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Random thought What population size and density do you need to keep a language alive? Are languages slowly over generations going away in small european count

Random thought What population size and density do you need to keep a language alive? Are languages slowly over generations going away in small european countries?

tsjq 6y ago
Also due to migration, forced cultural shifts, invasion, etc stuff
lmm 6y ago
In Denmark they say that you can tell what decade a danish person emigrated in just by hearing them speak - the language is degenerating very quickly. Welsh is looking pretty stable after a deliberate effort. Whereas Irish had more speakers but is now more endangered. So I think it's more a function of how much people want - or don't want - to keep a language alive, than just of number of people.
- Twixes 6y ago
  What do you mean by "degenerating"? Is for instance today's English degenerated in comparison to the English of 100 years ago?
  - lmm 6y ago
    > What do you mean by "degenerating"? IIRC: Losing its distinctive grammatical features; becoming much closer to Swedish, and also adopting large numbers of loanwords from English. > Is for instance today's English degenerated in comparison to the English of 100 years ago? I've read that grammatical irregularities are being (slowly) flattened out, so in a limited sense yes.
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      English will flatten somewhat, but so long as English is a big enough tent to comfortably hold massive subgroups in its own right it will continue to fork and branch in unpredictable ways. I would probably watch Indian English as the biggest variety of English, it will probably develop some unique grammar of its own. Though to some extent each major variety of English has something different about it (e.g. AAVE and "ain't no" negative double negation.)
      - lmm 6y ago
        Maybe. The thing is, none of these subgroups is isolated the way geographic regions historically were; it used to take weeks to send a letter from one place to another, whereas now people in India and the UK have realtime conversations all the time. Of course the geographic separation has some effect, but maybe the mesh of connections is dense enough that there's just no space for dialects to diverge from each other.
    - mcswell 6y ago
      "Degenerated" carries a connotation of "becoming inferior." It's not at all clear that a relative lack of irregularities makes a language inferior. One might even say that it makes the language superior, at least in the sense that it's easier to acquire as a second language. (First language learners don't seem to have that much of a problem with irregularities, although the gradual loss of irregular forms probably means that the problem for first language learners is not null.)
  - bloak 6y ago
    That's a difficult question, but if a language changes rapidly then not everyone will keep up with the changes to the same extent and communication between those people will be compromised. This also affects written communication. Most modern English speakers can't understand Shakespeare properly. They could, if they put in hundreds of hours of study, but in practice they don't. English hasn't changed very much over the last 100 years, I'd claim, compared with many other languages, but it's hard to measure that objectively. To start off with, what do I really mean by "English"? I suppose I mean the standard written language rather than colloquial forms... One could perhaps also argue that a language that has changed a lot recently can't have built up the vocabulary, connotations, and all the rest of the stuff that is required for high-quality, nuanced communication and is therefore likely to be a less precise means of communication even between people who are tracking the changes. But that's speculative and I don't know how you could measure it. So, to conclude this waffle, I suspect it does make sense to talk about a language "degenerating", but it's very hard to be scientific about it.
    - mcswell 6y ago
      "Most modern English speakers can't understand Shakespeare properly." Wherefore thinkest thou that? Canst not understand the King's language?
throway23434 6y ago
It's not just population density - you need economic opportunities. For instance, most large languages in India are dying off quite rapidly even in regions with high speaker density, since the Indian state and people prefer a discriminatory class system that privileges a foreign language. There are very few opportunities for non-English speakers, either educationally or economically. Normal speech has turned into a crass pidgin of English and the local vernacular; schooling has turned 'English-medium' entirely, thus creating a generation of idiots, fluent neither in English nor in their own native languages. The Indian state being essentially the same as the colonial British Raj, will never tolerate empowering the natives of India, even if political cronies have and will continue to give it a sense of legitimacy by appealing to ethno-religio-linguistic rabble rousing. See, http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/ http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/
- bzb6 6y ago
  English is not a foreign language in India.
- mcswell 6y ago
  As I understand it (and I hasten to say that I have no first-person exposure), there are at least a dozen official languages in India. One reason for the dominance of English is that speakers of languages other than Hindi resent what would otherwise be the dominance of Hindi. English is perceived as better because it's no one's first language, rather than the first language of a plurality.
yorwba 6y ago
> Are languages slowly over generations going away in small european countries? On the contrary, small countries are the ones most likely to keep languages alive. Consider Luxembourg: with less than a million population, they still have their own distinct official language, Luxembourgish (in addition to French and German). If you picked any Luxembourg-sized chunk of Europe and went back 200 years, you'd find a similar situation with a small community speaking a language as distinct as Luxembourgish is from other official languages in Europe. But the formation of nation states with a centralized compulsory education system also meant compulsory instruction in a standard language, internal migration of people who only speak the standard language and not the local dialect and eventually mass media only available in the standard language. So by now, "one language per country" has become pretty much the norm, with only limited recognition for sub-national languages. Even in Luxembourg, not everyone speaks Luxembourgish (Wikipedia says 50.9%, but that's suspiciously also the proportion whose nationality is Luxembourgish, suggesting some confusion between the two concepts). But if I had to choose whether Luxembourg or some random city in Germany is more likely to preserve a distinct language, I'd definitely bet on Luxembourg.
mci 6y ago
> What population size and density do you need to keep a language alive? IMHO, the answer depends more on the lifestyle than on the number of speakers. As long as everyone lives in a homogenous community along with their grandparents and parents, the new generations learn the language. When people move to larger towns where the majority speaks a dominant language, their children at best speak the minority language at home while the grandchildren rarely acquire it at all, and its death is imminent. Anecdotal evidence follows. * Manx. In 1874: 16,200 speakers (30% of the population of the Isle of Man); in 1974: last native speaker dies. [0] * Belarusian. In 1999: 36.7% of Belarusian citizens spoke it at home; in 2009: 11.9%. [1] Remarkably, it is better preserved among the Belarusian minority in Poland which is concentrated in a few rural communes. * Lower Sorbian in Germany. In the 1880s: 70 thousand; in the 1990s: 7 thousand; around 2010: 2 thousand. Folk dances, costumes, and customs will outlast it like an empty shell outlasts its resident. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Number_of_speakers_by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Number_of_speake... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_language
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > Remarkably, it is better preserved among the Belarusian minority in Poland which is concentrated in a few rural communes. This happens somewhat often: people emigrate from a country/region, and the culture becomes 'frozen' with-in them at that time, while in the source location there is still change and evolution. The large Italian diaspora in the New World often have dialects that died out from the Old Country because of mass communication: > He speaks a language particular to a small town of about 3,000 people in the region of Calabria in southern Italy. This tongue is closer to Latin than typical Italian because of the region’s late Romanization. Back home, younger generations like his don’t speak Santonofrese — named after the town of Sant’Onofrio —because it is seen as “lowbrow.” He says that thanks to Toronto’s large Italian community, there may be several endangered languages and dialects like his preserved in the city as people continue to speak them with their family. * https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/09/30/linguist-documents-dying-languages-still-spoken-in-toronto.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/09/30/linguist-documen... * https://archive.is/hRtGY https://archive.is/hRtGY See also Endangered Languages Alliance (Toronto): * https://elalliance.com https://elalliance.com
sinkasapa 6y ago
The most important indicator is the average age of speakers. If you have 1000 elderly and middle age speakers but no children, the language is in serious peril. It is the chain from mother to daughter that needs to be maintained. Large numbers of speakers only increase the odds that that chain can be maintained.

Random thought What population size and density do you need to keep a language alive? Are languages slowly over generations going away in small european countries?

tsjq 6y ago

Also due to migration, forced cultural shifts, invasion, etc stuff

lmm 6y ago

In Denmark they say that you can tell what decade a danish person emigrated in just by hearing them speak - the language is degenerating very quickly. Welsh is looking pretty stable after a deliberate effort. Whereas Irish had more speakers but is now more endangered. So I think it's more a function of how much people want - or don't want - to keep a language alive, than just of number of people.

Twixes 6y ago
What do you mean by "degenerating"? Is for instance today's English degenerated in comparison to the English of 100 years ago?
- lmm 6y ago
  > What do you mean by "degenerating"? IIRC: Losing its distinctive grammatical features; becoming much closer to Swedish, and also adopting large numbers of loanwords from English. > Is for instance today's English degenerated in comparison to the English of 100 years ago? I've read that grammatical irregularities are being (slowly) flattened out, so in a limited sense yes.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    English will flatten somewhat, but so long as English is a big enough tent to comfortably hold massive subgroups in its own right it will continue to fork and branch in unpredictable ways. I would probably watch Indian English as the biggest variety of English, it will probably develop some unique grammar of its own. Though to some extent each major variety of English has something different about it (e.g. AAVE and "ain't no" negative double negation.)
    - lmm 6y ago
      Maybe. The thing is, none of these subgroups is isolated the way geographic regions historically were; it used to take weeks to send a letter from one place to another, whereas now people in India and the UK have realtime conversations all the time. Of course the geographic separation has some effect, but maybe the mesh of connections is dense enough that there's just no space for dialects to diverge from each other.
  - mcswell 6y ago
    "Degenerated" carries a connotation of "becoming inferior." It's not at all clear that a relative lack of irregularities makes a language inferior. One might even say that it makes the language superior, at least in the sense that it's easier to acquire as a second language. (First language learners don't seem to have that much of a problem with irregularities, although the gradual loss of irregular forms probably means that the problem for first language learners is not null.)
- bloak 6y ago
  That's a difficult question, but if a language changes rapidly then not everyone will keep up with the changes to the same extent and communication between those people will be compromised. This also affects written communication. Most modern English speakers can't understand Shakespeare properly. They could, if they put in hundreds of hours of study, but in practice they don't. English hasn't changed very much over the last 100 years, I'd claim, compared with many other languages, but it's hard to measure that objectively. To start off with, what do I really mean by "English"? I suppose I mean the standard written language rather than colloquial forms... One could perhaps also argue that a language that has changed a lot recently can't have built up the vocabulary, connotations, and all the rest of the stuff that is required for high-quality, nuanced communication and is therefore likely to be a less precise means of communication even between people who are tracking the changes. But that's speculative and I don't know how you could measure it. So, to conclude this waffle, I suspect it does make sense to talk about a language "degenerating", but it's very hard to be scientific about it.
  - mcswell 6y ago
    "Most modern English speakers can't understand Shakespeare properly." Wherefore thinkest thou that? Canst not understand the King's language?

throway23434 6y ago

It's not just population density - you need economic opportunities. For instance, most large languages in India are dying off quite rapidly even in regions with high speaker density, since the Indian state and people prefer a discriminatory class system that privileges a foreign language. There are very few opportunities for non-English speakers, either educationally or economically. Normal speech has turned into a crass pidgin of English and the local vernacular; schooling has turned 'English-medium' entirely, thus creating a generation of idiots, fluent neither in English nor in their own native languages. The Indian state being essentially the same as the colonial British Raj, will never tolerate empowering the natives of India, even if political cronies have and will continue to give it a sense of legitimacy by appealing to ethno-religio-linguistic rabble rousing. See, http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/ http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/

bzb6 6y ago
English is not a foreign language in India.
mcswell 6y ago
As I understand it (and I hasten to say that I have no first-person exposure), there are at least a dozen official languages in India. One reason for the dominance of English is that speakers of languages other than Hindi resent what would otherwise be the dominance of Hindi. English is perceived as better because it's no one's first language, rather than the first language of a plurality.

yorwba 6y ago

> Are languages slowly over generations going away in small european countries? On the contrary, small countries are the ones most likely to keep languages alive. Consider Luxembourg: with less than a million population, they still have their own distinct official language, Luxembourgish (in addition to French and German). If you picked any Luxembourg-sized chunk of Europe and went back 200 years, you'd find a similar situation with a small community speaking a language as distinct as Luxembourgish is from other official languages in Europe. But the formation of nation states with a centralized compulsory education system also meant compulsory instruction in a standard language, internal migration of people who only speak the standard language and not the local dialect and eventually mass media only available in the standard language. So by now, "one language per country" has become pretty much the norm, with only limited recognition for sub-national languages. Even in Luxembourg, not everyone speaks Luxembourgish (Wikipedia says 50.9%, but that's suspiciously also the proportion whose nationality is Luxembourgish, suggesting some confusion between the two concepts). But if I had to choose whether Luxembourg or some random city in Germany is more likely to preserve a distinct language, I'd definitely bet on Luxembourg.

mci 6y ago

> What population size and density do you need to keep a language alive? IMHO, the answer depends more on the lifestyle than on the number of speakers. As long as everyone lives in a homogenous community along with their grandparents and parents, the new generations learn the language. When people move to larger towns where the majority speaks a dominant language, their children at best speak the minority language at home while the grandchildren rarely acquire it at all, and its death is imminent. Anecdotal evidence follows. * Manx. In 1874: 16,200 speakers (30% of the population of the Isle of Man); in 1974: last native speaker dies. [0] * Belarusian. In 1999: 36.7% of Belarusian citizens spoke it at home; in 2009: 11.9%. [1] Remarkably, it is better preserved among the Belarusian minority in Poland which is concentrated in a few rural communes. * Lower Sorbian in Germany. In the 1880s: 70 thousand; in the 1990s: 7 thousand; around 2010: 2 thousand. Folk dances, costumes, and customs will outlast it like an empty shell outlasts its resident. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Number_of_speakers_by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Number_of_speake... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_language

throw0101a 6y ago
> Remarkably, it is better preserved among the Belarusian minority in Poland which is concentrated in a few rural communes. This happens somewhat often: people emigrate from a country/region, and the culture becomes 'frozen' with-in them at that time, while in the source location there is still change and evolution. The large Italian diaspora in the New World often have dialects that died out from the Old Country because of mass communication: > He speaks a language particular to a small town of about 3,000 people in the region of Calabria in southern Italy. This tongue is closer to Latin than typical Italian because of the region’s late Romanization. Back home, younger generations like his don’t speak Santonofrese — named after the town of Sant’Onofrio —because it is seen as “lowbrow.” He says that thanks to Toronto’s large Italian community, there may be several endangered languages and dialects like his preserved in the city as people continue to speak them with their family. * https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/09/30/linguist-documents-dying-languages-still-spoken-in-toronto.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/09/30/linguist-documen... * https://archive.is/hRtGY https://archive.is/hRtGY See also Endangered Languages Alliance (Toronto): * https://elalliance.com https://elalliance.com

sinkasapa 6y ago

The most important indicator is the average age of speakers. If you have 1000 elderly and middle age speakers but no children, the language is in serious peril. It is the chain from mother to daughter that needs to be maintained. Large numbers of speakers only increase the odds that that chain can be maintained.