[Foundation-l] List of Wikimedia projects and languages

[Milos Rancic]

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