[Foundation-l] List of Wikimedia projects and languages

Fri Jul 15 02:58:49 UTC 2011

2011/7/14 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>

> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 01:56, M. Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Present research actually indicates the decline of linguistic diversity
> has
> > accelerated in the last 10-15 years, possibly due to the exact factor you
>
> May you point to some statistics or relevant researches for the period
> 2000-2010?
>
http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/handle/10125/4474/harmonloh.pdf

Of course this is just one example; it covers the period up to 2005,
including between 200 and 2005, where a sharp and consistent decline has
continued in world indigenous languages.

> > Now when you say "Celtic languages", which ones do you mean? Irish and
> Scots
> > Gaelic are receding daily, despite the claims of their defenders. Breton
> is
> > in serious trouble, and Manx and Cornish, although undergoing hobbyist
> > revivals, seem unlikely to ever reach more than a few hundred native
> > speakers. Welsh is doing alright for now, thanks in large part to the
> fact
> > that it is supported by an autonomous regional government, which very,
> > very few endangered languages enjoy, and the fact that people decided to
> > "save" it when it still had plenty of speakers. But again, Welsh is the
> > exception rather than the rule, one drop of language survival in a sea of
> > languages speeding towards extinction.
>
> A number of languages of former Soviet Union, including Russia, whose
> speakers mostly know better Russian, are in the process of revival, as
> well. Many Romance languages highly endangered by the official
> languages of their countries are getting more attention, too. Non-Han
> languages of China have a lot of chances to survive, thanks to the
> support of the government. Many native languages of US are in much
> better position now thanks to the economic consequences of tribal
> sovereignty. There are a number of other cases. Without such efforts,
> many languages (I would say hundreds) wouldn't survive 20th century.
>
And tell me what exactly does a "process of revival" entail? Which Romance
languages and what programs and what are the results? Many minority
languages in China are spoken in relatively remote regions with low access
to resources, and a key difference between China and most of the rest of the
world is that rural status is enforced and rapid urbanization is technically
disallowed ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system ). If all
monolingual speakers of minority languages around the world were forced to
stay in their own home regions and speakers of other languages did not move
in or were not allowed to move into their territory, language shift would
not be happening anywhere.

As far as native languages of the US, this I have given you my personal
testimony about and I have actually done research myself. Out of the many
many indigenous languages of the United States, many of those that remain
have only a handful of native speakers. Approximately 60 are still spoken by
a slightly greater number of people.

Based on my preliminary statistical research, only the following languages
in the US have speaker populations that have an equal or younger age
distribution to English: Navajo, Havasupai, Crow, Zuni, Hawai'ian,
Vietnamese, and Spanish.

Of course, this is only one element of language survival, and this includes
languages with drastically different circumstances and numbers of speakers.
Navajo has somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 speakers, Havasupai has
530, Crow has 4280, Zuni has 9650, Hawaiian is difficult to determine
(perhaps between 10,000 and 30,000), Vietnamese is 1 million and Spanish is
around 30 million.

But of course we must also consider how widespread these are in their
communities, whether they are declining or growing, etc. Whereas only 30% of
Navajo children are considered to speak Navajo as their native language in
1998, this number was as high as 90% in 1968, indicating a rapid and
alarming language attrition and shift. The Navajo Nation is a mostly rural
tribe and has low access to resources, with many members living in poverty.

Havasupai, on the other hand, is spoken by nearly 100% of the tribal
population, thanks to extreme isolation, small cohesive community and
several other factors not found among most other tribes.

So when we look at the future outcomes of these two languages, it's not as
simple as "One has over 100,000 speakers and the other has under 1000", but
rather "Which one is healthy and which one needs help", "Which one is
decreasing and at what speed", etc.

The next step was to look at intergenerational maintenance, i.e., do
children of speakers of language X also speak that language?

The only languages that are being maintained intergenerationally at a viable
level are Havasupai, Crow, Zuni and Hawaiian. This means that at the current
pace of decline, Navajo will eventually cease to be spoken. This is true
also for Vietnamese and Spanish, but since neither is endangered in the
world I will not comment more here on either.

All of these other languages are currently thriving, partly due to
geographic isolation in all cases, and possibly to innovative practices used
by people in Hawaii to produce Hawaiian-speaking children from parents who
were not raised speaking Hawaiian. I cannot think of another indigenous
language in this country whose long-term outlook is not mostly grim (there
are "glimmers" of hope, but as of now they are still just that, glimmers).

> > I wonder how long Sorbian will actually survive as a full language. I
> think
> > it's unlikely that Sorbians will never marry non-speakers. According to
> > Ethnologue, Sorbian languages are both spoken by "mostly older adults".
> So
> > your shining example that you repeat of language survival is actually not
> > that. I wonder how many Sorbian native speakers there are of my
> generation.
> > Now I wonder how many of them will speak Sorbian to _their_ children. Now
> > what about the grandchildren?
>
> By number of active Wikipedians, Serbian Wikipedia would have to have
> four to five times more editors [1] than Upper Sorbian [2], while
> keeping in mind that the top of the activity on hsb.wp passed five
> years ago, while Serbian Wikipedia is now at the top of the activity.
> Numbers on hsb.wp are stable and all four active editors belong to the
> group of non-native speakers [3], expected for the situation of Upper
> Sorbian language (German is their native language).
>
Right, all editors belong to the group of non-native speakers, thus proving
my point. Me going to school and learning Serbian is not the same as you
speaking Serbian since childhood, and it never will be.

> And, yes, as I said, I think that Sorbian will survive not as actively
> used language, but as the language of cultural identity. That's good
> enough.
>
For communities perhaps it's good enough, but it's still language death when
there are no native speakers and everybody who learns it, is learning it as
a second language. Latin is a dead language, just one that's still heavily
used non-natively.

> > Livonian, I'm wondering where you're getting this information from. By
> most
> > accounts, it's got between 10 and 0 native speakers and is now used by
> some
> > hobbyists only.
>
> Requests for new languages [4]. Children learn the language.
>
>
According to whom? If you're referring to the comment that "they are trying
to teach Livonian language to children in summer camps", this certainly
doesn't count as a native language. The result of summer camp teaching is
not "native-level acquisition". I think it is necessary to get more sources
to claim that a near-dead language isn't near-dead than the word of a
stranger.

> >> Not just encyclopedias, but books, dictionaries, even news sources.
> >> All of that is inside of our job description. But not just that:
> >> gathering active community around Wikimedia projects is almost the
> >> ticket for language survival.
> >
> > This strategy couldn't help languages where speakers are already all
> > bilingual. When there is a large number of monolinguals, this strategy
> still
> > won't help much, as our job description doesn't include hiring
> interpreters
> > for government workers and businessmen, or for people from rural villages
> > when they go to sell crops at a market town. You are putting too much
> > emphasis on a faulty idea that books kill or save languages. No matter
> how
> > many books I can read in, say, Manx, there's still the fact that I can
> only
> > talk to a couple hundred people in that language and there's no community
> > where I can conduct my whole life exclusively in Manx. Or how about
> Romani
> > in Serbia: if I want to rent a flat in Belgrade, I'll not be able to do
> it
> > in Romani. If I want to go to a supermarket, or go buy parts for my
> computer
> > or my car, or go to a meeting for alcoholics, or stamp collectors, or
> take
> > classes at university, I won't be able to use Romani. That is what kills
> > languages, and until we as an organization can find a solution to that
> > problem, we can't solve the problem of language death.
>
> Semi-integrated Roma speak Romano-Serbian in buses, on streets; it
> varies from part to part of the city, but it is not strange to hear
> them; children, as well. Besides the fact that it is not taught in
> schools. Note, also, that Roma in Serbia (and elsewhere) have been
> bilingual for centuries because of their specific way of life. (AFAIK,
> non-integrated Roma don't live in Belgrade and they speak Balkan and
> Vlax Romani.)
>
I didn't say that they don't speak it in buses or on streets. People in my
city speak Navajo on buses and on streets; in Flagstaff (2 hours drive to
the north) you hear it in many places. But this does not mean I can go to
any random restaurant and place my order in Navajo, it does not mean these
speakers can go to the post office and speak in Navajo, or any such thing. I
think you've missed my point, which is not that these languages aren't
spoken in cities (they are!), but that their speakers are forced to speak
the LWC literally constantly.

> As the most of people want to have life easier than hunter-gatherer,
> nomadic or so, they have to know to read and write to be able to get
> it. In such circumstances information written in that language keep
> languages and we provide the platform for creating and storing written
> information. The important question is under which circumstances that
> transition occurs. If it occurs during the expansion of Qin Dynasty,
> there are not a lot of chances for languages to survive. If it occurs
> in modern China, when schools, cultural institutions are available, as
> well as willingness of majority population to help, then language has
> chance to survive up to some extent.
>
Again, this is a flawed perception of language shift, the idea that the only
reason people switch languages is so they can read books and newspapers.
Life for most of us is not limited to the written word, for most of the
inhabitants of the planet, spoken language plays a far bigger role in daily
life, and while we can work to translate written resources, we can't
translate human beings: shopkeepers, restaurant owners, police officers,
can't be translated, if they all speak one language, that places a strong
pressure on populations to switch languages, and inevitably they do,
particularly within urban settings.

> Preserving a language doesn't mean that it has to flourish. Stable
> ~1000 of hobbyists are good enough for waiting for the better times,
> as the case with Manx is.
>
"Good enough for waiting for the better times" - tell me, when are the
better times? There are no better times for such languages, unless the rest
of the world ceases to exist and they are left to repopulate it themselves.
Once a language has been totally defeated (as Manx was), it can keep
fighting, and it may even make some gains, but the chance is almost 0 that
it will return to what it once was.

Besides, let's look at a scenario where somehow magically you're right and
all the languages spoken today are still spoken in 2050. Let's say today
there are 7000 languages, and in 2050 there are still 7000 languages. But
instead of the fantastical idea that languages spoken by rapidly urbanizing
populations, or populations that are shifting languages, will maintain the
same number of speakers, let's postulate that they will, like Manx, maintain
a perpetual number of speakers of ~1000 bilinguals and no monolingual
speakers. In this scenario, we have 700 languages with hundreds of thousands
or millions of speakers, and 6300 with ~1000 or less speakers.

In these circumstances, what is our goal? To create a Wikipedia in every one
of these languages? Here's my thought:

If people who speak ~1000 bilingual speaker languages want Wikipedias, we
allow it, but we don't need to go out of our way to try to recruit people to
create content, or spend all of our free time holding workshops and looking
for new participants. They are useful to people as a tool of cultural
preservation, but nobody "needs" them as a primary medium for acquiring
knowledge since all speakers are bilingual. Thus, our priority is the 700
languages, which have large populations and many monolingual speakers. These
are the languages we need to focus on, and those which are missing
Wikipedias are primarily spoken in Africa, to my knowledge.