Thursday, May 08, 2008

Another Page on Endangered Languages of Eurasia

Focus on Europe and Russian Asia. This one includes the Caucasus and many languages in Europe that were not dealt with on the other pages. Depressing reading, but I doubt if the situation is really quite as bad as Tapani Salinem thinks it is. Still, this page implies that for a lot of languages, things are not looking so good.

The main problem is that many are not being learned by kids, or kids learn them and then quit using them at some point in favor of a larger area language later on.

It's too bad that more of these languages are not used in schools. It would be quite simple to have classes in the minority tongue (possibly with majority tongue textbooks) and make the kids take the majority tongue as a subject every year. They did it for a long time in Russia - kids had classes in the local tongue but were required to take Russian as a course for all 12 years of school. Worked great.

Italy and France are quite hostile to many minority languages, and even Germany is closing down Sorbian schools, probably out of anti-minority sentiments.

Russia is pretty much of a catastrophe, and Putin is amplifying that with his anti-minority projects. The state most friendly to minority tongues appears to be Finland. As usual, the Scandinavians come out on top.

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