Why do some languages survive and others disappear?

[Cainntear]

Wouldn't having a literary corpus also make a difference about a language's survival rate?

That seems to be the key argument of the Persian documentary for the survival of the Persian language, a well known history of pre-Islamic Persia, poetry, etc.

But didn't the Celts have their oral histories? Their songs? Their culture?

Well there's a difference between oral transmission and writing. Incidentally, Irish used the Latin script even while English was using the Futhark runic system, because the early Christianisation of Ireland meant that well-read people knew Latin. Also, there doesn't seem to be much evidence of extensive writing prior to Christianisation, as the older system of writing called ogham was typically used to make short messages on sticks (according to historical records) and has only been seen in Scotland and Ireland on things like gravestones, where there isn't more than a name inscribed.

But I digress...

The reason for language decline or survival is usefulness and status. People from ex-colonies in the UK and US historically didn't (as a rule) speak their languages to their children due to social concerns: English is the key to climbing the ladder, and all that! But at the same time, what if your status relies on being able to trade with commoners...? If you can't speak Farsi, you're not going to be a particularly good at negotiating the sales price of your wares!

Secondly, there has been a tendency to ignore the concept of multilingualism. Alfred the Great, a medieval king of very early almost-England, was described as being "illiterate until [I can't remember what age]" because he couldn't read or write Latin, but he was definitely capable of reading and writing Anglo-Saxon, which chroniclers didn't count. The switch of languages is often described as being quick because of the change of ruling lineage, but there's a complete failure to reflect on how quickly commoners picked up the new language. There's a theory that the change from Old English to Middle English was not because Middle English sprang into existence, but because Anglo-Saxon nobility ruled over commoners who failed to acquire Anglo-Saxon perfectly and spoke Middle English among themselves for centuries during the Old English/Anglo-Saxon period, and that the common tongue took over after the end of French as a language of English literature because the Anglo-Saxon ruling class didn't take over again -- instead the local population gained power.

But anyway (bloody hell, this head injury has led to fairly meandering thoughts!), Irish had the same problem as immigrant ex-colonials found in the 20th century -- English was the language of social advancement.
But more than that, the era of schooling had begun, and damn straight the English crown didn't want schools teaching in Ireland. Then there's also the question of technology. Irish had adopted the Uncial Latin script which the Romans had used for pen on paper, but the script used in England leant more on monumental Latin inscriptions carved into stone. This had become an even more pronounced split after the invention of the font-based printing press, so books in English not only had the advantage of economy of scale in terms of the number of copies of a book sold, but the printing equipment had a further economy of scale that an Irish fount typeset (source of the modern font) couldn't really be used for any other language.

20th century historians made the massive mistake of presuming that what they had experienced was normal and not considering how the causes of the effects they saw were in fact variable over time.

When was Persia invaded by Arabic speakers? I suspect it was long before childhood schooling became the norm (although I believe the middle-eastern Islamic cultures were ahead of Christian Europe on that, and it was definitely before the printing press. What reason was there for the masses to change their language? Was there a business-based economy that offered individuals with a career ladder that required a particular high status language?

[DaveAgain]

That seems to be the key argument of the Persian documentary for the survival of the Persian language, a well known history of pre-Islamic Persia, poetry, etc.

But didn't the Celts have their oral histories? Their songs? Their culture?

Well there's a difference between oral transmission and writing. Incidentally, Irish used the Latin script even while English was using the Futhark runic system, because the early Christianisation of Ireland meant that well-read people knew Latin. Also, there doesn't seem to be much evidence of extensive writing prior to Christianisation, as the older system of writing called ogham was typically used to make short messages on sticks (according to historical records) and has only been seen in Scotland and Ireland on things like gravestones, where there isn't more than a name inscribed.

The Celts documentary linked to above mentioned some examples in of Celtic languages being written using the Greek and Latin alphabets. Roman historians [Caesar's conquest of Gaul?] mention the Celts writing.

When was Persia invaded by Arabic speakers? I suspect it was long before childhood schooling became the norm (although I believe the middle-eastern Islamic cultures were ahead of Christian Europe on that, and it was definitely before the printing press.

One of the odd things about the literature cited in the documentary is that they were written AFTER the conquest, although in the case of the histories, they would already be known as oral histories.

What reason was there for the masses to change their language? Was there a business-based economy that offered individuals with a career ladder that required a particular high status language?

Two reasons were:

1. The arabs wanted it
2. The Persians had converted to Islam, which as I understand it means a daily interaction with the Arabic language because the Koran should not be translated (?).

[AroAro]

The resurrection of Hebraic in the form of Ivrit is the only case I know where a country decides to revive a stonedead language and succeeds in doing so.

I think that the (relative*) success is probably thanks to it being stonedead.

(* relative because I did read about Russian-origin immigrants largely continuing to use Russian and failing to learn Hebrew)

Perhaps the failure of Russian immigrants to learn is due to the borrowing of Yiddish-isms into Hebrew, making the language far less learnable to people who don't speak Yiddish...? (I don't currently have either Yiddish or Hebrew, so I'm not suggesting there's any evidence for this -- it's an uninformed musing rather that an educated statement of fact!)

Actually, Hebrew has surprisingly few borrowings from Yiddish so that's not the reason. I guess two reasons that can partially explain the failure are: 1) influx of around 1mln Russian Jews in just 17 years between 1989 and 2006 (the so-called post-Soviet aliyah), they have their own newspapers, tv stations and even political parties, so as you're right, at least some of them don't feel the need to learn Hebrew to function relatively easily in the new country with so many Russian speakers around. 2) new immigrants can learn Hebrew in "ulpans" and even though these immersion schools have their success they are far from being perfect, I think the course lasts only 5 months for example and Hebrew is so much different from Russian that it's probably not enough to master it.

[vonPeterhof]

Perhaps the failure of Russian immigrants to learn is due to the borrowing of Yiddish-isms into Hebrew, making the language far less learnable to people who don't speak Yiddish...? (I don't currently have either Yiddish or Hebrew, so I'm not suggesting there's any evidence for this -- it's an uninformed musing rather that an educated statement of fact!)

Highly doubt that this is the reason, since in that case we'd be seeing similar problems in Middle Eastern and Ethiopian immigrant communities. Besides, the Russian Jewish community lost ties with Hebrew as a liturgical language quite a bit earlier and more abruptly than it did with Yiddish as a household and community language. The teaching of Hebrew was stamped out pretty soon after the Revolution as part of the fight against "religious obscurantism and bourgeois nationalism", with enthusiastic support on the part of at least some activists for Yiddish as the language of a secular and proletarian Jewish culture. By contrast, the decline of Yiddish ended up following the more standard "three generations" decline cycle of linguistic minority assimilation, if accelerated somewhat by the Holocaust and the cessation of state support for most Yiddish cultural institutions in the 1940s (the YouTube channel The Cold War had a good two-part documentary summarizing all these processes).

I think the simpler explanation for the difficulties in learning Hebrew that Russian immigrants faced is their predominant lack of pre-existing passive familiarity with Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew that most Jewish communities had had prior to their mass immigration to Israel (as one aphorism about Hebrew revival says, "Before Ben‑Yehuda, Jews could speak Hebrew; after him, they did").

[galaxyrocker]

In Scotland at the moment, there is a massive explosion in Gaelic-medium education, which is fine where the language exists in the community, but where the school population is almost entirely learners, learner errors become a norm to the point where people who's self-claimed "dialect" includes a s***-load of English borrowings and direct word-for-word glossing of English expressions, and correcting there errors is portrayed as "gatekeeping" and "purism" rather than being seen for what it is: helping learners to learn the language they're supposed to be learning.

For example, I spent a year as a 2nd year of the Gaelic-medium college on Skye, and one of the first-years had gone through Gaelic medium education in Cumbernauld, which is a million miles away from a Gaelic community (well, not literally -- Scotland isn't a million miles in any direction!). The guy was certain he spoke Gaelic, but he complained when I called my bike a "rothair" instead of "baighsagal". He dismissed my word as "Sabhal Mor Ostaig Gaelic", but not only were we in the SMO, but the term "rothair" (lit. "wheeler") had been in continuous use for a long time and was not the sort of word that any official body would invent. He instead said that his word was correct because "bicycle" was international. While there's some truth in that, English is the *only* language that pronounces the I in bicycle in the same way as the word "eye". Spanish "bicicleta" and Italian "bicicletta" have an "ee" sound, as does the French "bicyclette" which isn't even used commonly any more. France calls it a vélo, in Germany it's fahrrad and it's a fiets in the Netherlands. "baighsagal" is not an international form -- it's an anglicism. He also word-for-word said "Tha mi (I am) a' coimhead (looking) air adhart (forward) gu (to) sin (that)" rather than using the native idiom "tha mi a' dèanamh fiughair ri siud" which could be literally glossed as "I am making anticipation/expectation with that-yonder".

I've witnessed similar with Irish, with people describing heavily anglicised Irish as "nua-Gheailge" (new Irish) or "urban Irish" and claiming it has equal right to be considered a dialect and "not wrong" as any of the dialects that are the latest form of long established continuity, and accusing people who say it's wrong of "gatekeeping" or "puritanism". It's got to the point where people appear on TV who can't even pronounce the /x/ phoneme. It's pretty horrible.

Just wanted to say glad you mentioned all this. I'm very pessimistic about the future of Traditional Irish, precisely for this reason. The quality outside the Gaeltacht is just not good, and it's declining even there as Urban Irish takes hold as a prestige variety, even if it's super inconsistent and idiosyncratic among individual speakers.

It's funny to note, though, that it's the opposite for baidhc, at least in Conamara. It's the natural word, with rothar only coming in via school Irish. In fact, I've found that to be one of the clearest splits in the divide in Irish -- natives are fine with borrowed words, but don't tend to use calques of idioms, word-to-word translations, or English phonetics. It's the exact opposite for Urban Irish (Gaelscoilis) speakers; they hate the idea of a borrowed word (or even ones that look borrowed, like carr, or damhsa -- ironically enough, 'rince', the word they prefer, is actually the one borrowed from English whereas damhsa is borrowed from French), but are fine with literally everything else turning into basically coded English.

But anyway (bloody hell, this head injury has led to fairly meandering thoughts!), Irish had the same problem as immigrant ex-colonials found in the 20th century -- English was the language of social advancement.

This is all that needs to be said. Even at the beginning of the Gaelic Revival, Irish was a project for an upper and upper middle class elite from Dublin. It never had buy-in from the common people, and the Gaelic League has been worst than useless with their incessant desire to try to convert the cities into Irish speaking areas as opposed to actually making sure the Gaeltacht stay as them and working outwards. It was political elite who tried to do it, but then they basically ignored the actual speakers of the language (at one point even trying to make them use Classical Gaelic instead of modern Irish...and don't even get me started on the Caighdeán). This is still an issue, and I still hold the opinion that Conradh na Gaeilge is actively causing harm to the language by their focus on trying to convert learners or create a 'Gaeltacht area' based in Dublin City centre -- nobody can afford to live there, there's no shops there, not to mention several of Ireland's biggest clubs are on the same street. It'll never have the density to be Irish speaking, without talking about any quality of Irish, which you can't because there's too many people who think that any "Irish" is good Irish. I wish that damned phrase Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béara cliste had never been uttered (and ironically, it's often uttered in the broken Irish it praises).

And then education, even in Irish, has also done harm to the language because it's imparted this view that English-phonemes are just as valid as traditional ones, and who'd want to speak like the 'culchies' out in Conamara or Donegal anyway? Not to mention most teachers are highly incompetent in Gaelic idiom (I've seen them correct native speakers...by directly translating the English instead of using Irish idiomatic expressions) and phonetics, which causes even more issues.

But that's enough of my rant (for now). To answer the main question, I don't think there's one reason in particular, and I suspect that reasons can almost be as numerous as the number of languages that have died out; everything must be looked at on a language-by-language basis, though I guess you can boil it down to either 'voluntary' shift due to status advancement, and forced shift due to war/governmental policies. But even that seems basically like a tautology, and everything has to be looked at individually.

[Cainntear]

It's funny to note, though, that it's the opposite for baidhc, at least in Conamara. It's the natural word, with rothar only coming in via school Irish. In fact, I've found that to be one of the clearest splits in the divide in Irish -- natives are fine with borrowed words, but don't tend to use calques of idioms, word-to-word translations, or English phonetics. It's the exact opposite for Urban Irish (Gaelscoilis) speakers; they hate the idea of a borrowed word (or even ones that look borrowed, like carr, or damhsa -- ironically enough, 'rince', the word they prefer, is actually the one borrowed from English whereas damhsa is borrowed from French), but are fine with literally everything else turning into basically coded English.

The situation with Gaelic is kind of comparable, because natural speakers calque loads of words and tend not to deal with word-for-word glosses as well.

However, I think the problem with vocabulary is the perception that a word has been invented simply because the speaker (whether a native speaker or a learner) doesn't personally know the word. I mean, I didn't say the "baidhsagal" was wrong, because plenty of people say it -- just that "rothair" isn't wrong either because plenty of people say it, and any rationalisation of an impulse to say it's wrong is just not acceptable from where I sit. I also found that when I lived in Corsica, it was infuriatingly difficult to speak my rudimentary Corsican with locals. If I said something that they interpreted as Italian, they would immediately say in French that they didn't want to speak Italian. The thing is, a lot of the things the thought were Italian were things I'd picked up from other Corsican speakers - people from the north of the island would assume that something said by a foreigner was Italian and not southern Corsican dialect, and people from the south would similarly assume that anything they wouldn't say wasn't Italian and was in fact dialect from the north of the island. I could swear blind that I literally had the same reaction to literally the same things -- like a northern person would tell me the southern version was "Italian", and if I got corrected, using the northern equivalent of the exact same phrase to a southerner would result in being called out on Italian.

I hardly learned any Corsican in the end, but if I wasn't so bloody minded I'd have given up trying to learn it after a month or two of that behaviour.

and don't even get me started on the Caighdeán

Excuse me, but you must be a gatekeeping puritan to suggest that a spelling regularisation shouldn't be carried out by entirely non-native speakers who can't tell the difference between a vowel-glide phoneme and a pair of pure vowel + consonant just because they're native language is full of vowel-glides and their target language actually has bloody pure vowels. Next thing you'll be saying that they murdered written consonants because of this.

I wish that damned phrase Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béara cliste had never been uttered

I *think* (might be wrong) the Scottish Gaelic came first: 'S fheàrr Gàidhlig briste na Gàidhlig ann an ciste (= "better broken Gaelic than Gaelic in a coffin!").
This seems to have originated during the period of pedantry when people would be mocked for not speaking like they were reading out of the Bible, which was a very conservative text that borrowed heavily from the Classical language.

The point was supposed to be "So what if you don't speak like the Bible? It's still your language."

Unfortunately modern learners have taken to it as meaning "so what if I haven't actually learned real Gaelic? My shitty Gaelic is better than no Gaelic at all!" But that's really not the case; I'd say: "'S e Gàidhlig briste a cuireas Gàidhlig ann an ciste." ("It's broken Gaelic that'll put Gaelic in a coffin.")
The phrase was clearly borrowed into Irish from Gaelic (which, as you'll have noted, doesn't mention English at all). Lots of people will claim it's the other way round, by Scottish Gaelic does have an adjective "cliste" whereas Irish doesn't have a noun "ciste" (which ScG probably picked up via the Scots "kist", related to English "chest" as in "treasure chest", not the upper front part of the human torso!!) so a translation to ScG is all but out of the question -- ScG wouldn't have needed to change anything to preserve the rhyme, but Irish definitely did.

(and ironically, it's often uttered in the broken Irish it praises).

How is that ironic? The Irish version was really borrowed in by the same type of zealots who did the Caighdeán, the sort of people who hang so much of their identity on the language that they can't possibly admit to having learner errors in their language model.

This is, unfortunately, what is essentially being imported from Ireland now, because people aren't allowed to say "it doesn't work that way" without being accused of puritan gatekeeping.

And then education, even in Irish, has also done harm to the language because it's imparted this view that English-phonemes are just as valid as traditional ones, and who'd want to speak like the 'culchies' out in Conamara or Donegal anyway?

Reminds me of a guy from Cork. Are you familiar with the term "pre-aspiration"...? This is something that happens very notably in ScG. Like, the difference between -t- and -d- isn't primarily voicing (although that's a very common problem in anglicised learner speech) but rather that a little "h" or "ch" is sounded *before* the main thing. So "ad" (hat) is pronounced almost like English "at", but if it existed, Gaelic "at" would be pronounced "ahht".

I noticed from this Cork guy that pre-aspiration was a very distinctive feature of his local dialect in English, but I asked him about Irish pronunciation from school, and the pre-aspiration disappeared, so he actual had a better English accent in his limited Irish than he had in his fluent native English.

Not to mention most teachers are highly incompetent in Gaelic idiom (I've seen them correct native speakers...by directly translating the English instead of using Irish idiomatic expressions) and phonetics, which causes even more issues.

Same with Gaelic medium education. We have a massive demand for "more more more" and "the government should do something" and we simply don't have enough genuine Gaelic speakers to fill the teaching roles that already exist, so there are plenty of 'S fheàrr Gàidhlig briste types who think something is better than nothing.

I have been shouted down for trying to speak up a 50-50 approach (half Gaelic, half English) which would mean
A) the Gaelic fluent speakers could teach twice as many kids because they wouldn't be responsible for the half of the time devoted to English;
B) the kids would learn better Gaelic because when your attention resources are stretched to their limit, people revert to Tarzan speak, and the primary curriculum places a lot of demand on attentional resources; and
C) kids can be expected to have a better attitude towards Gaelic because they'd associate it with the fun stuff they did while learning it, compared with the difficult hard stuff that they'd be doing in English (eg maths/sums)

[nooj]

I hardly learned any Corsican in the end, but if I wasn't so bloody minded I'd have given up trying to learn it after a month or two of that behaviour.

I've always wanted to learn Corsican, but I've never tried. I only follow Corsican people on social media and am learning (passively) quite a bit that way. What kind of resources did you use? If you could share some more of your experiences that would be appreciated!

[Cainntear]

I hardly learned any Corsican in the end, but if I wasn't so bloody minded I'd have given up trying to learn it after a month or two of that behaviour.

I've always wanted to learn Corsican, but I've never tried. I only follow Corsican people on social media and am learning (passively) quite a bit that way. What kind of resources did you use? If you could share some more of your experiences that would be appreciated!

I used the Assimil course, based on previous experience that said Assimil was great for languages closely related to languages you spoke and rubbish for languages that were different (eg. I'd used it for Catalan with a lot of success and was utterly baffled by the Basque version). As a speaker of French, Spanish, Italian and a bit of Catalan, Corsican was pretty easy, so Assimil was effective. (In fact, my first impression of Corsican was that the northern dialect sounded a lot like a Catalan trying to speak Italian!!!)