Great Site on Endangered Languages of Europe

Great site on endangered languages of Europe. Tapani Salinem, a Finnish linguist, has done a bang-up job on this stuff. This report was prepared for UNESCO.

The last good report I read on this subject was a great book published in 1976 called something like The Endangered Languages of Europe. Great little book if you can ever find it, and it covers pretty much most of the larger ones anyway.

Salinem is decidedly pessimistic, but I am not so much so. Furthermore, he often pessimistically notes that this or that language is heavily contaminated by some larger nearby language that the speaker usually also speaks. I don't think that this is all that relevant. Most modern languages nowadays are full of borrowings, often from English, for all sorts of modern words.

What matters is that you are speaking. Borrowing is a natural phenomenon, whether for lexis, syntax, phonology, morphology or whatever. It's been happening for 1000's of years. He often notes that not many children are learning these languages well. That may well be the case, but I do not think that is the end of the world either.

In 100 years though, long after I am gone, I think many of these languages may be on their way out. Note that many still have lots of older speakers. To be honest, the only way to almost surely guarantee a tongue nowadays in Europe is to get your own state. This is partially the impetus for separatism in Europe, but Europe is by and large mature enough to handle separatism.

Many of these types of researchers are too pessimistic. Compared to the US, Europe is doing great. Manx on the Isle of Man has 2,500 2nd language learners, many of whom are fluent. Some are even bringing up their kids speaking Manx! However, purists, often folks like this guy, say Manx is still dead because there are no more Manx first language speakers.

This is too pessimistic for our modern era. Cornish has 1,000 2nd language speakers. Both of those languages were actually revived from extinction. As linguists, we are pretty happy that any of these languages are still alive at all, being the language fetishists that we are.

In order to preempt some rejoinders, let us note that hardly any linguists are going around trying to force communities to retain languages to retain their languages. Communities all over decide to suicide their tongues, and as owners of their languages, they are entitled to that decision. Bilingualism is the answer to those who say that retention of a minority tongue is useless in a transnational world.

Truth is that none of these arguments really hold up. Contra this website, Europe is seeing an explosion of language retention and revitalization efforts. It's one of the few places on Earth where this is occurring and succeeding in a big way.

But Europe also has some extremely popular languages of states that in many cases even extend beyond state borders. These languages have many newspapers, magazines, TV and radio shows, are used by governments, and in some cases often have extensive literature and other books published in them. A number are also developing a significant Internet presence.

The separatists are probably correct that in order to guarantee your tongue, you need a state.

Europeans are now mature, wealthy and relaxed enough, and have retained the best Western values, such that they are some of the only people on Earth who are actually prepared to break up states with massacring each other in displays of mass idiocy. Nevertheless, few breakups are actually occurring. It is not known why this is occurring, but economics probably plays a large role.

Europeans are also probably friendlier towards minority tongues for the most part than folks in any other part of the world. The result is an interesting mix of attitudes and trends both help minority tongues in Europe to prosper and also cause them to slowly go extinct.

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