I'm going long on Madiba memorial signer Thamsanqa Jantjie. I feel strongly that a correct interpretation will be found and history will vindicate him in the end. | Submit your comments on this article |
| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| Economic Growth Kills Minority Languages |
| 2014-09-04 |
| [An Nahar] Economic prosperity is the worst enemy of minority languages, said researchers Wednesday who listed parts of Australia and North America as "hotspots" for extinction risk. We don't get to wear funny hats and embroidered jackets anymore either. Based on the same criteria used to determine the risk of extinction faced by animal and plant species, they concluded that about a quarter of the world's known 6,909 languages were threatened. Take your funny hat off to the last speakers of Vep and Athabaskan. "Languages are now rapidly being lost at a rate of extinction exceeding the well-known catastrophic loss of biodiversity," the U.S.-European research team wrote in the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters. "And we'll all be the worse off for it. How do you say that in Iriquois?" "Small-population languages remaining in economically developed regions are seriously threatened by continued speaker declines." What do you think they speak in Brittany anymore? In Alaska, for example, there were only 24 active speakers by 2009 of the Athabaskan people's indigenous language, which children were no longer learning. Toldja so. There isn't that much international commerce carried out in Athabaskan, so it's rapidly going titzup. Ask any Vep. And the Wichita language of the Plains Indians, now based in Oklahoma, had only one fluent speaker by 2008. How do you know she was fluent? She coulda been lying and you'd never know, wouldja? In Australia, aboriginal languages like the recently-extinct Margu and almost extinct Rembarunga are "increasingly disappearing", the team wrote. Think of all the great literary works that disappear with it... "Economically developed regions, such as North America and Australia, have already experienced many language extinctions," they said. "Nevertheless, small-range and small-population languages still persist in hotspots within these regions. Those languages need immediate attention because of their high extinction risk." What are you gonna do? Require people to speak them? I would have had more respect for the authors of this study had they written it in Vep... Also at risk were developing parts of the world undergoing rapid economic growth, such as much of the tropics and the Himalayan region, said the team -- citing Brazil and Nepal. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #14 Poor people find communication harder. Let's keep them poor and force them into making it harder to communicate. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2014-09-04 15:20 |
| #13 Also, both Hebrew and Irish represent state-driven cultural-formation creation of official "national" languages. Or, to put it another way, they're both examples of heritage languages which were used as part of a "nationalizing" state project, wherein they became the official language as part of an attempt to differentiate the society of the new state from the subjects of their former sovereignty (in the case of the Irish Free State) or to form a proper nation from a collection of poly-linguistic groups in the case of Israel and Hebrew. In the latter case, you had a bunch of Jews from three different regional groupings, who spoke Ladino, Yiddish, English, Arabic, and a vast array of other languages. Hebrew was at least a cultural commonality, which partially explains why it's been far more successful than Irish, which continues to be a notational "national" language. Anyways, long story short, both Irish and Hebrew were attempts to synthesize a state-supported "majority" language, in a classic case of a state "self-colonizing" its own people. (Again, terminology lifted shamelessly from James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State) |
| Posted by: Mitch H. 2014-09-04 12:21 |
| #12 Secret Master, I think you and the researchers have it exactly backwards. Minority languages rely on economic isolation, and tend to wilt in market-system economies. It's subsistence farming and, even more, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle which preserves the hyperlocal languages and microcultures they're talking about here. I've been slowly making my way through Seeing Like a State, and one of the author's main points is how states cultivate uniform cultures in their subject societies so as to make them more "legible", more discernable by central bureaucrats, tax-collectors, and educators. Every serious state cultivates a "national" language, and aims at the dissolution of dialects and sublanguages, because those stand in the way of the state communicating with its |
| Posted by: Mitch H. 2014-09-04 12:13 |
| #11 Keeping an ancient and obscure language alive is a tough business that requires a lot of effort, education, and social cohesion. The Jews did. So have the Armenians and the Irish. But not everyone is up for the challenge. |
| Posted by: Secret Master 2014-09-04 11:20 |
| #10 I'm going long on Madiba memorial signer Thamsanqa Jantjie. I feel strongly that a correct interpretation will be found and history will vindicate him in the end. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2014-09-04 10:29 |
| #9 And the Wichita language of the Plains Indians, now based in Oklahoma, had only one fluent speaker by 2008. How do you know she was fluent? She coulda been lying and you'd never know, wouldja That is Elizabeth Warren, and we are darn lucky to have saved her traditional high plains Native American pemmican recipe of crab and papaya, mister. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2014-09-04 10:15 |
| #8 Nature isn't static. It evolves. The same applies to human organizations and societies. Adapt or perish. You'd think the Left would understand the 'science' it keeps harping about to the 'bitter, bible thumping, gun clutching' crowd. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2014-09-04 09:52 |
| #7 Looks to me like 1) these knobs are sounding the alarm bells in order to justify their own existence and 2) in an offhand way, the natural market is being influenced by the economic market, just as expected. Companies come & go all the time (American Motors, Standard Oil, etc.), so why would these tools expect any different on the language front? Just shaddap already... |
| Posted by: Raj 2014-09-04 08:57 |
| #6 What are you gonna do? Require people to speak them? My God Fred!!! Don't give them any ideas!!!!!! |
| Posted by: AlanC 2014-09-04 08:40 |
| #5 Bov the frisking in yellow highlight is done by the Fred, owner proprietor and mayor of Rantburg. Other highlight colors of interest belong to Moderators and can be viewed on the right sidebar. Avoid annoying the periwinkle one and the haze gray unit. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2014-09-04 07:19 |
| #4 Spotted owls of linguistics? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2014-09-04 05:50 |
| #3 ok make that a Vep to Ebonics phrasebook |
| Posted by: Bov Flimbers 2014-09-04 03:24 |
#2  Atlanta being an at risk "hotspot" for the extinction of English. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2014-09-04 03:05 |
| #1 Can't tell who fisked that but it was "coffee meet keyboard". Made my night. Going down to B & N to see if they have a Vep to English phrasebook. |
| Posted by: Bov Flimbers 2014-09-04 01:56 |