# Minority European Languages **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 17, 2005, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537 "2005-02-17T14:55:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2005, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/21 "2005-02-17T20:18:05Z")
No one’s mentioned Romany? ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2005, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/22 "2005-02-17T20:30:04Z")
> [@Rune](#): > > Telling a Valencian his is a dialect of Catalan are fighting words I believe. Let me know when you’ve found a Valencian who actually speaks Valencian, and we’ll ask him - you’ll have to look pretty hard nowadays (but linguistically, there’s no doubt. In fact, Valencian is closer to standard Catalan than some rural dialects of Catalan.) > [@ruadh](#): > > Back to the OP, I suppose Irish doesn’t count as a minority language since it’s an official language of Ireland, but it certainly is spoken only by a minority. The youngest native speakers of Irish are over 30 nowadays, which means I may well outlive the language. I know this is the sort of thing that pisses people off, but Irish is on its deathbed. There’s a movement to revive it, but without native speakers they’ll be creating something else instead. > [@Lobsang](#): > > I don’t know how you define dead here, but I am told there are many who still speak it well. It’s on all the road signs, and there are children’s books that teach Manx. (and more adult ones too) I guess it’s a philosophical point, but I think it’s untenable to claim that a second-language community really counts for much; it’s nice that they’re playing at reviving their language, but it’s going to be a heavily Anglicized shadow of its former self even if more than a couple thousand people learn it. Native speaker competency can’t be achieved without contact with native speakers. So, clairobscur, I was wondering even before I got to your post - are there native speakers left of any of the other langues d’oïl? I’m guessing if there are, that they’re elderly. Or have they faded away completely under the influence of Francien? ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2005, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/23 "2005-02-17T20:50:10Z")
> [@Excalibre](#): > > So, clairobscur, I was wondering even before I got to your post - are there native speakers left of any of the other langues d’oïl? I’m guessing if there are, that they’re elderly. Or have they faded away completely under the influence of Francien? I don’t know well northern France. Maybe there are natives speakers, but I asked several times, and the best I could get (from people like old farmers, the most likely to be able to speak them) was some isolated sentences they remembered. I never once heard people speaking an oil dialect together, either (while in small villages you could hear Breton quite frequently, and, though rarely, Occitan too). My guess would be that there are none, but I wouldn’t know for sure. Or maybe very, very old people. ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2005, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/24 "2005-02-17T21:19:21Z")
By the way, searching for some cite about hypothetical native speakers of oil dialects (couldn’t find one), I visited a Breton message board where the posters were expressing their despise of gallo (an oil dialect sopken in eastern Britanny), how it wasn’t backed by any real history, culture, etc… (contrarily to the noble Breton language, of course…), that efforts to revive it were not only pointless and ludicrous but intended to counter the spreading of Breton, and so on… I also saw a linguistical map of France, where they had replaced the french names of towns, regions, etc…by their name in the local language. Except, mysteriously for Britanny, which was extended to its largest historical borders, including a large oil-speaking area (maybe two thirds of their “Britanny”) where all names where written in…Breton, of course! IOW, the oppressed turn into oppressors as soon as they get a chance to do so. ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2005, 9:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/25 "2005-02-17T21:40:49Z")
> [@clairobscur](#): > > I also saw a linguistical map of France, where they had replaced the french names of towns, regions, etc…by their name in the local language. Except, mysteriously for Britanny, which was extended to its largest historical borders, including a large oil-speaking area (maybe two thirds of their “Britanny”) where all names where written in…Breton, of course! > IOW, the oppressed turn into oppressors as soon as they get a chance to do so. Well, what would you expect from a country once ruled over by [Conan the Barbarian](http://www.mathematical.com/meriadocconan330.html)? 😃 ---
**Author:** ![GorillaMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/50afbb/32.png) [@GorillaMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GorillaMan)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2005, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/26 "2005-02-17T21:53:58Z")
> [@Excalibre](#): > > The youngest native speakers of Irish are over 30 nowadays That’ll come as news to many of my cousins and their friends. Not to mention some of their young children. Your assertion is plain wrong. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2005, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/27 "2005-02-17T22:58:32Z")
> [@Stranger On A Train](#): > > I don’t know…I think you could get a hell of a triple word score out of “gwrywgydiwr”. > > Whether you could pronounce it or not is another question. > > Stranger Not to mention you could give all the regular vowels to those playing in hawaiian=) ---
**Author:** ![Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/qadgop_the_mercotan/32/83_2.png) [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qadgop_the_Mercotan)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2005, 12:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/28 "2005-02-18T00:59:42Z")
Don’t forget [Frisian](http://www.eurolang.net/Languages/Frisian.htm), in the Netherlands and in Germany!!! ---
**Author:** ![cckerberos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f0a364/32.png) [@cckerberos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cckerberos)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2005, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/29 "2005-02-18T01:56:04Z")
> [@GorillaMan](#): > > That’ll come as news to many of my cousins and their friends. Not to mention some of their young children. Your assertion is plain wrong. I think he’s speaking of “pure” Gaeltacht Irish, which all the numbers I’ve seen have dying off, even as the population speaking Irish as a second language spreads. ---
**Author:** ![scotandrsn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a4c791/32.png) [@scotandrsn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scotandrsn)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2005, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/30 "2005-02-18T02:55:19Z")
> [@Qadgop the Mercotan](#): > > Don’t forget [Frisian](http://www.eurolang.net/Languages/Frisian.htm), in the Netherlands and in Germany!!! Yay, another Frisian fan! But we must distinguish between West Frisian, the language most closely related to English of any spoken on the planet, North Frisian, an entirely different dialect, and East Frisian, which is actually a dialect of German ---
**Author:** ![Askance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/askance/32/8281_2.png) [@Askance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askance)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2005, 3:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/31 "2005-02-18T03:02:30Z")
Not to mention the [bovine](http://www.whff.info/) and [ovine](http://www.farmersvillecheeses.com/breed.htm) dialects of Frisian. ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2005, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/32 "2005-02-18T04:12:19Z")
> [@clairobscur](#): > > By the way, searching for some cite about hypothetical native speakers of oil dialects (couldn’t find one), I visited a Breton message board where the posters were expressing their despise of gallo (an oil dialect sopken in eastern Britanny), how it wasn’t backed by any real history, culture, etc… (contrarily to the noble Breton language, of course…), that efforts to revive it were not only pointless and ludicrous but intended to counter the spreading of Breton, and so on… So far as I’m aware, from my limited research into it, it seems that Breton and Welsh are the only two Celtic languages likely to survive my children - while the numbers are always pretty questionable, and often minority language populations are pumped up to make the situation look a little less tenuous, Breton and Welsh have pretty large native-speaking populations, and aren’t in any serious danger of dying out soon. > [@GorillaMan](#): > > That’ll come as news to many of my cousins and their friends. Not to mention some of their young children. Your assertion is plain wrong. Your relations will come as news to many experts in linguistics. [Language Log: McCloskey on the rebounding of Irish](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001768.html) includes correspondence from one of the experts in Irish - and he notes clearly that the currently successful form of Irish is a heavily Anglicized second-language community (minority languages being subject to occasional fads, as with Galego and Catalan during the 19th century. Both of which, thankfully, in no immediate danger of dying.) People making a conscious effort to revive a language and managing some fluency in it as a second language are doing a pretty amazing thing, if you ask me - but the community of native, first-language Irish speakers has not passed the language onto their children. So what’s being revived is not really the same as the “real” Irish language. It’s great that there are hobbyists doing their best to protect their heritage - it’s an admirable thing, and preservation of expertise in the language is necessary to avoid losing the cultural legacy of Ireland. But as a language itself, what’s being preserved by the hobbyists is not the same thing. It’ll never have the depth or potential of true first-language Irish, since constructions and words will be forgotten and replaced with English calques. English will end up doing the language’s heavy lifting, because you can’t achieve native-level competency from books, so the speakers will end up switching to English when they can’t form a sentence in Irish. Proverbs and expressions will likely be forgotten, and it will remain the playground of the hobbyists if the young people don’t grow up speaking it and if there’s not a community to use it in. Kids tend to abandon their ancestral languages if they don’t see them as being useful, and Irish will most likely remain the specialty of a few who care a lot about it. It’s a lot better than nothing, but it’s not the same as a real language community. (The fine people at LanguageLog mention Irish in passing in [this post](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001783.html) as well, about some silly political move to get Cornish official status, after 200-some years dead and gone.) ---
**Author:** ![ruadh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/d2c977/32.png) [@ruadh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ruadh)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2005, 7:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/33 "2005-02-18T07:45:42Z")
**Excalibre** , I live in Ireland, and your “expert linguists” are simply wrong. All native Irish speakers are being raised bilingual these days, and their numbers are small in any case, but they definitely exist. One of the things which may have confused the “expert” you linked to (who, I will note, lives in California) is that the areas defined as “Gaeltacht” areas are significantly larger than the areas in which Irish actually is the primary language. This is partially due to wishful thinking, and partially because areas so defined get extra money from the Irish government. Also, if you’re looking for a Valencian who speaks Valenciano, just look in the University of Valencia. AFAIK it’s still a requirement for the staff there. In response to **bainne** ’s post there is a very small Gaeltacht in West Belfast, which was created when a bunch of Irish speaking families decided to buy houses together in order to raise their children in a bilingual environment. So there are a _few_ native speakers in the north (and no doubt there are also a few who’ve been raised bilingual by their parents in other parts of the north). ---
**Author:** ![KGS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/90ced4/32.png) [@KGS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KGS)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2005, 8:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/34 "2005-02-18T08:07:06Z")
> [@HeyHomie](#): > > The ones that come to mind are Basque, Catalan, Breton and Ladino. Surely there must be others. > > By “minority” languages I mean: not the official or dominant language of the country in which the speaker lives. Catalan is the official language of [Andorra](http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/an.html) ---
**Author:** ![GorillaMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/50afbb/32.png) [@GorillaMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GorillaMan)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2005, 8:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/35 "2005-02-18T08:07:27Z")
I’m with **ruadh** , that the expert’s wrong. He says: > [@](#): > > If you walk along a road in a Gaeltacht area and try to listen for the language being used by groups of teenagers and children by themselves, it is always (in my recent experience) English. Someone I know who is the principal of a primary school in the Donegal Gaeltacht reported that of the 22 children who entered his school at the beginning of the current year, only two had, in his judgment, sufficient Irish. His experience isn’t universal. And I’d be interested to know which Donegal school he’s talking about - some of the cousins I mentioned were the _only_ kids in their class who didn’t speak Irish at home, as the norm. To dismiss a surviving genuine mother-tongue community as ‘hobbyists’ is really insulting. Also, to say > [@](#): > > so the speakers will end up switching to English when they can’t form a sentence in Irish is rather ignorant - many Irish speakers will tell you that there’s many things that are _easier_ to express in that language. ---
**Author:** ![bainne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/fbc32d/32.png) [@bainne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bainne)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2005, 1:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/36 "2005-02-18T13:21:05Z")
> [@ruadh](#): > > In response to **bainne** ’s post there is a very small Gaeltacht in West Belfast, which was created when a bunch of Irish speaking families decided to buy houses together in order to raise their children in a bilingual environment. So there are a _few_ native speakers in the north (and no doubt there are also a few who’ve been raised bilingual by their parents in other parts of the north). Well I did say “As for Irish speakers in Northern Ireland I doubt **many** of them are native speakers of Irish, most of them having learned Irish in primary or secondary schools.” Thanks for the clarification though. ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2005, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/37 "2005-02-18T13:24:09Z")
ruadh and GorillaMan: Fine. I don’t have any other convenient sources of data on the subject. I’m pretty astonished by your arguments, given that the depressing decline of Irish’s native population has been pretty well known for a long time. I’ll continue to trust those who carry out research on the matter, but I’ll stop arguing it with you guys. > [@GorillaMan](#): > > Also, to say is rather ignorant - many Irish speakers will tell you that there’s many things that are _easier_ to express in that language. Huh? What does that have to do with anything? Have you ever tried to communicate in a language you don’t speak well? It’s hard. Am I missing something? Because this sentence just doesn’t seem to have to do with anything. In my experience, every language makes it particularly easy to communicate some things and difficult to communicate others. But that doesn’t relate to what I was talking about, so what did I say that was ignorant? So out of curiosity, how good is you guys’s Irish? Where are you from, and how old are you? ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2005, 1:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/38 "2005-02-18T13:29:07Z")
> [@ruadh](#): > > Also, if you’re looking for a Valencian who speaks Valenciano, just look in the University of Valencia. AFAIK it’s still a requirement for the staff there. It may well me. Well-meaning regulations often go unenforced, though. Valencia hasn’t had the political push to revive the language the way Catalunya has, and active use of it is quite uncommon. I don’t know if, historically, Valencia has ever been majority Catalan-speaking - it may well have always had both languages as Castilla and Catalunya both had a great deal of political and social power at different times. ---
**Author:** ![TwistofFate](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/cdc98d/32.png) [@TwistofFate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TwistofFate)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2005, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/39 "2005-02-18T13:45:54Z")
Taim fiche chuaig blian daois, ach ni raibhim ghaelgeoir 🙂 Is maith liom milsean. I speak barely enough to have a basic conversation, I understand the written word a bit better, but I put that down to my apathy towards the subject in school, which I regret now. that said, there is a growing number of primary Irish speaking schools, and although fewer kids are being raised with Irish as their only language (at least until school) there are more kids who are being raised bilingually. Irish isn’t on it’s deathbed, and will grow strong again. I don’t think Irish has a council like France which is dedicated to developing french words for new english words, although I am aware of a body which will develop a substitute upon request. ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2005, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537/40 "2005-02-18T13:54:00Z")
Interestingly, though tangential to the Irish-as-a-living-language discussion here, the Ancient Order of Hibernians in America is promoting (marginal) fluency in Irish among Irish-Americans and other interested parties. My wife took three semesters of Irish from Fr. Liam O’Doherty, a first-generation immigrant Irish priest who looked and sounded like a cross between Bing Crosby’s priest roles and a dissipated leprechaun. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/minority-european-languages/290537.md?page=3)