The World's Languages Are Fast Becoming Extinct

Ant sends news of a report, released a couple of weeks back by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, on the alarming rate of extinction of the world's languages. While half of all languages have gone extinct in the last 500 years, the half-life is dropping: half of the 7,000 languages spoken today won't exist by the year 2100. The NY Times adds this perspective: "83 languages with 'global' influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants."

Comments

What will happen to English?

[Anonymous Coward]

What will happen to the grammatical, pronunciation, and spelling differences between British English and American English (as well as others)?

For example, British English uses collective nouns (Microsoft are instead of Microsoft is) while American English thinks of the collective noun as singular.

In the contrary, American English uses subjunctive form while it seems British English doesn't use it .

Then you have all of the people that don't understand the differences between intransitive (takes no object) and transitive. (Lay and lie, anyone?)

What is going to happen to the English language? Increasingly, I see blatant grammatical errors on signs in big box stores, advertising, and even documentation!

Is grammatically correct English where the native speakers understand the differences of English in different countries?

How students possible learn a native language like German and hope to speak it correctly with the proper articles if they don't even the grammar rules of a language with commonalities with the language that they would like to learn?

Is this why foreign languages are dying? Or is it imperialism? Or is modern communication technology giving English even more priority over other languages?

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Re:What will happen to English?

[mysticgoat]

What is going to happen to the English language?

It is evolving faster than probably any language ever has before, and the rate of its change is likely to increase.

For years now, there are more users of English as a second language than there are native speakers of the language. If we have not done so already, we are coming close to the point where there is more correspondence in English between people who learned English as a second language than there is correspondence that involves at least one native speaker of English. We are also moving toward the point where there sum of all documents ever published in English by native English speakers is smaller than the total of all English documents written by non-natives.

It is now not uncommon for a Finn, a Pakistani, an Israeli, and a Brazilian to collaborate on a software project written in Python, Ruby, or Perl, and use English as the language for all aspects of the project even though none of them are good speakers of English.

English is getting stripped of a bunch of silly rules that were never really core to the language, and is being expanded by a bunch of new concepts that new users are bringing in from their own native languages. The result is probably going to offend the sensibilities of a lot of the older English teachers in English speaking countries. Gee, that's too bad if they can't keep up. But the benefits of a global language are worth putting up with jarring phrases and strange sounding usages.

Re:What will happen to English?

[Rufty]

Nothing is new. English started so that "Norman knights could chat up Saxon barmaids"
And now it's used for Russian Rubyists to insult Portuguese Pythonistas? Plus ca change ...