Samoa might be the only one of any sizable numbers.
Official languages Samoan • English
Pop: 205,557
I live in Hawaii part time, home is there - most grand kids great-grand kids are mainland. Hawaiian language (at least phrases/words) are part of daily life. News, radio, TV, and ads are sprinkled with some bits of language. Most roads/streets have Hawaiian names (military bases excepted); I live on Papolohiwa St. for example. My wife’s 1st husband was Hawaiian and the family carries on the tradition that each new birth comes with a “western” name, a “Hawaiian” name, and a Chinese name. Passport and official birth names get looooong.
My son-in-law is Hawaiian and a Pastor over in Waimanalo, a mostly native community. He conducts one of the services on Sunday in Hawaiian. This is not unusual in the Hawaiian home lands areas. So there is some revival. Difficult to grow as the native Hawaiians are spread out across the islands and job opportunities require assimilation into the English speaking culture.
Fijian is an official language in Fiji and the native language of the majority of the population.
True. But keep in mind that a huge Indo-Fijian minority (almost 40%) do not generally speak Fijian so the lingua franca among the islands is mainly English. The danger to a language like Fijian is that it creates schisms among citizens of the same country and for the sake of national cohesion might be abandoned for a more neutral international language like English.
It was sweet. My favorite line was when Sean the barman asked the other barman “Did you know old Paddy could speak Chinese?”
There’s a lot of that elsewhere too. The traditional native language(s) become the languages of the lower caste, the rural poor, the excluded, etc.
Meanwhile the professional and ruling classes speak whatever is the international language of commerce in their part of the world. English, French, Spanish, and increasingly Chinese are common choices.
The native speakers may be a LOT of the populace, but they’re the unimportant part of the populace politically and economically speaking. 'Tain’t right; 'Tis so.
So related I think and offered to get thoughts about how it relates - Spain. Current events a pretty big shift for the minority languages.
Whole article behind wall but the gist is in the preview.
So do you think the status of the Irish language has improved among daily use or fluency?
Yes. No. Pass.
If I recall, Duolingo now claims to have more people studying Irish than are native speakers of Irish. If so, that is a positive for the language and a form of support even if no one is going to become adept solely by using Duolingo.
Back when I was studying it there were supposedly only about 160,000 fluent speakers in the world (note that is fluent, as opposed to native tongue or L1 speakers. It’s possible to be fully fluent in an L2 language so presumably there were some fluent L2’s in amongst that number). My latest Googling indicates there are between 180,000 and 190,000 people considered fluent these days, which is a gain of 20,000-30,000 in the past two decades. However, you should take such numbers with a large grain of salt.
I’d say Irish is at least holding steady and may even be increasing slightly.
However, English is so much more powerful socially and economically in the greater world that holding onto Irish Gaelic is by no means certain. It’s not as moribund as it was 50 or 75 years ago, but it’s still struggling.
Good answer
A hundred years ago, a minority of the people of Ireland were fluent in Irish, and the majority spoke English with little to no knowledge of Irish.
Now, an even smaller minority are fluent in Irish and use it daily, but even among the majority who do not speak Irish, they have some knowledge of Irish, and accept it as the national language (in the Republic, anyway), even if they don’t speak it.
If you consider the Irish language to be a patient who is ill, its symptoms are worse now, but the chance of survival is actually better.
Irish is actually in an interesting position then
I’ll suggest that many languages that got colonized / imperialised into “illness” are now in a similar boat.
Indigenous rights and the importance of preserving indigenous culture are much bigger, more popular ideas today than 75-150 years ago. The overall headcount of humanity has grown greatly in that time. So even though the percentage of indigenous speakers in any country is probably smaller, the headcount is larger. And it’s headcount of co-located individuals who keep a language alive, rather than on permanent life support in a metaphorical “language zoo”.
Reading this, it occurred to me that perhaps a good barometer for the vitality of a minority language is: can you tell a dirty joke in it?
The US has been, to be certain, a self-interested actor towards Hawaii for most of their tangled history but your description is a bit extreme.
- Grover Cleveland opposed the efforts to take over Hawaii and, to my knowledge, the annexation was undertaken by a cabal of individuals in Hawaii and in the US, including both members of the government and private industry. While there was mainland support by some individual members who served in the Federal government, there doesn’t seem to have been a central objective by the Federal government to take the islands. A lot of the impetus seems to have come from Hawaiian-born whites, some of whom wanted to improve their profit margins by gaining power over the local government and others of whom wanted to convert to democracy and remove the corruption of the monarchy. I’d assume that the people on the mainland were mostly interested in Hawaii for strategic and financial reasons. Since they aided the annexation without the support of the US government, the financial goals were probably the core ones.
- The current US government, to my knowledge, has no particular anti-Hawaiian policy and it’s wrong to say otherwise.
- The Hawaiian education system is controlled by the government of Hawaii, elected by the people of Hawaii. The problem there is that only about 21% of the people who live in Hawaii have any native ancestry so getting the votes high enough to mandate universal education in the Hawaiian language might be difficult. (The population of the Hawaiian people was decimated by the introduction of Western diseases, making it easier for white and other immigrants to the islands to overtake the native population and become a notable political and voting block right from the beginning.)
- Starting from roughly 1984, the islands have started making native Hawaiian language available in schools and as an after-school progam.
Overall, Ireland has the double advantage of having started earlier and having a majority of people with native Irish heritage.
Ireland being the notorious exception to this, its population still being much smaller than it was in 1845.
@Sage_Rat has done a pretty good job of refuting the extremity of @Dr.Drake 's claims.
I would add that the Hawai’i State government is NOT “an arm of the US government.” Hawai’i voters elect their representatives, thank you very much.
The story of Hawaii’s annexation and absorption into the US seems more and more tragic the more I learn. But the very worst motivations are historical - missionaries from New England, particularly in the earlier part of the 19th century, with merchant class interests dominating in the later part. And some of their negative impact was accidental (though not so much with the missionaries, who actively wanted to replace what they saw as Hawaiian “licentiousness” with the strict morals of New England Protestantism). For example, merchant demands for sandalwood had an extremely destructive impact on both local ecology and power structures. But it’s not like the merchants rubbed their hands and cackled gleefully, “bwa-hah-hah, let’s destroy Hawaii and it’s people!”
And why would the US government give a rat’s ass as to the nature of Hawai’i tourism, for its own “self interest”? It’s true that the management of tourism is a HUGE issue. But it is one that is playing out on the local stage.
There are ongoing conversations about how Hawai’i can reduce its dependence on tourism; develop sustainable, “regenerative” tourism; and limit the damage tourism causes. It’s a fascinating, important subject, but the primary voices in the dialog represent cultural practitioners, State government, local merchants, and environmentalists - NOT the feds.
Probably, yes; a few others have added corrections, but I stand by the statement that American self-interest involves not paying too much attention to the Hawai’ian language as it attenuates, or offering tepid support but not actively promoting it.
You’re absolutely right about the numbers, and the will of the people, but the status quo presumes that only people who are of Hawai’ian descent would want to learn Hawai’ian. Probably true, but is it true that only people of Hawai’ian descent should learn Hawai’ian? That doesn’t necessarily follow: I’d guess the majority of people who speak English in Hawai’i are not of English descent.
There’s an argument to be made for promoting the local language because it is local. I don’t know enough about the situation in Hawai’i to know whether that is happening. I think that is happening in Ireland, but I don’t know how much people who are Irish by citizenship or residency, but aren’t ethnically Irish, embrace the language as theirs. Some, for sure, but I suspect not much.
Are the majority of people (in Hawaii) who speak American of American descent? I bet yes. There are a goodly number of native Asians of whatever flavor in Hawaii for whom American is probably not their birth language.