Do you feel concerned with the extinction of lanuages?

Shuimo   Mon Nov 09, 2009 10:45 am GMT
Do you feel concerned with the extinction of minority lanuages due to the spread of other BIG languages?
Guest   Mon Nov 09, 2009 10:47 am GMT
Yeah, I feel a little bad for French...
Baldewin   Mon Nov 09, 2009 11:08 am GMT
I am only annoyed by a possible Anglification of continental Europe. If it happens, however, it will be so well after my death,...
Uniformity is boring, but it may well be truth in the distant future. Still, the world needs to burn a few times in order to 'speed up the process'.
Shuimo   Mon Nov 09, 2009 11:24 am GMT
Guest Mon Nov 09, 2009 10:47 am GMT
Yeah, I feel a little bad for French...
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YOu even consider French as a minority tongue?
serin   Mon Nov 09, 2009 11:31 am GMT
It depends... Usually I care, but there are some cases where I don't care at all, for example, if some people are making a fuss over what is nothing more than a dialect. I wouldn't care at all if Luxembourgish went extinct, for example.
What Me Worry?   Mon Nov 09, 2009 11:57 am GMT
English could dissapear due to the spread of American...
Clever guy   Mon Nov 09, 2009 12:00 pm GMT
"YOu even consider French as a minority tongue?"

Of course. French is spoken by 67 million as mother tongue. Only languages spoken by over 100 million are big languages:

Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese can survive.

Almost all other languages won't survive.

Source, Ethnologue, 2009.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
blanc   Mon Nov 09, 2009 1:42 pm GMT
Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese can survive.

Really??
Basque could outlive Latin and Spanish and it is spoken by about 2.000000 people so your prediction is completely false.
Clever guy   Mon Nov 09, 2009 2:24 pm GMT
Basques are an extreme example. Some of them (not all) prefer to kill 1 million people with a nuclear bomb that Basque language dissapear.

If it is necessary they nuke Brussels before Basque language is not official there. They are (not all of them) the only Europeans that you can compare to radical muslims. An important percentage of them are completely crazy.

Anyway, I said ALMOST all languages.
chico   Mon Nov 09, 2009 6:00 pm GMT
i hate to see the dying of cajun french in louisiana. i am not interested in any snod comments about it either. i just hate to see it die out. it really is a beautiful dialect of french.

and yes they are mutually intelligible for the most part. as much as north american to british english.

chico
encore   Mon Nov 09, 2009 6:11 pm GMT
Languages of minorities are dying in France-Occitan,Breton,German (Alsatian and Frankish),Flemish,Catalan,Basque.
encore more   Mon Nov 09, 2009 11:16 pm GMT
Spanish is dying out in Catalogna, Aragon, Galicia and the Basque country.
Señor blanco   Mon Nov 09, 2009 11:28 pm GMT
Spanish is the first language in all the Spanish Communities. Besides, it is the first language in other 25 countries or states.

On the other hand, French is only the first one in France and Monaco, only two places and one of them is slighty bigger than a football field.
Blanchette   Mon Nov 09, 2009 11:33 pm GMT
Mais, il faut ne pas oublier que la langue française a encore plus d'influence culturelle que l'espagnol.
Señor blanco   Mon Nov 09, 2009 11:40 pm GMT
Si, el francés tiene más influencia cultural...pero el español es ya la segunda lengua más hablada del mundo.