[Foundation-l] A simple question on languages.

[Mark Williamson]

On 28/01/2008, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > But then it's a completely different question.
> >
> > It is. But it's much easier to answer.
>
> I wish they'd accept that argument in my exams... ;)

Well, the other one would take long enough for me to answer that I
don't care to spend the time on it - I don't know that it would be
worth it, and the answer would still be pretty inexact. Finding
literacy rates for countries and regions is one thing; finding them
for languages, including second-language users, is difficult to
impossible for many larger languages spoken across national borders.

> > Native speakers. However, as I noted previously, using the 6 languages
> > of the United Nations, INCLUDING second-language speakers, your reach
> > will still be under 50%. I didn't check out the statistics for
> > second-language speakers for, say, the top 20 languages, but as one
> > can imagine, there is a strong correlation between the number of
> > native speakers a language has and the number of second-language
> > speakers (with notable outliers such as French and Japanese, on
> > opposite sides). Thus, outside of the top 15 or so languages, the
> > number of people who speak the language as their second language is
> > usually going to be insignificant compared to the number of native
> > speakers. I guarantee you that even incorporating all bilinguals,
> > you're not going to be able to reach greater than 75% with less than
> > 50 languages, and quite likely many more.
>
> I agree. In addition to the correlation you mention, the number of new
> speakers you get with each new language you add diminishes because
> there is an increased chance that you've already counted them as a
> speaker of a language you've already considered.

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. 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.

Mark

-- 
Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.