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There's a middle road, you know: being bilingual. To run with the Icelandic example, you'll be hard pressed to find someone who speaks it but not English. Wher

There's a middle road, you know: being bilingual. To run with the Icelandic example, you'll be hard pressed to find someone who speaks it but not English. Where I live, there's also a local language (Frisian) spoken beside the 'bigger' language (Dutch). And here too, lots of people speak English. Or if not, you might get lucky with German.

Retric 9y ago
That's the first half of a language dying. If everyone speaks Dutch and it's on signs and menus etc then learning Frisian has limited value.
- marten-de-vries 9y ago
  I don't think so, or the language would have died out already. I'd argue it's more about whether children learn it as their primary language. Also, because of concerns of linguistic extinction, similar to the ones mentioned for Icelandic in the article, you see somewhat of a counter-movement as well. This caused e.g. a special status of the language by law (see e.g. [1]), and also: * it's a mandatory school subject * you are entitled to using it in government interactions, e.g. in court * a small part of the public television is in Frisian, and there's also a regional tv/radio channel using it exclusively * place name signs are often at least bilingual, and sometimes Frisian-only. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Charter_for_Regional_or_Minority_Languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Charter_for_Regional_...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 9y ago
    This stuff is not that fast. Give it 3-5+ generations. The tipping point is IMO what language people start conversations with. That shifts language skills and feeds off it's self.
  - dkarl 9y ago
    I'd argue it's more about whether children learn it as their primary language. I'd say even that can't accomplish much by itself, which is why the other things you listed are so important. A lot of Mexican-American kids in my hometown spoke exclusively Spanish at home, and now as adults if you ask them if they can speak Spanish most of them say "not really." They're embarrassed if they have to speak Spanish with someone from Mexico who has an adult vocabulary and a sophisticated grasp of the language. When your education, media, and social life is entirely in English, you end up so much more capable in English that that's all you want to speak. Even with their friends who also spoke Spanish at home, if the context of the conversation was their English-language schoolwork or an American band or an American TV show, it was more natural to talk about it in English; if there was somebody present they didn't know, it was safe to assume they spoke English; et cetera.
- davidy123 9y ago
  The local language is likely to have a lot of associations and nuance. Common languages can lead to cultural collapse; the world becomes less rich. "Chinglish" (bad translations) are one extreme outcome of this, but it's not always funny or trivial.
dalbasal 9y ago
A generation ago, Dutch minority dialects & languages were really discouraged and some were nearly killed. Kids were disciplined in school for using them. A generation before that, British accents/dialects^ actively suppressed to give way to standard (King's) English. I think there were almost no advantages to this dialect killing. Small minority dialects are at a danger of dying out, not crowding out the bigger languages. This is how all of europe worked for hundreds of years. My Grandfather grew up speaking yiddish (german dialect) in school, czech in town & Hungarian at school. These are completely unrelated and individually difficult languages. He later went to college in German & Latin, later on English. He spoke 10 languages in total, most fluently. I knew him in a language that he learned in his 40s. This was normal in his day. They weren't afraid of languages then. Anyway... if your "home" language is a tiny, local one. There is no danger that you will be monolingual in a commercially useless language. You will speak a big language too. Speaking 2 makes the 3rd one easier to learn. ^more on the dialect end of the spectrum than most people realize.
- ocschwar 9y ago
  Jersey Dutch died out completely in the US, without any suppression by the government. Cajun French is on its last legs despite government support. And it was purely the result of broadcast radio.
  - _emacsomancer_ 9y ago
    The US culture/society also tends to kill off non-English languages. Spanish is large enough and with a 'renewable' resource of Spanish speakers from other parts of the Americas that it manages to survive, but other languages do not fare as well.
    - schoen 9y ago
      I don't think that's quite right. Chinese is a notable counterexample in a lot of places, as well as Vietnamese and Tagalog and some others. But Spanish definitely has a more universal geographic distribution in the U.S. than any other non-English language. This article and map were pretty interesting: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/language_map_what_s_the_most_popular_language_in_your_state.html http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/langua...
smitherfield 9y ago
But is it a sustainable road? French-Canadians have been complaining for many years that Montreal's "bilingual" neighborhoods become English-speaking in a decade or so, and "French-speaking" neighborhoods become bilingual. And this is despite extensive government efforts to encourage or even enforce the use of French. You can see the same trends in Catalonia, Wales, Ireland, etc. Where the government intervenes in the opposite direction, the transition can be much more rapid. Visiting Strasbourg (in Alsace, France), people's surnames, street and place names, and the local cuisine are all German, but nobody speaks a word of it. It was amazing (and slightly depressing) to see how in 2-3 generations a city could forget the language it spoke for nigh-on 1,500 years. The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if Dutch were considered a dying language 50 years from now.
- graeme 9y ago
  Strasbourg was French from 1681, then German in 1871, then French in 1918. Then only briefly German in WWII. So it wasn't German very long, only 50 years. As for Montreal, it will be interesting to see how the city evolves. I notice more English in my neighbourhood than when I moved in (8 years ago). But, there is also more French in the old anglo neighbourhoods of the west. One factor is that a lot of "allophones" are perfectly fluent in both English and French. When you add in the francophone tendency to switch to English when dealing with anyone who shows even a whiff of not being a native francophone, a lot of francophone majority neighbourhoods may see English conversation. (I'm perfectly fluent and speak French in public. But for the life of me I can't francophone friends to speak French. I think they all want to practice their English. Also, the Quebecois that care about Anglicization probably don't move to urban montreal)
  - smitherfield 9y ago
    “Germany” hasn’t been a country very long, only since 1871, but an identifiable German culture has existed since Roman times. German (or precursors) was spoken in Alsace for well over a millennium before declining and dying out in the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Balero 9y ago

Retric 9y ago

That's the first half of a language dying. If everyone speaks Dutch and it's on signs and menus etc then learning Frisian has limited value.

marten-de-vries 9y ago
I don't think so, or the language would have died out already. I'd argue it's more about whether children learn it as their primary language. Also, because of concerns of linguistic extinction, similar to the ones mentioned for Icelandic in the article, you see somewhat of a counter-movement as well. This caused e.g. a special status of the language by law (see e.g. [1]), and also: * it's a mandatory school subject * you are entitled to using it in government interactions, e.g. in court * a small part of the public television is in Frisian, and there's also a regional tv/radio channel using it exclusively * place name signs are often at least bilingual, and sometimes Frisian-only. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Charter_for_Regional_or_Minority_Languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Charter_for_Regional_...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 9y ago
  This stuff is not that fast. Give it 3-5+ generations. The tipping point is IMO what language people start conversations with. That shifts language skills and feeds off it's self.
- dkarl 9y ago
  I'd argue it's more about whether children learn it as their primary language. I'd say even that can't accomplish much by itself, which is why the other things you listed are so important. A lot of Mexican-American kids in my hometown spoke exclusively Spanish at home, and now as adults if you ask them if they can speak Spanish most of them say "not really." They're embarrassed if they have to speak Spanish with someone from Mexico who has an adult vocabulary and a sophisticated grasp of the language. When your education, media, and social life is entirely in English, you end up so much more capable in English that that's all you want to speak. Even with their friends who also spoke Spanish at home, if the context of the conversation was their English-language schoolwork or an American band or an American TV show, it was more natural to talk about it in English; if there was somebody present they didn't know, it was safe to assume they spoke English; et cetera.
davidy123 9y ago
The local language is likely to have a lot of associations and nuance. Common languages can lead to cultural collapse; the world becomes less rich. "Chinglish" (bad translations) are one extreme outcome of this, but it's not always funny or trivial.

dalbasal 9y ago

A generation ago, Dutch minority dialects & languages were really discouraged and some were nearly killed. Kids were disciplined in school for using them. A generation before that, British accents/dialects^ actively suppressed to give way to standard (King's) English. I think there were almost no advantages to this dialect killing. Small minority dialects are at a danger of dying out, not crowding out the bigger languages. This is how all of europe worked for hundreds of years. My Grandfather grew up speaking yiddish (german dialect) in school, czech in town & Hungarian at school. These are completely unrelated and individually difficult languages. He later went to college in German & Latin, later on English. He spoke 10 languages in total, most fluently. I knew him in a language that he learned in his 40s. This was normal in his day. They weren't afraid of languages then. Anyway... if your "home" language is a tiny, local one. There is no danger that you will be monolingual in a commercially useless language. You will speak a big language too. Speaking 2 makes the 3rd one easier to learn. ^more on the dialect end of the spectrum than most people realize.

ocschwar 9y ago
Jersey Dutch died out completely in the US, without any suppression by the government. Cajun French is on its last legs despite government support. And it was purely the result of broadcast radio.
- _emacsomancer_ 9y ago
  The US culture/society also tends to kill off non-English languages. Spanish is large enough and with a 'renewable' resource of Spanish speakers from other parts of the Americas that it manages to survive, but other languages do not fare as well.
  - schoen 9y ago
    I don't think that's quite right. Chinese is a notable counterexample in a lot of places, as well as Vietnamese and Tagalog and some others. But Spanish definitely has a more universal geographic distribution in the U.S. than any other non-English language. This article and map were pretty interesting: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/language_map_what_s_the_most_popular_language_in_your_state.html http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/langua...

smitherfield 9y ago

But is it a sustainable road? French-Canadians have been complaining for many years that Montreal's "bilingual" neighborhoods become English-speaking in a decade or so, and "French-speaking" neighborhoods become bilingual. And this is despite extensive government efforts to encourage or even enforce the use of French. You can see the same trends in Catalonia, Wales, Ireland, etc. Where the government intervenes in the opposite direction, the transition can be much more rapid. Visiting Strasbourg (in Alsace, France), people's surnames, street and place names, and the local cuisine are all German, but nobody speaks a word of it. It was amazing (and slightly depressing) to see how in 2-3 generations a city could forget the language it spoke for nigh-on 1,500 years. The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if Dutch were considered a dying language 50 years from now.

graeme 9y ago
Strasbourg was French from 1681, then German in 1871, then French in 1918. Then only briefly German in WWII. So it wasn't German very long, only 50 years. As for Montreal, it will be interesting to see how the city evolves. I notice more English in my neighbourhood than when I moved in (8 years ago). But, there is also more French in the old anglo neighbourhoods of the west. One factor is that a lot of "allophones" are perfectly fluent in both English and French. When you add in the francophone tendency to switch to English when dealing with anyone who shows even a whiff of not being a native francophone, a lot of francophone majority neighbourhoods may see English conversation. (I'm perfectly fluent and speak French in public. But for the life of me I can't francophone friends to speak French. I think they all want to practice their English. Also, the Quebecois that care about Anglicization probably don't move to urban montreal)
- smitherfield 9y ago
  “Germany” hasn’t been a country very long, only since 1871, but an identifiable German culture has existed since Roman times. German (or precursors) was spoken in Alsace for well over a millennium before declining and dying out in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Balero 9y ago