Imminent language death of Icelandic

[Linguoboy]

Not gonna try "Styrkár" cause nothing jumps right out at me. However, my guesses for "Þorgerður" are [θorgərður] and [θorgɛrður]. I'll be very surprised if they're in the ball park because this is the first time I've seen the name. The only "cheating," if you wanna call it that, I did was seeing if *r can be trilled. Even if it can't have been trilled, I'd have still used [r] and specified it as the trill.

[ˈstɪɾ̊kauɾ̊] and [ˈθɔɾɟɛɾðuɾ̊] The Icelandic /r/ is mostly just flapped (but trilled occurs from time to time) but the more difficult challenge is the fact it tends to be voiceless.

Has my textbook been lying to me? It always transcribes the noun ending -ur as [ʏr̥], with a front rounded vowel.

[vegfarandi]

Not gonna try "Styrkár" cause nothing jumps right out at me. However, my guesses for "Þorgerður" are [θorgərður] and [θorgɛrður]. I'll be very surprised if they're in the ball park because this is the first time I've seen the name. The only "cheating," if you wanna call it that, I did was seeing if *r can be trilled. Even if it can't have been trilled, I'd have still used [r] and specified it as the trill.

[ˈstɪɾ̊kauɾ̊] and [ˈθɔɾɟɛɾðuɾ̊] The Icelandic /r/ is mostly just flapped (but trilled occurs from time to time) but the more difficult challenge is the fact it tends to be voiceless.

Has my textbook been lying to me? It always transcribes the noun ending -ur as [ʏr̥], with a front rounded vowel.

No you're 100% right of course. Þorgerður is [ˈθɔɾɟɛɾðʏɾ̊]

[Curlyjimsam]

I wonder what effects developments in machine translation might have on language vitality. If (hypothetically) somebody developed an AI that was capable of working out how to accurately translate from English to Icelandic with minimal human input, then might Icelanders start engaging with the automatically translated materials more than the original ones?

[xxx]

this kind of machine would permit to save endangered languages if they could be input in the machine...
better than esperanto pretends for itself (I am sure it would supplant endangered language more than help them...)

[Vijay]

I wonder what effects developments in machine translation might have on language vitality.

None. Next question.

[Kuchigakatai]

I wonder what effects developments in machine translation might have on language vitality. If (hypothetically) somebody developed an AI that was capable of working out how to accurately translate from English to Icelandic with minimal human input, then might Icelanders start engaging with the automatically translated materials more than the original ones?

Nicholas Ostler wrote an entire book around that premise: The Last Lingua Franca: English until the Return of Babel (2010).

[doctor shark]

I'm a little skeptical about blaming the media... millions of people hear other languages/dialects in the media without abandoning their home language. But that's also why I ask about age. I can see 13-year-olds speaking English to be cool, but 3-year-olds shouldn't care.

The question is not hearing or listening to stuff in a foreign language. The question is only hearing about some subjects in said foreign language. When playing D&D, I can hardly get myself to call my stats force, dextérité, constitution, intelligence, sagesse, charisme. I've played more RPGs in Japanese than in French. When you've never heard of something in language X, it's really hard to discuss it in X without a lot of translation efforts.

This is very true. I see this when I'm playing Magic: The Gathering here in Luxembourg and over in Germany, where a number of English terms prevail over the native terms (especially "discard" over "défausser", for example). A large part of this here is probably due to the sometimes complicated language situation among Luxembourgers in Luxembourg, but also because English language product is the most widely disseminated (for example, it's what card spoilers are in and not all sets make it into French and German). Similarly, I've run into a few scientists among my coworkers who have difficulty talking about their work in their native language. One in particular is German, but she did her Ph.D. in Sweden in English, so all of the terms for her field are terms she only readily knows... in English. And this is also "helped" by the fact that almost all conferences and journals are in English, so knowing the terminology in another language is not as easy or readily accessible.

That said, here in Luxembourg, Luxembourgish is fairly commonly used among kids, at least from what I've heard walking and going out and about, but it also depends on the age of the children and when they moved to Luxembourg (since Luxembourgish is only used primarily at crèche and in the first years of primary school). Luxembourgish has, working for it, a larger population, a requirement to know Luxembourgish in order to naturalize, and a substantial connection to national identity and pride (I like to refer to it as a "secret handshake" for Luxembourgers), but it's still a not-widely-spoken language, official in only one country, and almost all Luxembourgers are fluent in German, French, English, or a combination thereof.

[Vijay]

I don't think I've ever met anyone who's ever managed to talk about academic research entirely in Malayalam.

[Tropylium]

This sure sounds like imminent loss of prestige, but starting from healthy and assuming it's all language shift rather than speakers literally being killed off, languages take a good while to really die after even thorough marginalization. There are minority languages that were observed to be at > 10k speakers and in freefall already a hundred years ago, and which are regardless still around (some moribund like Votic at < 20 speakers; some still lurching along like Mansi at 2000–3000).

If current trends continue, I do think Icelandic and various similar-sized languages will likely go extinct within the next about ~200 years, but probably not substantially sooner.

[Nachtswalbe]

Would a world government or at least a world where multinational entities render nationstates irrelevqnt contribute to a monolingual world?

[Otto Kretschmer]

Isn't irish undergoing a kind of slow revival thanks to young people, on the other hand?

[Nachtswalbe]

Isn't irish undergoing a kind of slow revival thanks to young people, on the other hand?

What are your sources for this?
Also, English seems to be crowding out Arabic in the UAE and there are exclusively Anglophone middle class type in India. Even if the entire middle class of a country switched to English or whatever the local lingua franca is, that doesn't mean the language will go extinct

[Linguoboy]

Isn't irish undergoing a kind of slow revival thanks to young people, on the other hand?

Yes and no? The kind of Irish spoken by young people has little in common with traditional Gaeltacht Irish, as Breandan mac Ardghail explains in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kw-of3UBgg. Moreover, the percentage of Irish-speakers who use it regularly after leaving school continues to decline; according to the most recent census figures (2016), only about 4% of the population make regular daily use of it outside of the educational system. I'm not sure this really adds up to a "revival", but I suppose that's a matter of definition.

[Nachtswalbe]

Yes and no? The kind of Irish spoken by young people has little in common with traditional Gaeltacht Irish, as Breandan mac Ardghail explains in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kw-of3UBgg. Moreover, the percentage of Irish-speakers who use it regularly after leaving school continues to decline; according to the most recent census figures (2016), only about 4% of the population make regular daily use of it outside of the educational system. I'm not sure this really adds up to a "revival", but I suppose that's a matter of definition.

Would this be considered a prestige-fueled switch since post-Independence Irish generally favor English for prestige reasons, like how Haitian elites favor French over kreyol because French is more prestigious and useful?

[Linguoboy]

Would this be considered a prestige-fueled switch since post-Independence Irish generally favor English for prestige reasons, like how Haitian elites favor French over kreyol because French is more prestigious and useful?

The switch was completed well before Independence and it was the result of a combination of prestige and brute force: Irish-speakers were excluded, persecuted, and left to die by the thousands.

The government of the Free State and independent Ireland tried to artificially boost the prestige of Irish but that's a very tall order when a huge chunk of your population is emigrating to Anglophone countries just to earn enough to live on. The situation has finally changed for the better (although even so roughly 1 in 5 people with Irish nationality lives outside the borders of Ireland) but there are still no tangible benefits conferred by speaking Irish that aren't equally available to English monolinguals.

[Moose-tache]

America has the privilege of containing dozens of Irishes, with a range of speakers from six digits all the way to a handful of pensioners. Revival efforts are constant and varied, so it's turned out to be quite a useful laboratory. Classes and phone apps and the like have expanded the number of adults learning Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee, for example, and classes for young children are available in those languages as well. But so far the transfer of language from one generation to the next remains elusive. If Dave learns Choctaw as an adult, his children will not necessarily learn it from him, and if Sally goes to Choctaw preschool, she will not necessarily remain fluent in adulthood. Until this loop is closed, the increase in the number of people who say they "speak Choctaw" tells us little about the long term prospects of the language.

The larger issue is permeability of speech communities. When a language is spoken by ten thousand people across communities totalling millions of English-speakers, bilingualism is inevitable. You can preserve the smaller language in a bilingual community, but expanding it is never easy. Welsh, for example, still has communities where Welsh speakers outnumber non-Welsh speakers, and its own media and literature. Reaching this stage from a starting point of one third of a village in Anglesey would be pretty much impossible.

[kodé]

Back to Icelandic: my issue with the idea that it is likely to die out in a couple generations is, it’s just based on extrapolation from present trends. The recent trends are a retreat of Icelandic and an expansion of English. I’d bet good money that this trend is likely to reverse in a generation among at least some social groups, since this happens in a lot of similar situations if there’s no coercive pressure. In the case of Icelandic, there’s a lot of potential support for those who might want to try to reverse the trend, either as a marker of national identity or as a subcultural badge: there’s lots of “space” that could be carved out for Icelandic use, as opposed to languages of an immigrant community or an indigenous minority.

[kodé]

The larger issue is permeability of speech communities. When a language is spoken by ten thousand people across communities totalling millions of English-speakers, bilingualism is inevitable. You can preserve the smaller language in a bilingual community, but expanding it is never easy. Welsh, for example, still has communities where Welsh speakers outnumber non-Welsh speakers, and its own media and literature. Reaching this stage from a starting point of one third of a village in Anglesey would be pretty much impossible.

Yeah, expansion of a language that has been decreasing in speech arenas is very difficult. Maintenance, though, may not be. In many parts of the world, multilingualism is normal and stable. For communities of endangered or threatened languages, finding a stable multilingualism is probably the best case scenario, but it’s also a quite reachable scenario in many cases, though certainly not all. Over-simplistically, finding domains favorable to the minority language and then promoting its use therein seems like a solid playbook (with the obvious caveat that I don’t have a background in language planning).

[Linguoboy]

Yeah, expansion of a language that has been decreasing in speech arenas is very difficult. Maintenance, though, may not be. In many parts of the world, multilingualism is normal and stable. For communities of endangered or threatened languages, finding a stable multilingualism is probably the best case scenario, but it’s also a quite reachable scenario in many cases, though certainly not all. Over-simplistically, finding domains favorable to the minority language and then promoting its use therein seems like a solid playbook (with the obvious caveat that I don’t have a background in language planning).

I'm more pessimistic about these prospects than I used to be. So many basic conditions of life have changed so radically so quickly recently that it makes it very hard to project much into the future based the current situation. Earlier forms of "stable bilingualism" were often not so stable (e.g. there was actually a steady ongoing erosion of the smaller language community) or not so universal (i.e. there was always a significant minority who did not learn the leading L2(s)). Now I'm inclined to believe arguments that if it's not possible for at least some individuals to live monolingually within a language community, that community is probably doomed in the long run.

Switzerland, for instance, is often touted as an example of successful stable multilingualism. But, practically speaking, most Francophones live their lives entirely in French and most German-speakers predominately speak dialect. Francophones regularly complain that the Swiss Standard German spoken by Swiss Germans is so dialect-influenced that they can't understand it based on the German they learn in school; it's not uncommon for Swiss from different language communities to resort to English to converse with each other. So it's less an example of "normal, stable bilingualism" than normal, stable monolingualism with a veneer of bilingualism thrown over it.

[Nachtswalbe]

Switzerland, for instance, is often touted as an example of successful stable multilingualism. But, practically speaking, most Francophones live their lives entirely in French and most German-speakers predominately speak dialect. Francophones regularly complain that the Swiss Standard German spoken by Swiss Germans is so dialect-influenced that they can't understand it based on the German they learn in school; it's not uncommon for Swiss from different language communities to resort to English to converse with each other. So it's less an example of "normal, stable bilingualism" than normal, stable monolingualism with a veneer of bilingualism thrown over it.

Anglophone Switzerland in 2100?
Also, vgr argues that languages lacking an high culture or online base, and with strong mutual unintelligibility between high prestige and low prestige dialects will become extinct by becoming only a language for "stupid people with stupid thoughts"

Venkatesh Rao wrote:
Prediction: tailwinds of digitization, auto-translation, robust street use, and demographics notwithstanding, most 2nd tier languages are going to die of stupidification because they are below critical mass of creatives working in high culture and keeping it close to low culture