-native Chinese speakers are more numerous than native/non-native English speakers.
        hx87 10y ago
        True, native + nonnative speakers of Chinese > native + nonnative speakers of English, but the relation I'm talking about is: nonnative speakers of Chinese < nonnative speakers of English If the vast majority of Chinese speakers are native, that means that not that many non-Chinese people are learning the language compared to English, and thus English is more attractive for interlingual communication. China is big enough to be a world in itself, and for most of history has been so, but globalization means that it is part of a greater whole and competes on that level.
- matroosberg 10y ago
  What evidence do you have to support your claim? I think it is much more likely that we will have a small number of lingua francas (right now English, Spanish and Mandarin are the top three spoken languages and serve as the lingua franca in various locations) but a plethora of local languages will remain. Many African countries, but also Latin America, the US and Canada are examples of that. South Africa is a stark example with 11 official languages. Many South Africans grow up bilingual. English is the lingua franca there, but neither Xhosa, Zulu, nor Afrikaans will die out any time soon. Language forms reality and vice versa. It always adapts to the needs of the speakers. Just look at English used be lawyers vs engineers. Geography is not the only factor for diverging languages. Social differences are also a factor, e.g, sociolects are specific to a socioeconomic class. So unless human societies become a lot more homogenous, I don't see a single language emerging.
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    "What evidence do you have to support your claim?" A) The evidence is in the article. It's heading towards a small number very quickly. B) Everyone is learning to speak English. Everyone in W. Europe under 30 speaks English fairly well. It's happening in M/E and Asia as well. Once immigrants to W. Europe who speak English + some foreign language can get services in English - there's no point in learning the local language. There are only 12 million Swedes. 10% of them barely speak Swedish - and the number is growing rapidly. Once young people speak English fluently and services are in English - so much work will be in English ... Swedish loses all real utility. And utility is an important thing. 'Long term' I think a diaspora of languages is important, but people make short term decisions: 'what is important in my life'? I fear in 20 years, in Sweden, young people will equate 'Swedish' with 'old, out of touch, nationalists and racists' - which is an unfair characterization but the perception is already developing: young urbanites speak English fluently, rural, less developed communities, less so.
    - matroosberg 10y ago
      Ad A) It's merely a list of extinct languages, an incomplete at that since we cannot possibly know all languages that were spoken 3000 years ago. So it does not even give you a rate at which languages go extinct. But, yes, as we see more mobility (geographically and socially), languages consolidate, but a consolidation to one single language seems extremely unlikely, as I explained before. Just because Swedish might die (which I doubt, but that's beside the point), does not mean that all languages but one will die. Ad B) While English is probably gaining importance (speculating, I don't have a source), it is number 2 in total speakers after Mandarin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num.... Even Everyone in W. Europe under 30 speaking English is an overestimation. If you look in less well educated groups, you will find more people not speaking English. Even Sweden shows ~5% of "Younger" not speaking English in http://languageknowledge.eu/countries/sweden http://languageknowledge.eu/countries/sweden. Austria even shows only 52.35% speaking English natively or learned: http://languageknowledge.eu/countries/austria http://languageknowledge.eu/countries/austria
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tianlins 10y ago
Save languages near extinction by building a machine translation model for them?
- leereeves 10y ago
  For purely historical interest, a simple dictionary and grammar might be more useful than an inaccurate machine translation.
- jl6 10y ago
  Extinct doesn't mean the language becomes indecipherable, just it has no more native speakers. I'm not sure machine translation would help.
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Alexey_Nigin 10y ago
I (sort of) agree that having many languages encourages diversity and coexistence of different cultures. However, I think that apparent drawbacks outweigh any potential benefits. As a native Russian speaker, I know just how excruciating learning English can get. I have been learning it for 12 years, and most of the time it was no fun. For example, I once literally memorised 1500 words over a few months. Still, I cannot say that I speak as well as native speakers do. Most Russians never make it past learning to say "I don't speak English" with a funny accent. By the way, if you are an English speaker, you probably don't realise what it means not to know English. Let me assure you: it's horrible.
- sverige 10y ago
  I'm a native English speaker who learned Russian. It has to be harder to learn English, though Russian was no picnic. Though I was once maybe 75% fluent speaking (and could understand 90% of what Gorbachev said - he speaks pretty fast), I haven't used it for 25 years and so have forgotten most of it. I do remember that it was easy to spell, especially compared to English. I also remember that Russian verbs of motion were hard to get right, and declining numbers and certain adjectives correctly was tough. English has become the new lingua franca (still cracks me up to pause and consider that literally), for better or worse. For all its faults, English is very flexible and can be precise, despite the fact that it's not often used for that feature. Most native speakers I know would be surprised to learn how many verb tenses English there are, and even more surprised at their proper use. The MLA and AP styles haven't helped that cause any.
  - HillRat 10y ago
    >English has become the new lingua franca (still cracks me up to pause and consider that literally), for better or worse. On a completely pedantic note, lingua franca doesn't actually refer to what I think most people associate it with (the use of French as the diplomatic language of the 18th and 19th centuries in particular). It actually means the language of the franj, the "Franks," or Western Europeans. The original lingua franca was a pidgin Italian with a lot of Arabic and Turkish loanwords, the result of the Venetian dominance of the Levantine sea trade. Of course, in a purely literal sense, using it in phrases like, "Gulf media Arabic is the lingua franca of the Middle East" is itself wrong. Tiresome pedantry complete, please carry on.
niftich 10y ago
Languages are tools for communication. Online, we have a much larger community to communicate with, so network effects apply for languages as well. I don't think it's troubling that languages rise and fall, and many die out. Rather, it's the intangible heritage of humanity and particular cultures in danger that should attract our attention. Language is an element of this, but more important is the substance of their stories, their oral and written traditions, their values, and their way of live. We should work on preserving this heritage possibly at the expense of their language, if that's our only viable method. (disclaimer: previously posted by me here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11904129#11904318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11904129#11904318)
- sverige 10y ago
  The biggest problems with this are 1) that some things are untranslatable, and 2) the substance of the stories is best communicated with the words originally used. Translation takes something away every time. Although some translations become classics in their own right, such things are very rare.
- Hondor 10y ago
  While there may be value in preserving those cultures. What tends to happen is outsiders say "We want to preserve that interesting way of life in case it's useful to us oneday. Hey you natives with nothing better to do all day, why don't you keep using it so we don't have to? You won't need English in your remote tribe." Then the poorest people in the world end up lumped with the huge task of maintaining a language for the possible benefit or mere academic curiosity of others. Instead, they could just learn English as children and gain access to greater opportunities in the global economy.
Theodores 10y ago
Funny to see that 'Latin' is not in the list. Sure there are plant names with names in 'latin' but not the same Latin as the Romans used. Does anyone actually converse in Latin outside of the classroom? Until the Industrial Revolution came along most people identified themselves as from the town or county where they lived rather than a given nation. People rarely travelled further than the next village and language was extremely regional. Same in France, until Napoleon came along France had hundreds of languages/dialects rather than an identifiable 'French' that everyone knew. In the UK, before television, it really was not that easy to be understood in places like Liverpool if you were from a place like Bristol - accents were too different to make that easy in everyday conversation even if written words were the same everywhere. The railways were the start of this process of making English universally understood amongst the English, before that there really wasn't much need to bother to read unless you were a book-reading academic type. I am pleased that English is lingua-franca(!) for planet earth when it comes to computer stuff, science and little things like air traffic control. English may not be 'strongly typed Esperanto' but it does not have to be. It is considered courtesy to try and speak in native languages for Brits abroad, however, beyond 'please and thankyou' I think it is much better to stick to English and, in the process, help others that want to learn English. Just speak s-l-o-w-l-y and remember that something like 90% of communication is body language when face-to-face. I do a fair amount of translation in the day job, and, amongst the foreign-language speakers that I pester for words 'n' phrases, I frequently find people preferring English as they can express so much more in it than their native tongue. As far as my Italian friends are concerned, Italian might as well be FORTRAN or COBOL, i.e. not as good. Consequently I look forward to a world that speaks English, that English being British English, of course!!!
- jl6 10y ago
  I have had many a conversation with non-native English speakers on this topic and one theme that crops up often is the idea that it is easier to think "advanced" thoughts in English than in their native language. But digging a little deeper, I think what is really happening is that these people learned "advanced" topics from English-language textbooks, papers, seminars, etc. and so they only have English vocabulary, phraseology, idioms and context for that topic.
unabst 10y ago
Sustenance is done by utility. The organic evolution of languages at the word level is determined by word choice, and every time we utter anything, by exercising choice we're contributing to the sustenance of the expressions we just used. It's the same at the language level. I could choose to speak English or Japanese, but I can never speak both simultaneously at any moment. Choice is mandatory. People choosing to speak English is the force that corresponds to the greater sustenance of English, or any language X. From experience, I know that I do not prefer English at home or with family. So I will speak Japanese until I die. And I see this often. Most bilingual families speak non-English at home (privately), but speak English outside of home (publicly). This works extremely well, and we have no problem speaking multiple languages as long as there are enough natural and practical use cases throughout our lives. But had I been born speaking only one language, then this choice does not exist. And since languages are really hard, unless you're immersed in language usage, transferring a language in its entirety through plain education is impossible. That's why languages die off with their communities and their cultures, and last just a while longer academically until the last speaking person dies. Or, in the case of second and third generation immigrants, they don't bring the culture with them, so family usage doesn't entail everything that language entails. You can't suddenly speak Japanese in a professional setting if all you've done is speak it with mom. So this limits usage, and is the beginning of the end. With less usage, there is less sustenance.
- sverige 10y ago
  Both my parents spoke their grandparents' native languages at home (Swedish and Plattdeutsch) when they were very young, but stopped when their grandparents' generation passed. They passed on very little of that to me, so by third generation it seems to die out.
Snesker 10y ago
2050: hebrew

98 points by sndean 10y ago

avodonosov 10y ago

Sooner or later we will end up with only one language on Earth - it's very likely I think. (if we survive long enough)

jdimov9 10y ago
Not a chance. For any globalisation / unification force there is an equal and opposite force pulling towards autonomy / authenticity / diversity. Language is a very core component of human identity.
- avodonosov 10y ago
  For globalization in general - very possible you're right; if speak about aspects other than language I would probably agree. But language is changing constantly; all languages are influenced by surrounding countries / cultures, and by those which lead progress currently. I think every day need of communication and convenience will define the result. And this list, I think, is an evidence of that tendency.
- djKianoosh 10y ago
  thats why it's best to have both. one de facto universal language, and people can still maintain their local language. that way everyone in the world only has to learn two languages and people dont have to waste their time learning 3-6 languages
  - kwhitefoot 10y ago
    Who does that? Most people learn only their own language. A substantial number learn one other language, generally English. My own experience (bi-lingual Brit living in Norway working with people from 17 different countries) suggests that a very small proportion go beyond that. I'm excluding those who have a smattering of another language such as most Brits like me who had to take French and Latin at school but never got beyond being able to ask for a beer in a bar. Some of my Polish colleagues can get by in Russian as well as English but not many of those under 30.
    - GuiA 10y ago
      > Who does that? Most people learn only their own language. In 2002, the AP reported that 66% of children worldwide are bilingual. There are probably fewer people who speak a single language than 2 or more. http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/06/19/language.glance/index.html?_%2520s=PM:US http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/06/19/language.glance/index.h...
    - djKianoosh 10y ago
      anecdotally I know several europeans where they know at least their language + english + at least one of (french, german, spanish, italian) brasilians I know typically know english and portuguese and they dont want to admit it but usually they know spanish. they just prefer brasilian or english. overall if we just all agreed on english as the universal language (imperfect as it is) then it would save so many smart people so much time from needing to learn and translate between so many languages. just from an efficiency perspective alone, humanity would see a major benefit, I believe.
      - pyrale 10y ago
        > overall if we just all agreed on english as the universal language (imperfect as it is) then it would save so many smart people so much time from needing to learn and translate between so many languages. > just from an efficiency perspective alone, humanity would see a major benefit, I believe. I'm always surprised to see people accustomed to the world of computers say this kind of things. We know computer languages have different strengths, and we're often advised to learn some languages, not for the professional impact, but for the abstractions they teach. In this context, I can't explain how people miss the fact that learning multiple languages is an enriching experience. And it is not only an abstract theory, considering the loan words every language has. It is not only a matter of opening your thought framework, but also a matter of what ressource you have access to : the english language as we know it is very recent, and as a consequence, most of the world's intellectual output has been written in foreign languages. A world that switches to a single language as fast as we do is inevitably burning bridges with most of its knowledge. Don't try to save smart people from diversifying their views, it's a bad idea.
- pierrec 10y ago
  >For any globalisation / unification force there is an equal and opposite force pulling towards autonomy / authenticity / diversity. I think it might be more correct to say that for every globalisation / unification force, there is an equal and opposite teapot in free orbit around the sun.
empath75 10y ago
English is already pretty much a lingua franca for most of the world.
- vbernat 10y ago
  Not sure. Compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world (at most more than a billion) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinophone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinophone (more than a billion).
  - hx87 10y ago
    English is much more common as a second/third/... language.
    - vbernat 10y ago
      Both links contain figures about non-native speakers. And it seems that native/non-native Chinese speakers are more numerous than native/non-native English speakers.
      - hx87 10y ago
        True, native + nonnative speakers of Chinese > native + nonnative speakers of English, but the relation I'm talking about is: nonnative speakers of Chinese < nonnative speakers of English If the vast majority of Chinese speakers are native, that means that not that many non-Chinese people are learning the language compared to English, and thus English is more attractive for interlingual communication. China is big enough to be a world in itself, and for most of history has been so, but globalization means that it is part of a greater whole and competes on that level.
matroosberg 10y ago
What evidence do you have to support your claim? I think it is much more likely that we will have a small number of lingua francas (right now English, Spanish and Mandarin are the top three spoken languages and serve as the lingua franca in various locations) but a plethora of local languages will remain. Many African countries, but also Latin America, the US and Canada are examples of that. South Africa is a stark example with 11 official languages. Many South Africans grow up bilingual. English is the lingua franca there, but neither Xhosa, Zulu, nor Afrikaans will die out any time soon. Language forms reality and vice versa. It always adapts to the needs of the speakers. Just look at English used be lawyers vs engineers. Geography is not the only factor for diverging languages. Social differences are also a factor, e.g, sociolects are specific to a socioeconomic class. So unless human societies become a lot more homogenous, I don't see a single language emerging.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  "What evidence do you have to support your claim?" A) The evidence is in the article. It's heading towards a small number very quickly. B) Everyone is learning to speak English. Everyone in W. Europe under 30 speaks English fairly well. It's happening in M/E and Asia as well. Once immigrants to W. Europe who speak English + some foreign language can get services in English - there's no point in learning the local language. There are only 12 million Swedes. 10% of them barely speak Swedish - and the number is growing rapidly. Once young people speak English fluently and services are in English - so much work will be in English ... Swedish loses all real utility. And utility is an important thing. 'Long term' I think a diaspora of languages is important, but people make short term decisions: 'what is important in my life'? I fear in 20 years, in Sweden, young people will equate 'Swedish' with 'old, out of touch, nationalists and racists' - which is an unfair characterization but the perception is already developing: young urbanites speak English fluently, rural, less developed communities, less so.
  - matroosberg 10y ago
    Ad A) It's merely a list of extinct languages, an incomplete at that since we cannot possibly know all languages that were spoken 3000 years ago. So it does not even give you a rate at which languages go extinct. But, yes, as we see more mobility (geographically and socially), languages consolidate, but a consolidation to one single language seems extremely unlikely, as I explained before. Just because Swedish might die (which I doubt, but that's beside the point), does not mean that all languages but one will die. Ad B) While English is probably gaining importance (speculating, I don't have a source), it is number 2 in total speakers after Mandarin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num.... Even Everyone in W. Europe under 30 speaking English is an overestimation. If you look in less well educated groups, you will find more people not speaking English. Even Sweden shows ~5% of "Younger" not speaking English in http://languageknowledge.eu/countries/sweden http://languageknowledge.eu/countries/sweden. Austria even shows only 52.35% speaking English natively or learned: http://languageknowledge.eu/countries/austria http://languageknowledge.eu/countries/austria

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tianlins 10y ago

Save languages near extinction by building a machine translation model for them?

leereeves 10y ago
For purely historical interest, a simple dictionary and grammar might be more useful than an inaccurate machine translation.
jl6 10y ago
Extinct doesn't mean the language becomes indecipherable, just it has no more native speakers. I'm not sure machine translation would help.

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Alexey_Nigin 10y ago

I (sort of) agree that having many languages encourages diversity and coexistence of different cultures. However, I think that apparent drawbacks outweigh any potential benefits. As a native Russian speaker, I know just how excruciating learning English can get. I have been learning it for 12 years, and most of the time it was no fun. For example, I once literally memorised 1500 words over a few months. Still, I cannot say that I speak as well as native speakers do. Most Russians never make it past learning to say "I don't speak English" with a funny accent. By the way, if you are an English speaker, you probably don't realise what it means not to know English. Let me assure you: it's horrible.

sverige 10y ago
I'm a native English speaker who learned Russian. It has to be harder to learn English, though Russian was no picnic. Though I was once maybe 75% fluent speaking (and could understand 90% of what Gorbachev said - he speaks pretty fast), I haven't used it for 25 years and so have forgotten most of it. I do remember that it was easy to spell, especially compared to English. I also remember that Russian verbs of motion were hard to get right, and declining numbers and certain adjectives correctly was tough. English has become the new lingua franca (still cracks me up to pause and consider that literally), for better or worse. For all its faults, English is very flexible and can be precise, despite the fact that it's not often used for that feature. Most native speakers I know would be surprised to learn how many verb tenses English there are, and even more surprised at their proper use. The MLA and AP styles haven't helped that cause any.
- HillRat 10y ago
  >English has become the new lingua franca (still cracks me up to pause and consider that literally), for better or worse. On a completely pedantic note, lingua franca doesn't actually refer to what I think most people associate it with (the use of French as the diplomatic language of the 18th and 19th centuries in particular). It actually means the language of the franj, the "Franks," or Western Europeans. The original lingua franca was a pidgin Italian with a lot of Arabic and Turkish loanwords, the result of the Venetian dominance of the Levantine sea trade. Of course, in a purely literal sense, using it in phrases like, "Gulf media Arabic is the lingua franca of the Middle East" is itself wrong. Tiresome pedantry complete, please carry on.

niftich 10y ago

Languages are tools for communication. Online, we have a much larger community to communicate with, so network effects apply for languages as well. I don't think it's troubling that languages rise and fall, and many die out. Rather, it's the intangible heritage of humanity and particular cultures in danger that should attract our attention. Language is an element of this, but more important is the substance of their stories, their oral and written traditions, their values, and their way of live. We should work on preserving this heritage possibly at the expense of their language, if that's our only viable method. (disclaimer: previously posted by me here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11904129#11904318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11904129#11904318)

sverige 10y ago
The biggest problems with this are 1) that some things are untranslatable, and 2) the substance of the stories is best communicated with the words originally used. Translation takes something away every time. Although some translations become classics in their own right, such things are very rare.
Hondor 10y ago
While there may be value in preserving those cultures. What tends to happen is outsiders say "We want to preserve that interesting way of life in case it's useful to us oneday. Hey you natives with nothing better to do all day, why don't you keep using it so we don't have to? You won't need English in your remote tribe." Then the poorest people in the world end up lumped with the huge task of maintaining a language for the possible benefit or mere academic curiosity of others. Instead, they could just learn English as children and gain access to greater opportunities in the global economy.

Theodores 10y ago

Funny to see that 'Latin' is not in the list. Sure there are plant names with names in 'latin' but not the same Latin as the Romans used. Does anyone actually converse in Latin outside of the classroom? Until the Industrial Revolution came along most people identified themselves as from the town or county where they lived rather than a given nation. People rarely travelled further than the next village and language was extremely regional. Same in France, until Napoleon came along France had hundreds of languages/dialects rather than an identifiable 'French' that everyone knew. In the UK, before television, it really was not that easy to be understood in places like Liverpool if you were from a place like Bristol - accents were too different to make that easy in everyday conversation even if written words were the same everywhere. The railways were the start of this process of making English universally understood amongst the English, before that there really wasn't much need to bother to read unless you were a book-reading academic type. I am pleased that English is lingua-franca(!) for planet earth when it comes to computer stuff, science and little things like air traffic control. English may not be 'strongly typed Esperanto' but it does not have to be. It is considered courtesy to try and speak in native languages for Brits abroad, however, beyond 'please and thankyou' I think it is much better to stick to English and, in the process, help others that want to learn English. Just speak s-l-o-w-l-y and remember that something like 90% of communication is body language when face-to-face. I do a fair amount of translation in the day job, and, amongst the foreign-language speakers that I pester for words 'n' phrases, I frequently find people preferring English as they can express so much more in it than their native tongue. As far as my Italian friends are concerned, Italian might as well be FORTRAN or COBOL, i.e. not as good. Consequently I look forward to a world that speaks English, that English being British English, of course!!!

jl6 10y ago
I have had many a conversation with non-native English speakers on this topic and one theme that crops up often is the idea that it is easier to think "advanced" thoughts in English than in their native language. But digging a little deeper, I think what is really happening is that these people learned "advanced" topics from English-language textbooks, papers, seminars, etc. and so they only have English vocabulary, phraseology, idioms and context for that topic.

unabst 10y ago

Sustenance is done by utility. The organic evolution of languages at the word level is determined by word choice, and every time we utter anything, by exercising choice we're contributing to the sustenance of the expressions we just used. It's the same at the language level. I could choose to speak English or Japanese, but I can never speak both simultaneously at any moment. Choice is mandatory. People choosing to speak English is the force that corresponds to the greater sustenance of English, or any language X. From experience, I know that I do not prefer English at home or with family. So I will speak Japanese until I die. And I see this often. Most bilingual families speak non-English at home (privately), but speak English outside of home (publicly). This works extremely well, and we have no problem speaking multiple languages as long as there are enough natural and practical use cases throughout our lives. But had I been born speaking only one language, then this choice does not exist. And since languages are really hard, unless you're immersed in language usage, transferring a language in its entirety through plain education is impossible. That's why languages die off with their communities and their cultures, and last just a while longer academically until the last speaking person dies. Or, in the case of second and third generation immigrants, they don't bring the culture with them, so family usage doesn't entail everything that language entails. You can't suddenly speak Japanese in a professional setting if all you've done is speak it with mom. So this limits usage, and is the beginning of the end. With less usage, there is less sustenance.

sverige 10y ago
Both my parents spoke their grandparents' native languages at home (Swedish and Plattdeutsch) when they were very young, but stopped when their grandparents' generation passed. They passed on very little of that to me, so by third generation it seems to die out.

Snesker 10y ago

2050: hebrew