"Why Korean is a dying language"

[QarQing]

An opinon shared

Why Korean is a dying language.

I don’t know how many people who is reading this article or might read have interest in Korean or learning it. But You can find yourself interested in a story of the unique language that migh…

vincentdkim.wordpress.com

 

[NovaKart]

This article doesn’t say anything about the number of Korean speakers declining and I don’t think it makes any convincing argument that Korean is too complicated. Lots of languages have inconsistent grammar rules, irregular verbs. Why do we have to be (am/is/are) in English?

And the example of hanbok meaning Korean clothes but more specifically clothes from just one period …. that’s not so complicated either. Like okay, people didn’t wear it in ancient times but it’s still traditional.

 

[amadeus]

I could write the same article about Japanese, and have it be equally convincing to the uninitiated. I suspect people could also do the same for other languages with which I‘m not familiar.

From my experience in learning a second language, Korean is not an isolate in having things like irregular verb conjugations and the classroom version of the language not actually spoken by locals.

Besides that, I think most Koreans still speak Korean to this day, so until they decide to give it up I’m going to bet that it’ll be around for a while.

 

[QarQing]

I could write the same article about Japanese, and have it be equally convincing to the uninitiated. I suspect people could also do the same for other languages with which I‘m not familiar.

From my experience in learning a second language, Korean is not an isolate in having things like irregular verb conjugations and the classroom version of the language not actually spoken by locals.

Besides that, I think most Koreans still speak Korean to this day, so until they decide to give it up I’m going to bet that it’ll be around for a while.

Yah but that doesn't mean, it's not hard to be fluent at Korean

 

[amadeus]

Yah but that doesn't mean, it's not hard to be fluent at Korean

I didn’t say it was easy?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Moderator Action: This thread doesn't seem to have any significant focus beyond an unexplained link. @Joeco please step up your game and make your case (not whatever is in the link) for the discussion. If you cannot do that, it is hardly worth keeping open. Thanks.

 

[amadeus]

@Joeco have you ever studied a second language?

 

[NovaKart]

It’s hard to become fluent in any second language, I mean it takes a lot of work. And even if Korean is especially hard it doesn’t mean it’s dying. There would at least be a large number of native speakers.

 

[Kyriakos]

If it has few speakers, it can always die. Not many languages on the planet are likely to be around in a couple of centuries.
But I doubt complexity is the problem. People speak languages poorly, even if they are monolingual in the US, where english runs no risk of dying.

 

[Moriarte]

Yeah, in a few centuries people will be mostly speaking Mandarin, Spanish, English & Hindi. The thing with languages is that they accumulate ideas. The bigger the user base, the bigger the pool of ideas. Any “big” language is constantly enriched by the vastness of population that uses it. So, big languages are destined to become bigger, small languages will shrink. Korean won’t die. There is always some group of people interested in keeping it alive for scientific, historical, aesthetical reasons. I’m sure in 1000 years some people will still speak Korean and carry on it’s culture. Most others will flock to big languages though. I can converse in three languages, but it’s English that is by far most important in my life. The language of technological revolution, of aviation, etc.

Smaller languages can be beautiful, but far less useful, in the modern world.

 

[EnglishEdward]

Ideas leak from one language to another.

It is to my mind the purist linguists who don't accept loan words for new concepts
who'd make the choice to let their language become obsolete rather than modernised.

Vive le weekend.

 

[Kyriakos]

Yeah, in a few centuries people will be mostly speaking Mandarin, Spanish, English & Hindi. The thing with languages is that they accumulate ideas. The bigger the user base, the bigger the pool of ideas. Any “big” language is constantly enriched by the vastness of population that uses it. So, big languages are destined to become bigger, small languages will shrink. Korean won’t die. There is always some group of people interested in keeping it alive for scientific, historical, aesthetical reasons. I’m sure in 1000 years some people will still speak Korean and carry on it’s culture. Most others will flock to big languages though. I can converse in three languages, but it’s English that is by far most important in my life. The language of technological revolution, of aviation, etc.

Smaller languages can be beautiful, but far less useful, in the modern world.

Probably also Portuguese, due to Brazil.
French, less likely. German, even less likely to survive by then.

 

[amadeus]

What happened to the Latin and Greek speaking worlds of antiquity? I would think that if the trajectory were necessarily towards a singular global language in everyday life, it would have happened already.

 

[Kyriakos]

What happened to the Latin and Greek speaking worlds of antiquity? I would think that if the trajectory were necessarily towards a singular global language in everyday life, it would have happened already.

Latin survived for a while, but only artificially (as language of the clergy and forced language of science).
Greek was never enforced to the slavs as language of religious rites (to the contrary, even an alphabet was created for them, by Cyril and Methodios), and the greek world fell to barbarians ^^

 

[E.man]

Dying with only millions of users...

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Maybe they should enact a law like Quebec did a few days ago. If you go there now and want to be served in English by government agencies, courts, and numerous other institutions, agencies, and businesses, you have to meet a strict set of criteria. Employers now have to report how many employees are fluent in French.

In short, if I were to go to Quebec, I would have to apply to the government to be served in English - which happens to be one of Canada's official languages, so you'd think it shouldn't require an application, right? I wouldn't get approved because I don't meet the criteria. So it's either learn French or GTFO.

And they wonder why more and more people in English Canada wouldn't actually mind if they separated...

 

[Farm Boy]

Smaller languages can be beautiful, but far less useful, in the modern world.

Monocultures are efficient and efficiency cares nothing for beauty. Weeds will get sprayed. Like accents. They're wrong.

 

[QarQing]

Yeah, in a few centuries people will be mostly speaking Mandarin, Spanish, English & Hindi. The thing with languages is that they accumulate ideas. The bigger the user base, the bigger the pool of ideas. Any “big” language is constantly enriched by the vastness of population that uses it. So, big languages are destined to become bigger, small languages will shrink. Korean won’t die. There is always some group of people interested in keeping it alive for scientific, historical, aesthetical reasons. I’m sure in 1000 years some people will still speak Korean and carry on it’s culture. Most others will flock to big languages though. I can converse in three languages, but it’s English that is by far most important in my life. The language of technological revolution, of aviation, etc.

Smaller languages can be beautiful, but far less useful, in the modern world.

Thing is we will all be eventually dead in many centuries

 

[Snowygerry]

The significant problem is that there’s no newly established grammar that learners can depend on. Korean has history like all the other languages do and throughout the history this language has been modified, changed and got a number of diversities within its grammar system. But regard of this, no governmental action or organization has been made. I mean yes, there has been some attempts but none of them has considerable constancy that can actually affect and order the general grammar system. Apart from this public issue no representative publication that complies and formulates Korean grammar is found. This means there hardly is a common reference that Korean native speakers use to confirm and correct their grammatical errors readily.

Strange - why don't they simply establish a standard grammar then ?

An equivalent of this :

Taalunie - Union for the Dutch Language - Taalunie

De Taalunie ontwikkelt en stimuleert beleid voor het Nederlands in Nederland, Vlaanderen en Suriname, en ondersteunt het Nederlands in de wereld.

taalunie.org

The Netherlands is virtually 100% Dutch-speaking. In 1980 the cooperation between the Netherlands and Flanders in the field of the Dutch language policy was confirmed by founding the Nederlandse Taalunie - or the Dutch Language Union

 

[Kyriakos]

Strange - why don't they simply establish a standard grammar then ?

An equivalent of this :

Taalunie - Union for the Dutch Language - Taalunie

De Taalunie ontwikkelt en stimuleert beleid voor het Nederlands in Nederland, Vlaanderen en Suriname, en ondersteunt het Nederlands in de wereld.

taalunie.org

The Netherlands is virtually 100% Dutch-speaking. In 1980 the cooperation between the Netherlands and Flanders in the field of the Dutch language policy was confirmed by founding the Nederlandse Taalunie - or the Dutch Language Union

When the inevitable happens, the other bit will leave par walloon monte