I know we could make this a very complicated question, discussing whether different dialects, etc., count as distinct languages, but I’m mostly interested in an approximate number now and what some future projections might be.
How about in 500 years? 1000? Is humanity hurtling inexorably toward a universal language? What’s the going theory on how this process (language change, development, extinction, etc) has been/is being affected by contemporary technology?
There’s about 6000 languages spoken in the world today. Estimates of the rate of extinction vary wildly, but I’ll go with one language dying every two weeks, and an assumption that that trend is increasing.
Any language with about 100,000 speakers that has a good percentage of under-25s fluent in it is probably safe, so you can’t just make it into a math problem of 6000 - (26 * X years), but there’s going to be a huge die-off in the next 100 years… say 75%.
So I’ll say about 1500 languages left in 2102. Unless we take steps to prevent this. But it is debatable whether or not there are any effective steps to be taken.
I don’t think technology has much direct effect on language. People think media like television and radio do, but all the studies done suggest otherwise.
Hopefully some other linguists will disagree with me and make this interesting… it’s an excellent question.
Well just because a language exists doesn’t mean it’s still alive and useful. It kind of sounds like you’re wanting to ask something like “How many ‘first’ languages will there be?” Meaning how many languages will there be that someone somewhere on the planet will learn as his or her first language.
I would imagine that eventually the number of languages would be roughly equivalent to the number of countries. I mean look at Japan, Korean and Chinese. These are three languages that will never die as these countries would never abandon them. Factor in groups of countries that speak the same langauge, like Spanish or English or Arabic and those few small populations who somehow manage to retain their local language perhaps along with their national language and I feel that 1000 years from now the # of language per the # of countries will be roughly one.
Of course that’s assuming a whole hell of a lot. Namely that by and large geopolitical relations will stay largely the way they are now.
You cannot just look at the death rate; the birth rate is also important. I spent two weeks in Barbados in each of the last two years and I’ll be damned if I could understand the native “English”. In 100 years, there could be a dozen spinoff languages from English, as many of Spanish and, conceivably, Brazilian could be considered as a separate language from Portuguese. When a dialect becomes a language is as hard to decide as when a subspecies becomes a species. In fact, the two questions are very similar. For species, it is ability to breed and produce fertile young, while for languages I suppose mutual comprehensibility is the criterion. Of course, the Barbadians understand me; but they hear my English all the time. I just cannot understand them. And no, I do not think we are tending towards one language.
Some old lauguages that were dying or extinct, such as Gaelic Irish and Manx, are experiencing revivals. I stumble across quite a few folks who have learned Gaelic, not because it’s particularly useful in the United States, but because it’s either cool (among certain circles of geeks) or they’re trying to honor their heritage (among Irish-Americans). I think there will be a similar revival of some American Indian languages.
If the exodus of whites from South Africa accelerates, you can probably kiss Afrikaans goodbye. That’ll probably be the biggest language to go “tot siens.”
First of all there is a very big difference between Irish and Manx: Irish is still alive as the first and daily language of thousands of people; it is still being passed on from generation to generation. Manx isn’t and everybody who speaks it today had to learn it as a second language.
The OP seems to be concerned mainly with how many languages are still in existence at all, but I think a more important question is how many languages are still being used as a primary means of communication. In this respect the “revivals” you speak of are not really going to be very helpful, because few of the people who learn Irish or Manx as a second language are going to be in a position to use it on a daily basis or to pass it along to their children. And even when they can, it won’t do the language much good if those children have nobody to speak it with. In the 1960s a group of Irish speakers bought houses along the Shaws Road in Belfast for the purpose of creating an urban Gaeltacht; it was successful in that their children did grow up bilingual and spoke Irish amongst each other, but everywhere outside their tiny Gaeltacht they have had to use English and the population of daily Irish speakers in Northern Ireland therefore remains negligible nonetheless.
Hebrew is the language usually cited as a successful case of revival for the simple reason that it’s just about the only truly successful case.
Some thoughtful, interesting replies from all of you–thank you very much.
Yes, my intent with the OP was to ask about how many “first” or “native” languages there will be/are. Thanks to a couple of you for clearing up my vagary.
Your responses are somewhat more encouraging than my initial thoughts about this, but I still find it troubling to consider how much we are losing when a language becomes extinct. Osiris, I’m intrigued to hear that the impact of our media on language extinction is not significant. Maybe that makes me a little bit less of a luddite.
Of course, it’s easy to continue to loathe the de-forestation and industrialization of vast expanses of rain forests, one of the effects of which is to eradicate entire cultures, which were previously isolated and protected and even unknown to the West until the moment of their demise.
Or so I have been led to believe (sorry, no cite).
I am part of one of those groups of Gael-o-philes. I find the prospect of learning a language from scratch, with little to no native help exceedingly daunting. In fact, I keep hoping I’ll find a nice Welsh family that’ll adopt me for a few weeks so I can pick up some rudimentary conversation.
Sadly, Welshmen are thin over here in California…
However, could it not be said that Welsh is another language that is undergoing a successful revitalization?
Welsh is very much in the middle of a revitalisation. Road signs are in Welsh first, then English - some just in Welsh (I eventually figured out what “Araf” means after a couple of near car crashes). Even ATMs are programmed in both, a very large number of terrestrial TV programs are in Welsh (remember, in the UK there are only 5 terrestrial free to view analogue channels). Get satellite/cable or digital TV and whole channels are in Welsh. It’s taught in schools with a great deal more success, and importantly a great deal more takeup, than say French or German is in English schools.
All very confusing for a simple Englishman like myself.
Welsh is considered the healthiest of all Celtic languages (it isn’t a Gaelic language, BTW, Tristan). It’s suffering from the same problem which other Celtic languages have, namely being spoken mainly in the further reaches of the country which have a significant amount of out-migration, but this problem is less pronounced than it is in the Gaelic-speaking areas of Ireland and Scotland.
Well, cultures don’t break down evenly with boarders, so it probably won’t turn out that way. Irish, for example, has over a million speakers now, but it’s not the primary language for most of them. Yet India has dozens of languages with over a million speakers each, and those people use those languages daily. And then you have places like Canada and Belgium. The Quebecois aren’t going to be giving up French anytime soon, and the Flemish in Belgium won’t be speaking French anytime before hell freezes over. I think (maybe!) South America is the only continent that is anywhere nearing having parity with number of languages and number of countries. And finally, Papua New Guinea will blow your averages, since it has over 800 languages and most of them are pretty stable.
Do you (or anyone) have any figures on the linguistic birth rate in different parts of the world? I’ve never seen it discussed in what I’ve read about language death, and it’s not easy to search for online. I just assumed it was negligible, since newborn languages would be subject to the same negative forces as established but dying languages because both groups have a similar number (not many) of speakers.