[Foundation-l] List of Wikimedia projects and languages

[M. Williamson]

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 at gmail.com>

> On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 14:57, emijrp <emijrp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2011/7/11 Milos Rancic <millosh at 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&authkey=CPCE5pMB#gid=1
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>