![\"Why](\"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/2013-06-25-Why-Do-Languages-Disappear.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nPeople assume that globalization or colonialism is the main culprit behind the disappearance of languages. But the truth is, any language can disappear. And all languages are threatened.<\/p>\n
They always have been.<\/p>\n
Linguists debate whether there are presently 6000 or 7000 languages spoken on earth. That would mean there are on average, barely one million speakers per language. In fact, there are only 137 languages in the world that are spoken by more than 5 million people. But there aren\u2019t even a dozen of languages spoken by more than 100 million people.<\/p>\n
Most languages are in a dangerous position, and always have been. Most have no written dictionary or written grammar and have never been taught in school.<\/p>\n
Believe it or not, some of today\u2019s main international languages were once threatened languages \u2013 to the point that the story of the origins remains a bit of a mystery. For example, Spanish, which is the subject of our latest book, The Story of Spanish<\/i><\/a>, was originally the tongue of a remote tribe of shepherds in Northern Spain. French has even more mysterious origins: it began as a sort of made up language that combined different dialects spoken in Northern France.<\/p>\n Colonialism itself does not explain why some languages are eradicated. While the Spanish conquest erased a number of Pre-Columbian languages, some of the dominant languages in the Americas \u2013 Nahuatl, Mayan, Guarani, Quechua \u2013 are still spoken five centuries later. Some of these even fared better after <\/i>the Spanish conquest than before, and they began to wane only after <\/i>the colonial period.<\/p>\n In fact, the real \u201cthreats\u201d to languages are usually internal, not external. Speakers of a language may transform it into a variety of dialects that become so distinct they end up turning into separate languages \u2013 the way Latin did in the first millennium. According to some linguists, Arabic is in that situation today.<\/p>\n The other internal threat comes from the fact that speakers sometimes simply abandon their mother tongue. Why? Perhaps it doesn\u2019t bring them any advantages, or instead relegates them to harsher living conditions \u2013 a lot of regional languages in Spain and in France disappeared that way. There was no threat. The speakers just let their language go.<\/p>\n But in the end, linguists and socio-linguists do not understand exactly why some languages disappear while others, facing similar threats, don\u2019t. Basque, Catalan and Welsh are famous cases of mysteriously resilient tongues.<\/p>\n In 2006, in a panel discussion, Jean-Beno\u00eet had an exchange with a Sioux Indian whose language, Lakota, has never been spoken by more than 50 000 people. Inuit is spoken by about 35 000 people in Canada \u2013 and that\u2019s probably more speakers than there have ever been. Aramaic \u2013 the historical language of Jesus \u2013 is often described as a dead language, but 100 000 people still speak it today, or at least a modern version of it.<\/p>\n In short, all languages face threats, but it\u2019s impossible to predict which will survive and which won\u2019t.<\/p>\n By Jean-Beno\u00eet Nadeau & Julie Barlow People assume that globalization or colonialism is the main culprit behind the disappearance of languages. But the truth is, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9208,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[33,30,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9206"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9206"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9211,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9206\/revisions\/9211"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>More about the sociology of language can be found in our new book,\u00a0The Story of Spanish<\/a> (St. Martin\u2019s Press).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"