> Are languages slowly over generations going away in small european countries? On the contrary, small countries are the ones most likely to keep languages ali

> 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.