On 29/01/2008, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
To some extent. However, long-term maintenance of bilingualism at all levels of a society is rare, and in those situations where it can be found, one language can still be said to be "dying", for example Welsh and English.
I'd certainly disagree in the case of Welsh. The official promotion of it in schools means a generation of Welsh kids is growing up speaking it as well as they do English.
The idea is that for a language to be "healthy", it will need to have a large portion of functionally monolingual people. This has not been proven definitively, but there is much literature on the subject. Many linguists today believe that when everyone is fully bilingual in a vehicular language (dominant language), the smaller language is doomed.
- d.