Language Extinction

Can we talk about language death? i.e. when a language loses its remaining speakers and becomes functionally (if not outright) extinct.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuone_Udaina

>Dalmatian language
>an independent tongue that had descended from Latin along the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic
>as the cities of the coast became more insular to protect themselves from the threats of the Slavs, Gepids etc. inland continue speaking Latin within the walls gradually shifting to a new language as in Western European romance languages
>gradually cucked out of existence by Slavs and Venetians like most other remnants of Rome
>last speaker dies an ignominious death in an explosion while building a road
>hadn't even spoken the language for 20 years

E el daic. Jon ciairt jomno ci avaja doi feil, e el plé pedlo de louro daic a soa tuota

Remnants of Gothic, the language spoken by the men who sacked Rome in 410 and seized half of the west in the 5th century, may have continued to be spoken in the Crimean peninsula by surviving Goths until the 18th century. I wonder what the last peasant speaking it would have thought, surrounded as he was by Turks, Greeks and Slavs. The same with Cumbric, the language of the men of the Old North in Britain that was conquered by the Anglo-Saxons and survived up to the 12th century in the crags and fens of the northern counties.

Anyone else interested in this? What is your favourite dead language? Can a language really die, or does it just change naturally?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Sardinian_language
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quingnam_language
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mochica_language
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_language
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harappan_language
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_language
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharian_languages
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elamite_language
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongshan_culture
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_Neo-Aramaic
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchu_language#Current_situation
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibe_people
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brithenig
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_Jesus
youtube.com/watch?v=NPLp8liGnQU
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Interaction_Language
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Favorite dead language? Sanskrit or ancient Greek.

There's no inherent value in any language, but having a variety is beneficial.

Manchu is pretty much dying. Only 10 native speakers remain.

Jesus. Another thing destroyed by the fucking Han.

As far as im aware all the big countries try to kill their minor languages and impose their main language to form unity. America, Russia and China at the very least. Havent heard India doing it but it wouldnt suprise me.

>Jesus. Another thing destroyed by the fucking Han.
No. It's the Manchu's fault. They conquered China, wore the Emperor's hat, and went "We China now." Literally.

By the 1800s, the Manchus can barely speak Manchu anymore. Some dont even consider themselves Manchu anymore but Qing subjects like everyone else in the Empire. When Japan founded that puppet state, Manchuria, in the 1930s, they made a big show of how Non-Chinese it was, but the functional language was Mandarin.

Furthermore when they conquered China, Manchurian identity itself was relatively newborn, and already heavily sinified. It wasnt the case of Meme Nomads coming out of China invading the place, but a Non-Han Chinese minority (The Jurchens) declaring independence, then deciding to invade the whole thing, while making up an identity along the way (Hong Taiji's "Manchus.")

>russia
Tell me about it. The last Livonian died in 2013.

>In recent years, with the help of the governments in Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang, many schools started to have Manchu classes.[30][31][32] Various regional governments around China have taken to teaching Manchu in more recent times; it was reported that Heilongjiang University Manchu language research center in no.74, Xuefu Road, Harbin, listed Manchu as an academic major. It is taught there as a tool for reading Qing Dynasty archival documents.[33] The Wall Street Journal reported in 2009 that the language is offered (as elective) in one university, one public middle school, and a few private schools.[33]

>There are some groups of Manchu language enthusiasts in Beijing and elsewhere in Eastern China who try to revive the language of their ancestors using available dictionaries and textbooks, and even occasional visits to Qapqal, where the related Xibe language is spoken natively.[33] There are also other Manchu volunteers in many places of China who freely teach Manchu in the desire to rescue the language.[34][35][36][37] Thousands of non-Manchu speakers have learned the language through these measures.[38][39]

Well, at least something is changing.

>tfw half Okinawan
>mom and all her siblings can speak Hogen and Japanese
>almost none of them taught their kids, including me, any Hogen
>only one of my aunts taught one of her daughters
>that daughter has a ton of mental issues and will never marry
>tfw your family is contributing to the death of your culture and language

I guess I should attempt self study, but where the hell do I start?

You have a duty to your family and people. Just google, you'll find something eventually.

Main problem is that I was too burgerfied and only recently started working on my Nip, and most if not all sources will probably be in Japanese. I basically have to relearn at least high school level Japanese to then learn Hogen. Preserving culture is gonna be rough, man, and all this to basically be learning the Jap equivalent of Beowulf era English.

Tolkein knew Beowulf era English. You want to be like Tolkein don't you Okinawanon?

Buy Tolkein was a linguist or some shit wasn't he? I'm working on a medical degree like a good little Nip boy, this'll be a decent bit of extracurricular work for me. I suppose someone has to do it though, maybe I can try to make a name for myself by making an English-Hogen dictionary some day.

With your mom and her siblings

Britain and France did the same thing. Britain is reversing it, France probably not as much.
The modern nation state is the enemy of languages.

>independent tongue
>descended from Latin

I take it as my duty to prevent my nation from being linguistically cucked. Thus I'm learning Irish

They don't want to for some reason, and the only ones who might are greedy cunts who fucked over family for land so we basically disowned them. So I basically just have to go about it the long way until someone changes their mind, it'd probably be easier if I actually lived in Okinawa, but I sure as hell can't fuck over all my future plans for this. Seriously, culture preservation when most of your own people don't even want to preserve it is a bitch.

Don't bother, it's only right for the state of your language to match with the state of your people, Patrick.

I'll kick the head off you.
>The clear true eyes of this man almost alone in his day visioned Ireland as we of to-day would surely have her: not free merely, but Gaelic as well; not Gaelic merely, but free as well.

Why are potato chimps so easy and fun to trigger?

Nope. Fucking wrong.

Han Chinese linguistics professors and Han Chinese government officials are actively working to preserve this language while modern day Manchus are going full 'WE WUZ HAN AN SHEET'

Where are you from? Can't you handle the bantz? Anyway, I'm Ulster-Scot. So actually I'm probably mixed haggis chimp and potato chimp.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Sardinian_language

would've been quite useful to help reconstruct pre-IE European languages(assuming it was/they were pre-IE, which seems the most likely hypothesis), goddammit Romans

>the state of your people
You mean a prosperous European nation?

Yeah I jumped to conclusions there, but some searching definitely suggests that i'm wrong.

I just don't understand why people are so willing to destroy their own identities.

>laugh at Irish
>UMAD

Is this a language barrier thing? At least you have various cultures to learn and continue, shitblood user.

>tfw louisiana
>tfw cajun french is going to die with my parent's generation

Why dont you learn it then?

Be part of the solution. Southern Louisiana is the only part of the U.S with any real culture.

What do you mean by this

>Quingnam language spoken by the Chimu is dead and mostly unrecorded
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quingnam_language

>Mochica is dead and mostly unrecorded
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mochica_language

>Etruscan is dead and the only book that recorded the language and the culture of its speakers in detail is lost in time.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_language

>Indus Valley Civilization language is dead, unknown, and its writing system (if it is one) will be forever never be deciphered.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harappan_language

>Minoan Language will never be deciphered and classified
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_language

>You will never know what language the Olmecs spoke.

>Tocharian languages are dead
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharian_languages

>Elamite language is dead
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elamite_language

>Sumerian language is dead
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language

>No one will ever know what language this small and irrelevant but interesting culture spoke:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongshan_culture


It's kinda sad to be quite honest.


My favorite dead language is Quingnam because it looks like it would've sounded cool or cute (judging from the words seen from the small amount of its attested vocabulary).
If only they had a writing system to go along with it and that would've preserved the language...

...

Bumpo

>tfw your regional language is dying out
nobody even bats an eye even after UNESCO warned our government

learn french then ya dip

>Rongorongo will never be deciphered
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo

>we cut down some more trees for the Moai
>there seem to be less trees lately
>oh well, will cut more tomorrow

There's something elite in merging your own identity with Chinese, the dominant force in East Asia for most of history.

>You have a duty to your family and people
Fuck that. Preserving a language is important for research, but no one has a personal duty to learn them if they don't want to. I have ancestors from France, England, Ireland, Italy, and the Iroquois, should I really be expected to learn all their languages?

>having a variety is beneficial
why tho?

You have a responsibility to learn rare languages. You should also support endangered local languages and varieties where you live.

Why? My ancestors are not me.

>I just don't understand why people are so willing to destroy their own identities.


Mindfucked into hating it
Massive self loading
Inferiority complex
Government is active killing it and people/person losing hope.

You're a mutt. Nobody cares what your identity is or whether you preserve shit.

Go far enough back and you're a mutt too.

>15 million Belarusians
>Only about 2 million speak the language
>They still prefer to speak Russian
>by the time I die I might be the few people who could speak the language

we...

wuz...

QINGZ N SHET

>There's no inherent value in any language
there is immense value because language is much more than mere communication, its an entire structure of thought and mental process unique to a society.
as a bilingual speaker from childhood I can tell you words have very different feeling and emotion/meaning to them in one language or another. some ideas you simply can't express or understand in one language while in another its very easy.
language is human thought crystallized into a system which can be transmitted to others. losing a language only hurts all humanity.

lots of people learn french there, but Metropolitan not Cajun

Assyria here

Pretty sure our language is gonna die soon

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_Neo-Aramaic

This. I'm a Scottish Gaidhlig speaker and the government here is currently doing everything it can to revive the language, having spent the past 300 odd years systematically trying to exterminate it. Funny how things turn out.

Good riddance to bad languages

I'm curious, how does a government go about doing that? Do they provide some kind of financial incentives for learning/teaching? I feel like that'd be the easiest way to go about it.

Peoples who are perceived as barbarians are often willing to abandon their culture if it meant an increase in social standing.

Just look at the Germanic tribes of Europe Post-Rome.

They're putting it in Schools that teach it from the primary level, and making it available for everyone to learn. We've also got BBC Alba now, a tv channel entirely in Gaidhlig. Generally encouraging it, I guess saying they were doing everything they can to save it is a bit of a hyperbole but certainly far more than they used to. Gone are the days when my grandmother would get the belt in School for being caught speaking her language.

sardinian is cool as shit tho

That's actually a lot more than I expected, maybe I'm just too used to half-assed burger government work. As much as I love to mock non-English UK folk because you're all so easy to get buttflustered, I hope for the best for your language user. Languages are neat, it would be a shame to lose more.

As a side note, as a half German and half Nip, would I just seem like some kind of annoying outsider if I were to attempt learning one of these dying UK languages?

Isn't there a branch of the Manchu language with tens of thousands of speakers that survived purely because an Emperor got pissed at a certain tribe and dumped them in another part of China?

Found it
>The modern custodians of the language are the Xibe (or Sibe) who live near the Ili valley in Xinjiang and were moved there by the Qianlong Emperor in 1764. Modern Xibe is very close to Manchu, although there are a few slight differences in writing and pronunciation

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchu_language#Current_situation

>According to Jerry Norman, after a revolt by the Qiqihar Sibes in 1764, the Qianlong Emperor ordered an 800-man military escort to transfer 18,000 Sibe to the Ili River of Dzungaria.[3][8]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibe_people

There are roughly about ~30,000 Xibe/Sibe speakers out of a population of ~120,000

SAD!

Do you speak the language? Aramaic seems pretty interesting.

Pls preserve it as well as you can, user.

All languages must die...

Celtic languages are being cucked. We have to preserve Cornish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx.

I really wish Britain stayed Celtic. Imagine the modern lingua franca being some weird ass Celtic language with bizarre syntax and consonant mutations

>very soon there will nobody alive speaking the language of Jesus of Nazareth

Holy fuck that's sad.

Mate...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brithenig

It is unavoidable that the trend is moving towards one universal language. The process is slow and there are the variables that may leave some variety, but given enough time that shouldn't matter.

Nah, if having multiple languages had any benefit it would show. But looking at history, it clearly doesn't.

>I can tell you words have very different feeling and emotion/meaning to them
Nah that's just your own feelings that you've attached to words. You may have heard the same word in different languages in different contexts, making you treat the words differently.

wait, is Jesus Assyrian?

No, but Jesus spoke Aramaic. It would have been the language he preached in. It would not have been Greek or Hebrew or whatever. Aramaic was the lingua franca of the near-east in that period.

Cool didn't know that

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_Jesus

I'm an Irish speaker and although I haven't really looked into learning Gaelic I usually understand bits of it that I hear. Are they very mutually intelligible?

Yeah, I can speak the local dialect (Mosul).

All modern dialects of neo-Aramaic are a bit fucked up though. The ones in southern Syria (Maaloula and such) are the most distorted sounding to me.

In my dialect 'kobeno omerolokh bo'leshono oromoyo' means 'I want to talk to you in Aramaic.'.

There's a few churches in southern India that are doing a good job of preserving it actually.

youtube.com/watch?v=NPLp8liGnQU

shame romansh is dying in switzerland

>Are they very mutually intelligible?
I can understand Gaidhlig if they speak slowly, and I can at least catch the gist of their conversation. It's supposed to be easier for Ulster people. From Galway btw

Soon to be extinct languages.

Irish Gaelic(eternal anglo strikes again)
Scot(anglos!!!)
Romanch
Ainu languages(less than a 100 native speakers left)

>Fuck that. Preserving a language is important for research, but no one has a personal duty to learn them if they don't want to. I have ancestors from France, England, Ireland, Italy, and the Iroquois, should I really be expected to learn all their languages?
No, you're an American mongrel, you have no culture to protect so you're off the hook.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Interaction_Language

>Irish Gaelic(eternal anglo strikes again)
>Scot(anglos!!!)
Irish will be alive for a long time. Scottish Gaelic is in more danger though.

I just looked it up and you're right about Ulster Gaeilge being more similar.
>Cad é mar atá tú?
>Ciamar a tha thu?
could easily be just another dialect of Irish

>you will never speak ancient Punic

It was Vasconic.

>Nah, if having multiple languages had any benefit it would show. But looking at history, it clearly doesn't.
I'll bet you that most great men in history spoke two or more languages. Unfortunately there is no way for me to verify this, but it would be interesting to see if it holds up.

>mfw Irish is actually beginning to do well again here

Regional dialects will almost certainly die out, but if the 'urban' dialect (based on standard Irish) takes a bit more firm shape and becomes deeper rooted as a first language, then we're sorted.

The question is whether or not that will happen. It'll never be a case where Irish overtakes English again, but I'd be happy with a kind of bilingual situation

They're similar, but not mutually intelligible.

We realised that in some of the Gaeilge threads on /int/ way back - there was a Gaedhlig speaker there, and while we could get the gist of what he was on about, there was a lot that didn't map directly into Irish.

Norn Iron gaeilge is definitely more similar though

Cool to hear some good news about Irish.

F U C K Y O U
U
C
K

Y
O
U

We're not out of the woods yet, but it's thought that we're at the point where the language is stable enough that even if it wasn't being propped up by the school system, it'd probably survive.

The next decade or two will be the sink-or-swim period imo

An awful lot of regional languages in France are taking this path.
While the most regionalistic / independantist areas see an increase in the learnings of their traditional tongues (basques, britton, corsicans, etc...) by everyday-life people, most of the others are disappearing / have disappeared, only to be taught / learnt by a handful of scholars as a purely academic discipline, the way other dead languages such as ancient greek or latin is.

Even if true that wouldn't prove shit. Most historical great men were born into aristocracy, meaning more mingling with people from different places and more education. The most logical conclusion is that their greatness produced their multilinguality, not the other way around.

Just look at history. Every single society has moved towards eliminating its lesser languages. If being multilingual was so beneficial you'd see an opposite trend. If it had any benefit it would show whenever any multilingual society competed against monolingual one. However nearly all great powers of history have been monolingual with one language clearly dominating.

Language diversity is useless garbage. No, it's even worse than useless, it's probably a negative factor for society.

Take it from someone who speaks three languages.

where at?

Statistically, if he's from Europe, most likely France

What could cause it to die at this point?

Holy shit, this looks so weird.

Is the Kentish dialect still alive? It sounds pretty interesting