Dying Languages

 This is just a quick post about the worldwide loss of languages, prompted by this article:

Irish language ‘definitely endangered’ as linguists predict it will vanish in the next century

"UNESCO’s Atlas, along with Google, estimates that there are between 20,000 and 40,000 Irish speakers in the world."

It seems that one of the most important factors in the decline of the Irish language is that it is not passed on intergenerationally, partly because people tend not to stay in the place where they were born these days.

A language expert, Federico Espinosa, is quoted in the article. 

He says: "Maybe to take the stigma out of being an endangered language there are about 7,000 languages in the world and about half of them are predicted to be extinct by the end of the century, which is by UNESCO’s reckoning as well as Google.”

This seems to be a misuse of the word 'stigma', though I am not sure whether this is a simple mistake or something like a Freudian slip. ("It's okay, you don't have to feel ashamed that your language might go extinct.") Did he mean to say "sting"? In any case, it would seem that what follows is meant to make us feel less negative about the fact that the language is endangered. And now I have slipped into the same kind of unthinking use of a buzzword that I suspect Mr Espinosa has here. Do we really 'feel negative'? I'm not sure that we do. But let's stick with 'negative' for now. A stigma is basically an assignment of negative value. Mr Espinosa is saying that we can "maybe" remove such a negative evaluation by contemplating the fact that half of all the currently existing 7,000 languages are predicted to disappear within the century. Does the imminent disappearance of 3,499 other languages make you feel better about the fate of Irish?  Does the use of 'stigma' indicate that it would be a shame if Irish stood out by being one of only a few endangered languages?

Well, I said this would be a quick post, but before I finish, I'd just like to mention that Jared Diamond advocates bringing up your children bilingually if you are in a position to do so:

Jared Diamond, A New Guinea Campfire, And Why We Should Want To Speak Five Languages

Apart from the intrinsic cultural value of the languages, there are other benefits:

"Geographer and evolutionary biologist Diamond clearly feels that a person's worldview is expanded when she speaks more than a single language — but in his book he also says practical benefits flow from bilingualism. One example comes from a Canadian study of 400 people with a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer's disease. Symptoms were first experienced by bilingual people in the sample at an age 4 or 5 years older than by monolingual people. Significantly, given that education is usually associated with a lower incidence of Alzheimer's symptoms, the bilingual patients in the study were less educated than their monolingual counterparts."

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