LING 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Language Death, Language Shift, Multilingualism
Document Summary
Occurs when people no longer speak a language. Number of languages in the world: 6912. 347 languages (~5%) have over a million speakers. 94% of world"s population speaks one of these language. Remaining 95% of languages are spoken by 6% of world population. 497 of these are nearly extinct (>50 speakers) Median size of languages in world: 3,000 speakers. Manadarin, spanish, english, bengali, hindi, portugeuese, russian, japanese. Top 20 languages: 3. 5 bil speakers or more. Linguistic diversity is not distributed equally around the world. There are hotspots of language diversity like new guinea, indonesia, india, mexico. Before european invasion: 20mil native americans spoke around 300 language. 20 may survive since they are spoken by children. Before european invasion: 1mil indigenous australians, 500 languages. Today: 200 languages survived, all are endangered. Only 20 of these are spoken by children. About 90% of languages are on the verge of being lost. Language death: when the last speaker of a language dies.
