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“My parents spoke Elfdalian with each other, and with my grandma and my aunts and uncles and everyone around,” Schütt said. “But when they turned to me, they sp

“My parents spoke Elfdalian with each other, and with my grandma and my aunts and uncles and everyone around,” Schütt said. “But when they turned to me, they spoke Swedish.” Schütt said her parents spoke Swedish with her because that’s what was spoken in schools. Students were even discouraged to speak Elfdalian in the classroom. Now, there’s only about 2,500 speakers left. This same story has played out in so many different places around the world.

Grakel 5y ago
Consolidating what we do (language, money, etc.) while honoring and keeping local culture alive is a huge issue everywhere, as the globe continues to shrink via technology and diplomacy. It's a root factor in practically every issue and will continue to be. Not sure what the answer is that results in more than crappy themed restaurants.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  I still don't understand why losing another language is a bad thing. I realize that another language creates another way of thinking, culture, and way to express oneself which leads to a good variation instead of having a unified "one world view." I really am not coming off as someone ignorant thinking "the whole world should speak english!" What I'm getting at is, if it's a very insignificant language like that and nobody bothers learning it anymore, what is the point aside from looking for something to do? It's a dying language. Much like a dying culture of an extinct people. Reviving it and forcing people to retain it will not be doing anyone favors either. I think having culturally distinct languages is fine on a macro level, but at the scale of this minor language, it's really as useful as arrowhead you find in the ground here in the States. At one time this was useful, but now is no longer that time.
  - rogerclark 5y ago
    Why not? As far as "looking for something to do", preserving a dying language seems a lot more interesting than a lot of other things people do with their spare time.
    - bpiche 5y ago
      The incuriousness in this thread is atypical of the board in my opinion. At one point I used to think that language diversity was actually a net bad thing for humanity, because it decreases our ability to communicate and so on. These days language technology and machine translation are solving that communication issue and we may choose to preserve dying languages for the sake of understanding how language itself works, how humans migrated in the past, and so on.
      - huachimingo 5y ago
        Some languages open your understanding of the other ones from the same family tree. Learn one, and you are partially learning the other.
  - magicsmoke 5y ago
    Probably the human tendency for loss aversion. No one today cares about the exact preparations and steps needed to prepare an offering of sheep intestines to Zeus other than a some PhDs in classical studies, but I could imagine ancient Greeks thinking that their youth deciding to worship Roman or Christian gods was a bad thing that took away from their cultural heritage. But after that event happened, no one today really cares or notices the loss of the precise minutia of ancient Greek cultural practices and values.
  - bpiche 5y ago
    If another random species of lemur died off and we never sequenced its genome, you might not care. But many scientists would. That arrowhead you discount as useless is another data point to an anthropologist. One man’s trash is unfortunately another man’s dissertation and a window into the past. Edit: an apostrophe
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      Yes, these niche languages are essential for comparative linguistics and sometimes more generally.
  - dimmke 5y ago
    I think the thing that doesn't make sense to me about all of these language preservation efforts is the idea that a language has to have people actively speaking it. That's a gigantic lift, that takes a ton of effort. Even if you teach a new generation they likely won't keep using it in their day to day. Why not just catalog it? Get the most experienced speakers to record hundreds of hours of audio of it, if it had a writing system catalog that too. Problem solved. Language preserved. Otherwise you're fighting a losing battle trying to keep a language actively being used when only a few thousand people know it still.
    - bradrn 5y ago
      Because you need to have native speakers in order to properly analyse the language. Let’s say you have a corpus and you’ve found two words that seem nearly synonymous: what’s the difference between them? A native speaker might be able to tell you about such subtle differences, but it can be impossible to know otherwise. Or, let’s say you’ve found an affix with an unusual distribution — if you want to test your theory of where it is allowed, you’ll need to have a native speaker to double-check if you’re using it correctly. Or even at a more fundamental level, one of the first things any book about field linguistics mentions is that it’s nearly impossible to transcribe audio without going through it with a native speaker, because you won’t necessarily be able to perceive all the sounds at first. (Disclaimer: I’m not a linguist myself, but I’ve seen this advice mentioned several times.) Problems like this are why language preservation generally ends up as a race against time until the last native speaker dies.
      - dimmke 5y ago
        It sounds like the main argument you're making is that having a record wouldn't catch every single edge case. But maybe that's okay? If you get 90% of the value of preserving the language and you miss the 10%, it's probably still worth doing vs. trying to artificially keep a language alive. If you read about this language, it emerged from Old Norse. Do you think there was some kind of "Preserve Old Norse" movement? I just don't see how an effort like this could possibly succeed. If you make kids learn it, the chances of them retaining fluency in it are pretty low I'd think? They'd have to be using it a lot. And I think most people would probably rather their kids learn English as a second language. I guess a solution would be to teach the kids English and Elfdalian instead of English and Swedish, and then when they need to talk to people from other regions they just use English as the lingua franca.
ericmay 5y ago
It’s so sad too. I think nation states have destroyed a lot of local cultures. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  I sometimes wonder what percentage of people can't speak the same language their grandparents spoke. With China and India it must be hundreds of millions.
  - don-code 5y ago
    My grandmother speaks fluent English, but also fluent Italian. Problem is, it's what I'll call "pre-radio Italian" - where there was no single Italian language, but rather a great many dialects that sort-of sounded the same, until radio and (later) television came and unified them all into one language. I bring this up because she often references words that only loosely resemble the modern forms. A good example is a number of her childhood figures who she affectionately calls "azi" - this is actually a version of the modern Italian "zio" (uncle). It gets much worse with foods, which really no amount of Googling can ever resolve a recipe, or even a description.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- thegrimmest 5y ago
  I'm not sure what's sad about it. What good is a language if no one speaks it? In the ideal world, wouldn't everyone speak the same language?
  - friendcrunch 5y ago
    Language encodes within it's systems, a built-up treasure trove of human meaning. A universal language looses a humongous amount of meaning. Its usefulness is in merely communicating functionality. In short, such a "universal" will fragment for the need to enrich this substandard language. Remember, human language needs to be rich.
Duralias 5y ago
And several times in Sweden with Sami, Finish, this and probably more.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Gothic at some point. And I wonder if the Göta and Svea even spoke the same languages before merging.
joe_the_user 5y ago
Preserving an old language is great. Preserving it by having young people who's first language is this obscure language probably is doing a disservice to those young people and the older people probably knew that.
- redisman 5y ago
  Kids can learn two first languages just fine
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    Some kids can. Some kids definitely learn only one language really well and struggle with a second indefinitely. I'm sure there's some cut-off and a way to do it right and so-forth. But are the surviving native speak of an obscure language in some rural village going to suss that out. Plus a lot of kids who a language just when they're young go to forget. I remember, growing up, a friend who could understand but not speak Urdu. He wasn't going to perpetuate the language.

Grakel 5y ago

Consolidating what we do (language, money, etc.) while honoring and keeping local culture alive is a huge issue everywhere, as the globe continues to shrink via technology and diplomacy. It's a root factor in practically every issue and will continue to be. Not sure what the answer is that results in more than crappy themed restaurants.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
I still don't understand why losing another language is a bad thing. I realize that another language creates another way of thinking, culture, and way to express oneself which leads to a good variation instead of having a unified "one world view." I really am not coming off as someone ignorant thinking "the whole world should speak english!" What I'm getting at is, if it's a very insignificant language like that and nobody bothers learning it anymore, what is the point aside from looking for something to do? It's a dying language. Much like a dying culture of an extinct people. Reviving it and forcing people to retain it will not be doing anyone favors either. I think having culturally distinct languages is fine on a macro level, but at the scale of this minor language, it's really as useful as arrowhead you find in the ground here in the States. At one time this was useful, but now is no longer that time.
- rogerclark 5y ago
  Why not? As far as "looking for something to do", preserving a dying language seems a lot more interesting than a lot of other things people do with their spare time.
  - bpiche 5y ago
    The incuriousness in this thread is atypical of the board in my opinion. At one point I used to think that language diversity was actually a net bad thing for humanity, because it decreases our ability to communicate and so on. These days language technology and machine translation are solving that communication issue and we may choose to preserve dying languages for the sake of understanding how language itself works, how humans migrated in the past, and so on.
    - huachimingo 5y ago
      Some languages open your understanding of the other ones from the same family tree. Learn one, and you are partially learning the other.
- magicsmoke 5y ago
  Probably the human tendency for loss aversion. No one today cares about the exact preparations and steps needed to prepare an offering of sheep intestines to Zeus other than a some PhDs in classical studies, but I could imagine ancient Greeks thinking that their youth deciding to worship Roman or Christian gods was a bad thing that took away from their cultural heritage. But after that event happened, no one today really cares or notices the loss of the precise minutia of ancient Greek cultural practices and values.
- bpiche 5y ago
  If another random species of lemur died off and we never sequenced its genome, you might not care. But many scientists would. That arrowhead you discount as useless is another data point to an anthropologist. One man’s trash is unfortunately another man’s dissertation and a window into the past. Edit: an apostrophe
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Yes, these niche languages are essential for comparative linguistics and sometimes more generally.
- dimmke 5y ago
  I think the thing that doesn't make sense to me about all of these language preservation efforts is the idea that a language has to have people actively speaking it. That's a gigantic lift, that takes a ton of effort. Even if you teach a new generation they likely won't keep using it in their day to day. Why not just catalog it? Get the most experienced speakers to record hundreds of hours of audio of it, if it had a writing system catalog that too. Problem solved. Language preserved. Otherwise you're fighting a losing battle trying to keep a language actively being used when only a few thousand people know it still.
  - bradrn 5y ago
    Because you need to have native speakers in order to properly analyse the language. Let’s say you have a corpus and you’ve found two words that seem nearly synonymous: what’s the difference between them? A native speaker might be able to tell you about such subtle differences, but it can be impossible to know otherwise. Or, let’s say you’ve found an affix with an unusual distribution — if you want to test your theory of where it is allowed, you’ll need to have a native speaker to double-check if you’re using it correctly. Or even at a more fundamental level, one of the first things any book about field linguistics mentions is that it’s nearly impossible to transcribe audio without going through it with a native speaker, because you won’t necessarily be able to perceive all the sounds at first. (Disclaimer: I’m not a linguist myself, but I’ve seen this advice mentioned several times.) Problems like this are why language preservation generally ends up as a race against time until the last native speaker dies.
    - dimmke 5y ago
      It sounds like the main argument you're making is that having a record wouldn't catch every single edge case. But maybe that's okay? If you get 90% of the value of preserving the language and you miss the 10%, it's probably still worth doing vs. trying to artificially keep a language alive. If you read about this language, it emerged from Old Norse. Do you think there was some kind of "Preserve Old Norse" movement? I just don't see how an effort like this could possibly succeed. If you make kids learn it, the chances of them retaining fluency in it are pretty low I'd think? They'd have to be using it a lot. And I think most people would probably rather their kids learn English as a second language. I guess a solution would be to teach the kids English and Elfdalian instead of English and Swedish, and then when they need to talk to people from other regions they just use English as the lingua franca.

ericmay 5y ago

It’s so sad too. I think nation states have destroyed a lot of local cultures. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.

LAC-Tech 5y ago
I sometimes wonder what percentage of people can't speak the same language their grandparents spoke. With China and India it must be hundreds of millions.
- don-code 5y ago
  My grandmother speaks fluent English, but also fluent Italian. Problem is, it's what I'll call "pre-radio Italian" - where there was no single Italian language, but rather a great many dialects that sort-of sounded the same, until radio and (later) television came and unified them all into one language. I bring this up because she often references words that only loosely resemble the modern forms. A good example is a number of her childhood figures who she affectionately calls "azi" - this is actually a version of the modern Italian "zio" (uncle). It gets much worse with foods, which really no amount of Googling can ever resolve a recipe, or even a description.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
thegrimmest 5y ago
I'm not sure what's sad about it. What good is a language if no one speaks it? In the ideal world, wouldn't everyone speak the same language?
- friendcrunch 5y ago
  Language encodes within it's systems, a built-up treasure trove of human meaning. A universal language looses a humongous amount of meaning. Its usefulness is in merely communicating functionality. In short, such a "universal" will fragment for the need to enrich this substandard language. Remember, human language needs to be rich.

Duralias 5y ago

And several times in Sweden with Sami, Finish, this and probably more.

guerrilla 5y ago
Gothic at some point. And I wonder if the Göta and Svea even spoke the same languages before merging.

joe_the_user 5y ago

Preserving an old language is great. Preserving it by having young people who's first language is this obscure language probably is doing a disservice to those young people and the older people probably knew that.

redisman 5y ago
Kids can learn two first languages just fine
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Some kids can. Some kids definitely learn only one language really well and struggle with a second indefinitely. I'm sure there's some cut-off and a way to do it right and so-forth. But are the surviving native speak of an obscure language in some rural village going to suss that out. Plus a lot of kids who a language just when they're young go to forget. I remember, growing up, a friend who could understand but not speak Urdu. He wasn't going to perpetuate the language.