#language extinction

[covenawhite66]

Romeyka descended from ancient Greek but may die out as it has no written form and is spoken by only a few thousand people

Romeyka is a sister, rather than a daughter, of modern Greek”, a finding she says disrupts the claim that modern Greek is an “isolate” language".

Most native speakers in the region are over 65

Last chance to record archaic Greek language ‘heading for extinction’

A new data crowdsourcing platform aims to preserve the sound of Romeyka, an endangered millennia-old variety of Greek. Experts consider the

Romeyka is thought to have only a couple of thousand native speakers left in Turkey’s Trabzon region.

Nationalism getting in the Way

To Greek nationalist these varieties are deemed ‘contaminated’ and/or disruptive to the ideology of one single Greek language spoken uninterruptedly since antiquity

To Turkish nationalists, speaking Greek goes against the very fundamentals of one’s belonging.

[guyghoul]

searching for a gifset

There was this gifset of a documentary scene set in South Africa. There, an old man talked about his time under Apartheid. He actually spoke a bit abou the vocabulary of his native language, bu the Boers, who were in charge under Apartheid, performed physical violence on him whenever he used his native language instead of the Boer-sponsored Afrikaans. The post was jus that gifset of that interview.

Update: @mononykus77 found the post!

https://mononykus77.tumblr.com/post/181101511287/rasdivine-i-have-to-reblog

[possessivesuffix]

The Ostyaks Did Melt

In discussions about the Khanty, there is a pessimistic yet poetic 1900 quote from field researcher K. F. Karjalainen that is repeated fairly often:

“The Ostyak people are melting like snow in the spring sunshine. On the slopes and in the clearings [of the taiga] there are even now some bare patches here and there, but the sun has begun to shine more and more, and so the pace of melting is quickening. Soon nothing more will be seen of the mantle of snow, but the nourishing soil beneath the new grass. In dark holes and under some crooked trees in the forest the observant eye may stumble upon chunks of ice, but nothing in the green of nature reminds us that not long ago this terrain was in the grasp of winter.” (translation by Csepregi 2009)

In my experience this has tended to be followed up by pointing out that actually the tide has turned, and that by now there are more speakers of Khanty than there were 120 years ago, up to about 10,000 (and still more Khanty people; about 30,000 by the latest Russian census).

This summer I have however gotten and read Ostjakit, a 1983 compilation of Karjalainen’s travelogues. This adds a new level of context I was not previously aware of: that the quote was written at a point when he had so far only visited the Southern Khanty, living along the river Irtysh and its tributaries Konda and Demyanka. Now, all of today’s decently numerous Khanty are rather a part of the northern and eastern groups… while the southern variety has indeed become an extinct language over the course of the 20th century, passing away without even a clear date of death sometime during the dark Soviet years, when field research was limited quite strictly and even then usually only to Eastern Bloc researchers. I do not dare to claim if the southern sub-ethnicity is totally extinct/assimilated, or has merely undergone language shift to Russian. Still, Karjalainen does not seem to have been too much off in his assessment after all.

(The travelogues contain many other quite quotable passages as well. I may translate and post some more of them later on.)

[speak-to-survive-blog]

So I finished my senior seminar paper the other day.

Its about global language death... I’m not sure what to do with it now? Its 14 pages long, probably could have been written better if I hadn’t literally typed all 4,000 words of it at once over 10 hours, but I’m also a little proud of it?

Not sure where to go from here.

[olumbetwon]

Inaugural Lecture: Don laments gradual extinction of Yoruba Language

..fingers Wrong Government Policy, People’s Attitude A Professor of Yoruba Language and Dialectology, Temitope Olumuyiwa, has lamented that the Yoruba language is becoming endangered due to government’s failure to implement the National Policy on Education as enshrined in the 1999 Constitution, as well as the attitude of Yoruba people who stigmatise the use of the language. He described the…

Inaugural Lecture: Don laments gradual extinction of Yoruba Language

[twogalsandabook]

Awareness Wednesday

A subject I have always been fascinated and passionate about is the plight of endangered languages. Not many people know or perhaps understand what that is, but I would love to share it with you, so I created a new weekly topic that explores it, focusing on one language a week. With the help and blessing of The Endangered Languages Project, we would like to bring some awareness to this serious…

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[athena-shi-blog]

Respect the Natural Selection, Believe That is the Best Outcome

At the beginning, I wonder if you can speak your dialect? If so, keep up! If not, don’t feel ashamed or embarrassed!

Based on my research about language extinction in the world and dialect death, it claims that half of total languages will extinct in 50 years. Also, the vanishing now is taking place at a faster rate. Something unexpected natural disasters may lead an only group who can speak this dialect die out. But the extinction of language mostly attributes to people’s diminished awareness of the importance of this dialect/ language. That is, people think they can gain more opportunities to earn profits if they pick up a new language. So, it is no denying that people unconsciously discard their dialects, local language.

Several years ago, in China government realized this issue so it enacted policies like opening classes that teaching local dialects, and promoting younger children to speak dialects to improve a severe situation. However, it achieved slight effects. Very few people cared about it, they still insisted their own mind.

In my view, this phenomenon is not surprising at all. Conversely, I would probably say it is an inevitable result. EF has such a slogan in their advertisement: how well your English is, how wide your world is. It indicates if people master English, a worldwide language, their studying and working choices increase, which is beneficial to individual development. People want a better life all the time and it is less often to see who stops progressing. Thus, something that cannot contributes to the development is ignored, like dialects.

Moreover, we shouldn’t blame people who abandon their dialects. They may argue: “Why should I learn to speak my dialect? I can live well without it! But I cannot live without using mandarin and English!” People have limited energy so we shouldn’t force them to speak dialects when they are learning a third language or expect them make efforts in developing economy and preserve dialects at the same time. Indeed, we need linguists to raise public awareness of protecting dialects because dialect can be served as the medium of culture partly.

To summarize, we can make efforts in language conservation but we shouldn’t hold high hopes on it. Everything we see today is naturally formed although there was human interference trying to alter. And another point is that benefits and weaknesses always come together, which means we are gaining and losing at every moment.  

[linguisten]

Edwin Benson, last-known fluent speaker of Mandan, passes away at 85

An influential figure in the history and culture of the MHA nation has passed away.