Endangered languages. The phenomenon of language extinction is not something new. Latin and ancient Greek are particularly striking examples. On his website, Jacques Leclerc, the famous Canadian linguist, indicates that during the last 5 millennia, apparently, more than 30, languages were born and disappeared. However, it seems that nearly half of the languages listed in the world have less than 10, speakers 2. This information leaves little hope for their survival. Hopefully they will not experience the same fate as Auregnais, a Norman language native to the island of Alderney Aurigny , which ceased to be used in the s.
Wish to be one of the 1. Contact us to prepare your customized language training project. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig Eds. Twenty-fourth edition. Change the language. French English Italian German. Customer space Ask for a demo EN. Due to persecution and stigmatization, some languages die out faster than others. For example, Ainu has long been regarded as an inferior language, and therefore speakers of Ainu in Japan were often excluded from society.
In such cases, population groups may decide to abandon their own language entirely and exclusively teach their children the majority language in order to ensure their social integration. There have been many other examples of genocide and forced assimilation throughout history that have placed minority language speakers in even more oppressive circumstances. But even if a local language is not regarded as inferior, increased mobility and globalization are contributing toward the disappearance of languages — and by the way, so is climate change.
If these two decide to start a family together, chances are high that their children will not grow up with all four languages. Moreover, maintaining a language is also a question of cost for a nation. Not every country can afford to maintain an entire public apparatus and mass media in two languages, let alone several languages.
We only need to think of all the public signs, forms, applications, administrators, police officers, doctors, newspapers, television channels…the list is endless. All of these things would have to be multilingual, or the people concerned would at least have to have extensive knowledge of the other languages. However, one academic database currently lists extinct languages.
A great example of preserving a language can be found in Toulouse in the south of France. As the capital of the region of Occitania, the metro system was set up in two languages: all stops are announced in French and then in Occitan, a Romance language with only about , native speakers left in France.
And Occitan often does not sound so different from French, perhaps a bit like a mix of French and Spanish. Although in the future, fewer and fewer people will grow up learning Occitan as their native language, it is still at least possible this way to ensure that it remains a second language in this region thanks to these kinds of initiatives.
There are also numerous organizations deep in the trenches of language revitalization work, such as Wikitongues and the Endangered Langauge Alliance. Try Babbel. With a set of about 50, characters, it is probably one of the most complex languages to learn. Language family: Indo-Ayran, a sub-family of Indo-European. These words and many more! There are about million native Hindi speakers, which makes it the third most spoken language in the world.
Language family: Romance, a sub-family of Indo-European. Related to: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian. Fun fact: The first modern novel and the second most translated book after the Bible was written in Spanish.
Which novel? This is great news for native English speakers. For Spanish appears to be the easiest foreign language for English speakers to learn! Fun fact: About 45 per cent of modern English words are of French origin. Spoken across different parts of the world — think everywhere from the rest of France and parts of Canada to a handful of African countries, including Senegal and Madagascar — the French language has spread its roots far and wide.
Language family: Semitic, a sub-family of Afro-Asiatic. Fun fact: Arabic has at least 11 words for love, each of them expressing a different stage in the process of falling in love. With million native speakers, Arabic is the sixth most spoken language in the world, and the only one in our top twelve that is written from right to left. It has also heavily influenced European languages like Spanish and Portuguese: some words sound exactly the same.
The word coffee, for example, comes from the Arabic word qahwa. Language family: Indo-Aryan, a sub-family of Indo-European.
Bengali, known to many English speakers around the world as Bangla, is mostly spoken in Bangladesh and India and is considered by some to be the second most beautiful language after French. Every consonant has a vowel sound built in, which is quite unusual for Westerners.
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