Xonen wrote: ↑30 Apr 2021 21:21
Salmoneus wrote: ↑29 Apr 2021 23:29Well, on the one hand: yes, absolutely, the great majority of languages on Earth are highly endangered. To quote Wikipedia: "the general consensus is that there are between 6,000 and 7,000 languages currently spoken and that between 50% and 90% of them will have become extinct by the year 2100". And that's just 80 years from now, let alone centuries. Most languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people; 96% of languages are, collectively, spoken by only 4% of Earth's population, while the top 20 languages are collectively spoken by around 50% of the population. People shifting from less-spoken languages to more-spoken languages isn't a rare thing, it's the norm.
Indeed. Between 50% and 90% of languages in the world also have a four-digit number of speakers at most, and no official status anywhere (or perhaps some sort of nominally official status which has essentially no effect in practice).
So when you say that if Danish were in danger, almost every language would be danger, then that should be no suprise to you!
Which is why I was somewhat bemused by Danish getting dubbed a minor language with few speakers; compared to the vast majority, it's positively gigantic.
Yes; but the vast majority of languages are absolutely tiny, even collectively make up a tiny percentage of the world's speakers, and are going to go extinct probably in decades, rather than centuries - so it doesn't seem to make much sense to compare Danish to them. When someone says "It's touch and go whether Bob will even survive for ten years, with his condition", it doesn't make sense to say "what? that's nonsense! Many people are dead already!" - instead, the meaningful health comparison is to people who aren't in imminent danger of dying. I was implicitly comparing Danish not to moribund languages, but to languages that we can be confident will NOT be dead in 200 years - by which standards I don't think Danish measures up.
Danish is a massive language compared to the majority of languages. But compared to the languages spoken by, say, 80% of all living humans, it's relatively tiny.
On the other hand: well, not exactly. Language vulnerability isn't just a matter of absolute speaker numbers - exposure to dominant languages is more important. A language with 500 speakers may be completely safe, if it's spoken in a remote village that sees one passing trader per year; a language with ten million speakers may be in extreme danger if it's spoken in, for instance, one city in the middle of China.
Again, Danish is the sole official language of an independent country and used in all levels of society. In this sense, it's probably much safer than, say, Shanghainese, despite having fewer speakers.
It's certainly safer than some speakerful Chinese languages, yes; although Shanghainese itself apparently has a lot of prestige culturally and economically. But again, I don't see the relevance of "but X is even MORE in danger!" - I wasn't making a specific claim about a unique peril for Danish alone.
Speaking as a professional linguist with a minor in English philology
...nice gatekeeping, thanks. Should I stop replying now, is that your point?
, and as someone who's lived in the US as a child and used English in some form almost daily for the past 30 years... I still express myself much more fluently in Finnish. So there's that. In the extremely hypothetical situation of me somehow managing to reproduce, I don't think I'd be able to consistently keep speaking English in my family life even if I wanted to. Of course, a lot of people simply don't seem to realize that they don't actually know English quite as well as they think, so perhaps they'd just fluently can it to their children as well. Still, in at least the few intercultural families that I know, multilingualism seems to be the norm; parents speak English with each other but their native languages to their kids. Obviously, though, we'd need to look at some statistics here.
But the home is the last refuge of the dead language. Saying "but parents speak it with their children" is like saying "there's no need to worry about the possibility of flooding - sure, the ground floor of my house is flooded, but up here on the roof everything is fine for now!" If a language stops being passed from parent to child, that doesn't mean we should start to be concerned for it - it means it's probably too late to be concerned for it! It's like saying "sure, people say that my catastrophic blood loss should be concerning, but I don't think there's anything to worry about yet - I still have a pulse. Get back to me when my heart stops beating, doctors, and THEN I'll accept that I need to worry about my health!"
I don't doubt for a moment that there are people who best express themselves in Finnish, or Danish, or Norwegian, or Dutch, or Low German, or Scots, or Faroese, or even Frisian. But that shouldn't mean that we regard these languages as thriving without a care in the world.
[FWIW, Scandinavians online always seem to be self-conscious about their English, and don't realise how good they are at it. Let's put it this way: if you were given two texts, one with almost 'perfect' standard English with one little typo/brainslip, and the other with multiple spelling mistakes and instances of non-standard syntax, and you were told that one was written by a Finnish teenager and the other by a succesful American businessman, you ought to assume that it's the Finn who has the perfect English. And this impression is backed up by proficiency survey results, not simply self-assessed ability. Sure, I've no doubt that watching Finns in real life for long enough, dialectical features could be distinguished... but the same is true for most native-speaking English populations.
More broadly, at least here in Finland, all of the aforementioned factors are certainly in existence: English is considered more prestigious, more useful, more progressive, more "logical" and just generally better in every sense, while people who object to its increasing presence in society are easily accused of being, at best, lazy regressive ignorants who can't bother to get educated, and immigrant-hating fascists at worst.
...and yet you don't think this should give rise to even a smidgen of concern!?
But still, there's no real move to abandon Finnish entirely, apart from a few lunatics on Twitter - and even they quite often seem to post their musings about the greatness of English and general inadequacy of Finnish in Finnish.
Languages don't die because there's a "move" to abandon them, expressed through polemical speeches and essays. They die because people don't bother using them because another language is 'more useful' or 'better'. The speeches, if they happen at all, are only a symptom, not the disease, and they're by no means necessary to the process. Irish marched to the edge of the grave to the musical accompaniment of speech after speech, essay after essay, about the importance of preserving the beautiful national language. Very often even the people delivering those speeches didn't bother to learn Irish, let alone their listeners.
It's still the norm in most places to default to Finnish as long as everyone can be assumed to understand it (of course, as soon as one immigrant enters the room, everyone switches to English, no matter how badly they themselves or the immigrant in question actually speak it...)
Well, let's look at that. 7% of the Finnish population are immigrants; presumably there's a small percentage of second-generation migrants whose Finnish isn't great. That doesn't sound like much, maybe. But it means that if you take a room of 10 Finns, there's a better than 50% chance that one of them will be an immigrant. A language only spoken when 9 or fewer people are in the room is a language that's going to have some problems. And as Finland is a liberal, rich country, with freedom of movement with the EU and many refugees, and as the 'native', Finnish-speaking population has a fertility rate considerably below the replacement rate, it's likely that the percentage of immigrants will continue to increase. The immigrant population has increased 400% in just 20 years; by 2050, it's projected that around 20% of the population will be immigrants - who, given that Finland is not widely spoken outside Finland, will mostly not fluently speak Finnish. And the threshold room size - the number of people who would have to be in a room for there to be, on average, at least one immigrant - decreases dramatically with even small increases in the immigrant population. At 7%, it's 10; at 10%, it's 7; at 15%, it's only 5; at 20%, it's only 4. Or let's put that the other way around: in a room with, say, 7 people, with 7% non-speakers you'll have to switch language 40% of the time; with 20% non-speakers, you'd have to switch language 80% of the time. Obviously, there will be both contexts (among family) and places (in rural areas) where you'd be on average less likely than that to encounter immigrants; but there would also be contexts (at work, in education) and places (cities) where you'd be more likely than that to encounter immigrants. And those contexts tend to be more prestigious.
, the media operates primarily in Finnish (by a rather wide margin – and I think there might still be more media in Swedish than in English, even), and as far as I know, the vast majority of children are still learning Finnish at home, even if some are being put into English-language daycare. So again, the risk of Finnish being pushed out of certain more prestigious domains of life is certainly present, but its situation is still infinitely far stronger than of any genuinely endangered language.
Again, this is a No True Scotsman. Sure, compared to some Platonic ideal of the maximally endangered language, Finnish is NOT likely to suddenly go completely extinct by 2023.
But I'd put it the other way around: the situation of Finnish is far, far weaker than of any genuinely un-endangered language. Thus, it should be a topic of concern (if you think that language death is a bad thing).
I guess the Netherlands might be a lost cause, though – although even there, people's attitudes can change once the language actually starts looking endangered.
The problem is, because it's much easier to lose speakers than to gain them, by the time a language "starts looking endangered", it's probably too late - at least, too late to maintain the language as a genuinely living language.
In particular, when we're talking about long-term bilingualism - rather than demographic decline of a monolingual population - language death can happen very quickly and suddenly. A person can switch quite quickly, when conditions change, from "Finnish speaker who is also completely fluent in English" to "English speaker who is also completely fluent in Finnish". And when the conditions lead one person to make that switch, the same conditions can also lead other people in similar situations to make the same switch. Large parts of the population can switch within a short period of time.
And even more generally, the political pendulum will probably change direction several times during the next few centuries, so I'm inclined to doubt any far-reaching predictions based on current trends.
It's unwise to rely on "current trends could change, you never know" to justify a position of "so my gut instinct is a better guide than current trends". Particularly when we're fundamentally talking here about long-term economic processes!
Also, seriously, children's cartoons? I thought those at least were still mostly getting dubbed...
Well, I don't live in NL, so I can't swear to anything. But when I spent time there as a child (I had relatives living there whom we would visit), in general most English programmes were either dubbed or subtitled, but the cartoons were left in English. I've heard from residents that this is indeed common. However, maybe they were exaggerating, and my own experiences were unrepresentative, or maybe things have changed. But given the level of English proficiency I've encountered in the Netherlands - and the eagerness to speak English! - it wouldn't surprise me if they haven't.
Nor is being a state-supported language as much a help as people often assume. Take Irish. Two hundred years ago, it was the majority language, with millions of speakers. A century of neglect and emigration ended that...
Those, and, you know, a million people starving to death. That'll do it.
...please don't lecture me on my family history. Yes, the famine was neglectful, and spurred emigration. But the famine by itself wouldn't have made a huge difference to the language, if it were still the majority language (Irish-speaking areas were disproportionately hard-hit, but not THAT disproportionately). The emigration that the famine triggered, which WAS that disproportionate, was a much bigger factor. And in general the way that famine and emigration destroyed the cultural integrity of the West - with peasants migrating (even if only temporarily) to the East, and Eastern landlords capturing large swathes of the West, and the West just generally being forced to enter into the cyclic migration patterns the East had already been locked into for decades, Ireland became, as it were, conceptually smaller and more homogenous.
but one hundred years ago, it still looked in a good position. There were around 700,000 speakers - not great, but not terrible. It was widely used in politics, in journalism, in commerce, in education, in law, and increasingly in literature, and was spoken in urban as well as rural areas, and by people from all classes. And after independence, the government was commited to Irish as the national language; it became compulsory in education (indeed, for several decades it was compulsory for ALL education to be through the medium of Irish); all state employees had to be proficient in Irish (and the state was the largest employers); Irish-language literature was subsidised, and Irish-only radio and television channels were established; areas of the country were set aside to be Irish-only to preserve its strongholds, from which it could expand across the country once again...
...and as a result, by the end of the century, there were no native speakers, and only a few tens of thousands of people regularly used it at all. [things have improved a little in the last few decades, but it still has a long way to go].
You seem to be leaving out the part where the state
abandoned those policies after a few years
Most of those policies were not abandoned 'after a few years', no. Irish remained the national language (and 'first official' language); Irish continues to be compulsory in education (though the policy of teaching other subjects through Irish was, as I say, only in place a few decades) - Irish is a compulsory subject up to the Leaving Cert (and all other exams bar English can be taken in Irish if preferred), and a pass mark in it is a prerequisite for entrance into many universities; the requirement that all civil servants speak Irish was in place until the 1990s, when it was replaced by a 'bonus point' system (Irish speakers were more likely to be hired), which is now being replaced by a quota system (20% of new hires should be Irish speakers); Irish-language literature, radio and television are still subsidised or outright nationalised; areas of the country are still set aside as Irish-only.
Now, it's true that these provisions were completely ineffective, but that's my point: having a government that - at times grudgingly, at times ardently - promotes the language through laws and policies is completely ineffective at actually preserving a language. For instance, take the requirement that civil servants speak Irish: how do you define 'speaking Irish'? Given that there was a desperate need for civil servants, yet almost no candidates actually were fluent in Irish, it's no surprise that the official standards of Irish dropped and dropped - not helped by the fact that the people hiring these people themselves could not speak Irish well - and of course even if a bright young recruit DID speak Irish when they were hired straight out of school, years and years of never speaking Irish in practice would cause their Irish to fall into desuetude. The government's intentions were good, and mostly (if not whole-heartedly) sincere, but the powers of government to effect (or prevent) cultural change are extremely limited.
Also, what's the source no native speakers? According to that same Wikipedia article, "estimates of fully native speakers range from 40,000 to 80,000 people.
This I think depends how you define 'native'. I'm referring to people with Irish as their genuine first language, which is an extremely small number - though not literally zero. However, if you define 'native' as anyone who has spoken Irish regularly since childhood, it's somewhat higher.
In any case, Irish (or at least Modern Irish) was never the sole or primary language of an independent state; it was always in a weaker position competing against the strongest language in the world. Of course, the competition is the same for languages like Danish, but at least they're not yet vastly outnumbered by essentially monolingual English-speakers in their own countries.
Nobody ever is vastly outnumbered, until they are. It also depends how you define 'country', of course - Danes are vastly outnumbered in the EU as a whole.
Notably, Irish remains a sort of zombie language, neither dead nor alive: not only are (almost) all the speakers non-native, but they speak a modernised form of the language that often smooshes together the various dialects into a single mishmash, and scrapes off the 'difficult bits' in favour of lexical and syntactical calquing from English. It's largely now an affectation and clique-marker for upper-class, well-educated people, something to drop into so that hoi polloi can't understand the joke. [the current revival is driven by excellent Irish-language private schools preferred by wealthier parents; essentially, Irish is used as a barrier to implicitly exclude the less educated, less 'dedicated' pupils]. This is probably quite a plausible outcome for languages like Danish and Dutch - optional add-ons for the local gentry, in simplified, Anglicised, de-dialecticised second-language forms.
Interestingly, this sounds like pretty much the exact opposite of how the situation seems to be developing here in Finland: it's the upper class that's most enthusiastically promoting the use of English and trying to get their children educated in it, while the Finnish-speakers (ie. those not fluent in English, or self-conscious enough to
realize that they're not fluent, I guess) are the plebs.
Which is why Irish, despite being in a parlous situation right now, is generally seen to be on a good trajectory, whereas a language like Finnish, despite being in no immediate threat, is probably on a downward trajectory. Because, historically, once speakers of a language are seen as 'the plebs', and another language is seen as aspirational, the first language is in serious trouble!
If you're referring to the decline of cockney, for instance, or the incomplete rise of MLE, both of those developments occured due to migration from outside the city, from dialects that had already diverged. (It's true that dialects can arise in different areas of the same city, but this is rare and overstated (the 'Bronx accent' was never actually unique to the Bronx), and probably requires a much larger city than Copenhagen...
Why would the size of the city matter that much? As long as kids go to the same neighborhood daycare centers and schools, their speech isn't going to be that much influenced by what happens on the other side of town.
Of course it is! People speak to one another! Language traits spread across entire countries, continents, let alone cities! For divergence to occur, the language has to be pulled in two different directions by two (or more) linguistic 'centres' with their own linguistic 'gravity'. In the UK, for instance, people living between Liverpool and Manchester can be linguistically pulled toward one or other of those cities. But gravity is hard to get without population - population leads to prominence. There's a reason why people emulate the speech of large cities, and not of random hamlets! So a city below a certain size is unlikely to be able to support two gravitational centres.
True, this is largely due to immigration both from the countryside and from abroad
Again, this was driven partially by immigration, yes - but immigration into cities isn't really going to stop anytime soon, is it?
But the point is, immigration only leads to language difference when there are different languages to bring in. If a language only has one centre, then there won't be aberrent dialects to bring into the city; and over time, any change in the city language due to immigrants speaking other languages will either die out or else be adopted thoughout the language.
[on urban dialects: the population size required to support a dialect has clearly exploded, due to mass migration and particularly mass media. Put it this way: the number of like-speaking people you have to surround a kid with to prevent them being exposed to relatively large amounts of out-speech is now far, far, far higher than it was. As a result, dialects now subsume much larger areas - in the UK, a few urban dialects have been spreading across large swathes of countryside where, two hundred years ago, once every dale would have had its own distinct dialect. But people no longer live in one dale and never leave and never hear from outsiders - and it's the same for wards. And, I'm suggesting, it's the same for countries too...]