Rare Tongues

yarb commented on the list rare-tongues

Extinct languages are one of the very few things that can make me tear up, especially recently extinct ones. A lot of these are extinct, or nearly so, and they're just the ones with cool names.

July 1, 2009

chained_bear commented on the list rare-tongues

Is "extinct" defined as "no living native speakers," or something else? Just curious. This is a fascinating subject (that I also find depressing beyond belief).

July 1, 2009

madmouth commented on the list rare-tongues

a language which nobody speaks (or writes) any longer (not something like Latin, which is very much alive in text form). if there still some non-native speakers of the language it's moribund.

the phenomenon does depress people tremendously, though I've always found it heartening that new dialects and creoles are being constantly created; these are the seeds of new languages. moreover, the stats are deceiving at face value, giving the impression of homology when that is not at all the case. for example, it is listed that 885 million people speak Mandarin, but within this, there are thousands and thousands of varieties, each reflecting specific group identity.

the emergence of orthography has done a lot of damage to the thousands of oral languages that were out there, but text does a lot to preserve languages as well. Old English--Old anything, for that matter--might be extinct by now.

in short, there's a lot to balance language extinction.

July 2, 2009