No, Milos, my "reasoning" is not "of the industrial age". It is backed up by first-hand experience and by research. People who live in cities are by nature a part of a larger urban community, with few exceptions (if there is some kind of enforced segregation, like ghettoization of Jews which often preserved Yiddish in urban environments pre-holocaust), which means it is very, very, very highly likely that their children will learn the LWC of the city in addition to the language of their parents. There is also a much higher chance that children who grow up in the city will marry someone outside of their own linguistic group, which often means their children will be raised primarily in the main language of that city. Now, like I said in my original e-mail, a 100% bilingual minority group does not usually stay bilingual for more than a couple of generations, especially in an urban environment where they must interact on a daily basis with people who do not speak their language, and often, might only use their own language at home.
Also, keep in mind that the idea of "generations" varies from country to country. In some countries, people typically don't give birth until mid-late 30s; in others, it is in the teenage years, so things like language death happen a bit more rapidly as the new generations come more quickly.
2011/7/11 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 22:42, M. Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
To be honest, I don't think 10k is a fair threshold. Many languages with hundreds of thousands of speakers will likely go extinct by 2050, due to high levels of bilingualism and low levels of children learning the language. This language shift is particularly acute on the American continent, where some languages that have been able to survive and remain relatively stable since conquest are now looking increasingly troubled
and
threatened by Spanish. Even languages that can still be regarded as
"safe",
like Quechua, can be said to be "melting at the edges" - though there is
no
doubt Quechua will be alive and have millions of speakers in 2050, there
is
a good chance that a good percentage of the grandchildren of living
Quechua
speakers will only have a passing knowledge of the language.
With the rapid urbanization that is currently occuring in many parts of
the
developing world, language death seems likely to accelerate. When you
come
from a group of 100,000 speakers, and all of them move to a city where
the
majority language is Nigerian Pidgin English, how many generations will
your
original language survive? Chances are, not more than 3. Linguistic diversity in Africa was still actually rising (!) until the early 1990s,
but
since then it has begun a sharp decline, much like what had already been seen in Europe, America, and Australia, with the difference that the sharp declines in Australia and America can be attributed exclusively or nearly exclusively to pressures from European colonial languages, while
in
Africa there is also pressure from larger African languages like Swahili
or
Lingala or Yoruba on smaller African languages.
When bilingualism reaches over 50% in a community, the only chance for intergenerational language maintenance is if there is a higher prestige
for
the native language than for the outside one. If the "prestige" of a language is perceived to be less than that of a LWC (language of wider communication), like Spanish or English or Swahili, and people are
already
bilingual, the native language will very quickly fall into disuse, which
is
followed by extinction.
Some people think that a large number of speakers is a good guard against extinction, but unfortunately there are several cases of hundreds of thousands or even millions of speakers of a language undergoing intergenerational shift, and such "large" languages can go extinct very quickly as well when there is very low prestige and very high
bilingualism.
Your reasoning is of Industrial Age: People come to the city, the only way to be informed is through the local newspapers and, logically, the grandchildren barely know language of their grandparents.
However, that's not the case anymore. People are using internet as primary source of information more and more. And it is always easier to read in native language, than in local lingua franca. Of course, *if* information exist in native language and that *is* our job.
Three generations in our age is a lot. We are able to create environment for thousands of languages In 50 years. Creating 100 new Wikipedias per year is impossible task now, but, with properly directed efforts we could reach that number.
Besides that, developing countries are becoming richer. It is possible that many languages would be preserved in the way in which Sorbian languages are.
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