Because no one is producing those resources, because those that speak only the dying language are handicapped by this fact and thus not in a position to spread the language and those that speak English or French would naturally use them, in order to be understood by more people.
People wanting to preserve the language is not enough. There has to be a need for the language.
There are still thousands of Gaelic speakers, so I would not classify it as useless or obscure yet.
The issue is not that people “shouldn’t” teach their kids their native tongues and raise naturally bilingual children. Even if the second language in question is obscure, I’m sure it is generally harmless and maybe beneficial. The problem is the handwringing from people who are not the child’s parents, whining that the precious language will die out, that the child is being cut off from its heritage, etc. Some people choose not to participate in passing along the burden of propping up a culture, and if that is their decision, the rest of us ought to respect that they know more about the topic than we do. Then there are the tedious and futile wasted efforts of people trying to learn the language or force others to by artificial means.
I find it ironic that it is often the exact same people that claim to value equal human rights, rationality, and reason that romanticize the wonders of a dying culture and want its members to remain static museum pieces for their observational pleasure. One of the main mechanisms by which a language dies is that speakers choose not to pass it on to their children. Now elders cannot share their ideas of the truth with the children and the children are free to make whatever they wish of their lives, unburdened by the long line of magical thinking that preceded them.
Absolutely no-one in the thread is suggesting that children are kept ignorant of the dominant cuturr, or language, and forced to learn only a language spoken by a very few. That would indeed be a problem.
Do you want to tell my Irish friend who loves reading Celtic legends that her parents should have taught her Mandarin or Spanish or some other ‘useful’ language instead of burdening her with being bilingual English/Gaelic? Sure, she doesn’t speak it often, because she lives in England now, and only uses it when she hangs round with other Gaelic speakers (or occasionally teaching me bits), but she’s repeatedly told me how much she appreciates being able to access all that culture, her family’s culture, in the original, not the watered down translations (the English translations skip half the best bloodthirsty bits apparently). She’s so far managed to refrain from disembowelling anyone for breaching ancient laws from the repressive outdated culture as well.
Not everyone is interested in learning the language of their cultural background, sure, but I wish I’d been brought up speaking two languages, even if one was something like Welsh (which would be the most likely candidate, as I lived on the Welsh border).
Incidently, the common story of Welsh people speaking English until a non-local shows up is pretty well a myth; Welsh has a hell of a lot of English loan words, especially regarding modern technology, so that it can be very easy to not realise that someone is actually talking in Welsh until you really listen.
How many people speaking dying languages are fluent ONLY in that language? Most minority language speakers are at least bilingual, arguably, polylingualism is the normal state of human beings and it’s only been in the past few thousands years that windspread areas of just one language cropped up.
“Wanting to preserve the language” is need enough for a lot of people who maintain a minority language and do so by using it as much as possible in their home lives.
Did her parents know Mandarin and Spanish and kept them from her so they could push Gaelic instead? If that’s the case and I were her, I would be a bit upset about their decision.
Gaelic and Welsh are not obscure languages. There are vast numbers of languages whose names are not familiar, because only a handful of people speak them. When a language dies off, I consider it a sign of positive progress.
I don’t know how many, but it is not zero. We never hear what they have to say, for obvious reasons, so we don’t have to be aware they exist at all, but they do. Why is it okay that they don’t get to participate in the global conversation?
Some people really do keep their children from learning about language and culture other than their own, in order to keep them from ideas that may lead to them abandoning a culture that does not hold up to rational scrutiny. When a new group does this, we call it a cult and disparage it, but if the group has been around long enough, we think the exact same behavior deserves respect, celebration, and romanticizing.
Language is for communication, and when we don’t speak the same language, communication is hampered. I want global communication to improve so we can work together for the benefit of everyone.
Wanting to preserve a language could create need, but it usually doesn’t, so the language’s death throes go on for a bit longer than necessary.
Actually, Gaelic could be considered an obscure language as only about 1 million and some change speak it at all, and only about 55,000 on a daily basis, although thanks to government programs it is now gaining rather than losing speakers.
We’re just going to have to agree to disagree regarding the “progress” thing - what you regard as a positive I still see as a loss. Mind you, I think there are worse things to lose in the world, but it’s still a loss in my viewpoint.
I tend to agree with the OP. Excluding things like natural disasters or genocide, languages die out because the people who speak the language perceive it as being of limited usefulness. If the people of some remote Peruvian tribe decide that it makes more sense to teach their children Spanish, who am I to decide they’re wrong? If Navajos now mostly speak English, so they aren’t limited to the reservation their whole lives, why should I wring my hands over this?
And if the members of that Peruvian tribe want to pass on not just Spanish but also their native tongue? And if Navajo want to speak BOTH Navajo and English? What’s wrong with that? Who makes it an either/or situation?
Some minority languages hang on for a long, long time - that’s probably how we get language isolates. In other instances they don’t. Frequently, it’s not a real “choice” - if you’re invaded and your new overlords administer severe beatings every time they hear your language instead of yours I’m not sure that makes for a “choice”. Sometimes, when that pressure is removed, a language will re-surge - are we to argue with those people, who think passing on the smaller language is preferable?
Some languages will inevitably die out - once you get down to a handful of elderly speakers it’s not going to survive. Others it’s not so certain. Others that spread over wide areas fracture into new languages - Latin did that, and English already has separate geographic dialects that might evolve into new languages. Or maybe not.
IANA linguist, but I have a suspicion that the way that people’s internal dialogues is framed via a language has profound effects on HOW you think, which is, in some part, a big part of being part of a “people”. I suspect that part of the vitality of English-speaking countries is a direct outgrowth of the vitality of English, with the rather promiscuous borrowing and appropriating of words and constructs from other languages, as well as the ease with which new ones are generated. It engenders a certain mental flexibility that a language whose grammar and lexicon haven’t significantly changed in 500 years doesn’t necessarily engender.
That, to me is a reason to preserve languages- they represent different ways of though- worldviews, approaches to life, etc… that would otherwise be lost.
Some world views and approaches to life should be lost, because they suck. You are welcome to look at the world and approach life according to a dying culture if you wish, but you don’t. Why should anyone else have to, just to make the scenery more interesting for the rest of us?
Language is not just a tool. Language is culture and history.
Different languages definitely affect how we think. Here’s an article that goes into how it affects our perceptions of color and direction.
Here’s a New York Times article that goes into the same thing.
Different languages can also affect how you view time:
Our language affects how we think. There will be a diversity of thoughts and worldviews lost as languages are lost.
Those. People. Speak. French. They speak French. They speak French. They already speak French. For those that do not speak French, they should have access to government schools, which are taught in French. It’s not “Moundang or French?”, it’s “Moundang, Guidar, Fulfulde and French” or just “Guidar, Fulfulde, and French.”
They are not losing by speaking an additional language. They are gaining.
Continuing a language required need, and it requires desire. But the other factor you aren’t figuring in is that it requires a certain amount of infrastructure. To give an example, Dutch is a darn useless language and basically everyone in the Netherlands speaks English. But it continues because the Dutch have the infrastructure to maintain it.
The Moundang have the desire, and they have the need (historically, the Moundang people have resisted Islamic invaders from the West, but they are now being folded into the Fulbe-Hausa majority. Now with Boko Haram invading, it’s probably useful to keep that resistant identity.)
What they don’t have is the resources. But it won’t always be that way. This is just a moment in history, and it’s likely the will one day have the infrastructure that allows, say, South Africa to keep local languages alive. I think it’s a little sad if they never get to the point where they can make that choice.
Neither of them are exactly obscure, no, and you know why? Concerted campaigns to keep them alive. Gaelic got down to fewer than 100,000 speakers at one point, and Welsh wasn’t a whole lot more widespread, because some people (OK, the English) considered that it was a good thing for ‘lesser’ languages to die off, and did their best to make that happen.
Luckily that view has changed.
I really don’t understand why you’d think 'Gaelic or Mandarin would be the choice anyway… For those who speak obscure langagues, it’s really not happening that way.
I worked with a lot of recent immigrants from several African countries in my previous job; just to take one example, he spoke (in order he’d learnt them) a tribal language that his parents spoke at home, French, as the country he was from was a former French colony and most business stuff was in French there, Arabic, as he was Muslim, Italian, as he’d spent three years in Italy before moving to the UK, and finally English
In what actual way is the fact that he only really use one language to speak to Grandma damaging? He didn’t use the Italian at all any more, but no-one thinks knowing that was in some way bad. Well, maybe he ordered pizza with it, I dunno.
Pretty well all the immigrant guys who spoke a tribal langague (every single one I asked, but I can’t speak for all) spoke at least 3 different languages. It’s reallly not an either/or choice.
Maybe I’m mistaken, but to me it seems as if AnaMen is thinking in terms of “adding a language to English” (which would be her case) rather than of what’s actually the worldwide norm, which is learning several languages in childhood - millions of people learn multiple languages in toddlerhood, even. To her, any language other than those she deems Acceptable is a waste of time and resources, and if those who are growing up speaking them don’t think so it’s because they don’t realize what a waste it is.
Never mind that learning multiple languages as a child is a lot easier than learning them as a grownup; she actually, personally KNOWS people who are fluent in English as an Nth language but she can’t emotionally comprehend that it’s not the only language they’re fluent in (and maybe not even the one they’re most fluent in) and that speaking other languages doesn’t deter from their knowledge of English. Meanwhile, the people who administer SAT, GRE etc know that speakers of Romance languages get higher grades in vocabulary than those who are not, due to being able to figure out the meaning of previously-unencountered words from their roots: our “additional” (in her view) languages actually improve our English.
I had no idea that you had met and conversed with every single one of them. Mea culpa!
There is no need for an infrastructure to prop up a language and sure, forcing people to stop speaking a language via beatings and such is wrong and bad, but it’s the violence and force that are bad, not the fact that a language is a casualty of it.
It doesn’t have to be such a Darwinian process; just because a language and/or culture is dying doesn’t automatically mean that the culture or the world view/approach to life is lacking in any way. It may just mean that for whatever reason, the language and culture of some other place is attractive for some reason.
I mean, people all over the world are learning English and soaking up American culture… because it’s there, it’s heavily marketed, and because there’s a perceived economic advantage to speaking English.
That doesn’t mean that speaking your native language and having your native outlook and way of life is somehow inferior, just that it’s not the “attractive” one for whatever reason.
I’m sure there were lots of speakers of Occitan back in the day, who learned French, and their descendants are monoglot French speakers. That doesn’t mean that Occitan and the corresponding ways of life are inferior, just that rather French was perceived as more useful.
Similarly, people spoke Texas German for decades in the Hill Country as a primary language. As interconnections between that area and the rest of the state and nation increased, the prevalence of Texas German has decreased drastically. Not because of any inherent inferiority or lack of merit, but rather because it was insular, and English is more widely useful.
Personally, I’m a big fan of bi/multilingualism, especially along the Dutch model. I mean, everyone there pretty much speaks Dutch as a first language, and English as an alternate language, and to a very high standard, I might add. So they’re still as Dutch as can be, but can interact with the wider world through English without losing what it is to be Dutch.
When we no longer have languages to fight over, we’ll fight over dialect.
I can understand indifference to the loss of languages - you can’t care about everything in the world, and for some people that issue is so low down on the list of concerns that they just have no reason to care. What I don’t understand is the hostility - not indifference but being GLAD a language had died out.