Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Endangered Languages of Northeast Asia

Cool site. Very pessimistic, possibly overly so, but the situation is not one to be optimistic about. In contrast to the sister site about endangered languages in Europe, it seems that the languages of NE Asia are so much worse off! I am wondering why that is.

The Soviets did a great job at first of trying to preserve national languages, but then after Stalin's lunatic purges in the 1930's, everything pretty much reverted back to Russification, and I guess that just continued on even after Stalin died. Under Putin, Russia is actually overtly hostile to all non-Russian tongues spoken on its territory, as fascists always are.

Most of these languages have been completely taken out by Russian. Russian is nuking languages over there the same way English is nuking languages over here. It's the great destroyer. I really do not think that Ainu is in as terrible a shape as this website says it is, though. One is really stricken by how many of these languages are no longer being learned by children.

Also Europe seems so much more friendly to having kids learn these languages in school or even study with the language as a general medium. And in Europe, literary standards for the endangered tongues are much more developed and more widely used.

In Russia, everyone is carted off to school, where all instruction is in Russian. Few of these languages have usable literary standards either. Oh well, the Russians always were barbaric and backwards.

For 15 years or so starting in 1917, they actually tried to go in a different direction and set a beautiful standard for all humanity, especially in the language area. That bit the dust in Stalin's anti-Nazi paranoia of the 1930's. Of course there was a very real threat, but so many died. This world can be a pitiless place.

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