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. 2011/7/11 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 14:57, emijrp emijrp@gmail.com wrote:
2011/7/11 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
Note that estimates from the past (and likely from the present) count that no language with less than 1M of speakers would survive 2050.
If Wikimedia projects and WMF leave to die 90% (or 80%, or 70%, or 60%)
of
current languages in the next 40 years (we will be alive to see it, probably), then both are failures.
I think (but I am not sure) that I posted this link [1] here a couple of weeks ago.
Speaking just about languages, the situation is approximately the next:
speakers total speakers number of languages 100M+ 2,514,548,848 9 10M-100M 2,376,900,757 78 1M-10M 950,166,458 303 100k-1M 284,119,716 900 10k-100k 61,223,297 1837 1k-10k 7,823,891 2025 100-999 460,911 1039 10-999 12,664 343 1-9 528 134 sum 6,195,257,070 6,668
So, number of languages with less than 10k is approximately 45%, but it is around 8M of people in total or 0,0015 of world population. It is highly likely that that number of languages won't exist in ~100 years. (Some of those below 10k will survive, but some of those above 10k won't.)
To make those languages viable enough to survive -- much more work than just our is needed. I am sure that 10% of military budgets of the world countries for one year would preserve all languages, but that's the other issue. Basically, that's not our failure as Wikimedians, but failure of our civilization.
[1] https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=tCwO11tFPLPB-SJafDesypg&...
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l