"Why Korean is a dying language"

[Snowygerry]

Well the language predates the nation state and is hardly dependent on it, but a nation state can of course support the language, it is hard to understand why Korea would not do that.

A language that is not codified and unsupported can indeed by said to be "dying" imho.

 

[Kyriakos]

Small languages are an issue. There are many such in Europe (actually, all of them, apart from English/Spanish, then Portuguese and to a lesser extent French and even lesser extent German). Are there more speakers of german than russian? (counting secondary speakers, and then not counting such)

 

[NovaKart]

When people talk about dying languages I think of languages like Lakota, Scottish Gaelic, Faroese, some Kurdish languages like Hawrami and Zazaki.

I think if this is a we’re talking about a language even one like Lithuanian or Albanian and it has millions of native speakers, is used in government, has a real active media and publication exclusively in that language then I can’t really see it as dying in any way, even if it has no influence internationally.

I wonder what the largest language would be in terms of number of speakers that has very little support, political power or media. Like is there an African or Indian language that has a huge number of speakers but is not used much in education, media, or politically.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I wonder what the largest language would be in terms of number of speakers that has very little support, political power or media. Like is there an African or Indian language that has a huge number of speakers but is not used much in education, media, or politically.

Navajo is spoken by about 170,000 Americans (2011 numbers) but is very limited in its distribution (Navajo reservation and vicinity). It is endangered but the tribe has an extensive program to keep it alive.

 

[tjs282]

Small languages are an issue. There are many such in Europe (actually, all of them, apart from English/Spanish, then Portuguese and to a lesser extent French and even lesser extent German). Are there more speakers of german than russian? (counting secondary speakers, and then not counting such)

Wiki sez:

More people speak German as their first language ("L1") than speak French: 95 mil (= 80 mil in Germany, 9 mil Austrians and roughly 6 mil assorted Swiss/Lux./Licht.) vs. 80 mil.

But globally, French is far more 'popular' than German as a second language ("L2"), with 270 mil (L1 + L2) vs. "80-85" mil for German as L2. Not sure if that extra 190 mil includes all the French creoles, but I'd assume that it does.

German is globally less widely spoken than Russian (L1 + L2 = 150 + 110 mil), but Russian is therefore also slightly less widely spoken than French.

 

[Angst]

Faroese

yea sorry about that >_<

 

[Takhisis]

Does the OP actually understand the blog post that he linked to?