On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 22:42, M. Williamson <node.ue(a)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.