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[M. Williamson]

No, Milos, my "reasoning" is not "of the industrial age". It is backed up by
first-hand experience and by research. People who live in cities are by
nature a part of a larger urban community, with few exceptions (if there is
some kind of enforced segregation, like ghettoization of Jews which often
preserved Yiddish in urban environments pre-holocaust), which means it is
very, very, very highly likely that their children will learn the LWC of the
city in addition to the language of their parents. There is also a much
higher chance that children who grow up in the city will marry someone
outside of their own linguistic group, which often means their children will
be raised primarily in the main language of that city. Now, like I said in
my original e-mail, a 100% bilingual minority group does not usually stay
bilingual for more than a couple of generations, especially in an urban
environment where they must interact on a daily basis with people who do not
speak their language, and often, might only use their own language at home.

Also, keep in mind that the idea of "generations" varies from country to
country. In some countries, people typically don't give birth until mid-late
30s; in others, it is in the teenage years, so things like language death
happen a bit more rapidly as the new generations come more quickly.

2011/7/11 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>

>  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.
>
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