Why do some languages survive and others disappear?

[DaveAgain]

I've watched two documenatries recently about the Celts and the Persians. The (continental) Celtic people were conquered, and their languages disappeared, the Persians were conquered, and their language survived.

Why is that? What keeps a language alive?

[Le Baron]

I'd say various reasons. Numbers of speakers first of all, but also when the language of the conqueror only becomes 'official' in the administration and offices of a country/area, but the vernacular language of the wider population remains roughly the same as before (England after the Norman conquest). Something a lot easier in the days of weaker communications. Also whether a power creates a concerted policy of extinguishing a language; though this can also lead a language to be preserved 'in hiding'.

[Iversen]

We are basically looking for situations where one society is defeated by another, and then the local language there either dies out or survives. In the second case it may actually be the language of the conqueror that dies out, but it may have had an influence on the language of the subordinate population. A clear cases of this is the history of the Normans in Great Britain after 1066. They became the undisputed upper class, and that haughty upper class spoke a French dialect for a couple of hundred years - but then switched to English, albeit a kind of English that in the dark period had shed most of its morphology and become something different from Anglosaxon. But meat to eat has still got French names, whereas the living animals you have to take of as a peasant have Germanic names - which goes to show who ate the veal after the invasion. And everything clerical or scientific of course has a Latin name.

The history of the Gothic language is slightly different. At one point the Ostrogoths ruled Italy and the Visigoths ruled the Iberian peninsula, but both disappeared leaving hardly any trace - maybe because they deliberately avoided contacts with the local population, they were few in number and more warriors than teachers, and they let the catholic priesters speak their Latin because they were Arians themselves and didn't care. You could say the same thing about the languages of the Baltic states which were sucessively ruled by Danes and Swedes and the Teutonic order: the foreign rulers here apparently didn't bother to communicate directly with their local subordinates, so when they left the peasants just kept on speaking their old languages (except Old Prussian which died out).

On the other hand the Romans were quite successful in forcing and luring people in Western Europe to adopt the Latin language - though not quite so much in the Eastern part of the empire, where Greek - the language of a conquered, but admired population - went on to become the predominant language. The Romans had the idea that you willy-nilly had to become a (second-class) Roman, voluntarily or by force, and even though the Roman citizenship wasn't extended to the whole population before 212 (by Caracalla) the Romans still liked to impose their kind of society on the subordinates. The English used similar brutal methods to subdue Ireland and Scotland, but it is worth noticing that there still was a lot of people in Ireland that had Irish as their native language until far into the 19. century - but a combination of famine and Anglophone schools then pushed it to near extinction. So yes, languages can be exterminated by using brute force, but discrimination in administration and schools can be just as efficient.

And then there is the mass media that could have been supporting local dialects, but instead are used to promote one single privileged 'standard' dialect. In Norway it seems that the dialects are favoured on TV, but here in Denmark there is a clique of language-challenged people (mostly from our capital, I guess) who get a fit if somebody says somebody in a dialect they don't understand. We have local TV stations around the country, and you could expect them to cater for the local dialects, but no - practically everyone speaks standard Danish there. As if people who live in Copenhagen would sit all day long watching local TV from Western Jutland...

[DaveAgain]

On the other hand the Romans were quite successful in forcing and luring people in Western Europe to adopt the Latin language - though not quite so much in the Eastern part of the empire, where Greek - the language of a conquered, but admired population - went on to become the predominant language. The Romans had the idea that you willy-nilly had to become a (second-class) Roman, voluntarily or by force, and even though the Roman citizenship wasn't extended to the whole population before 212 (by Caracalla) the Romans still liked to impose their kind of society on the subordinates.

The English used similar brutal methods to subdue Ireland and Scotland, but it is worth noticing that there still was a lot of people in Ireland that had Irish as their native language until far into the 19. century - but a combination of famine and Anglophone schools then pushed it to near extinction. So yes, languages can be exterminated by using brute force, but discrimination in administration and schools can be just as efficient..

The Eastern and Western Roman Empire was a military dictatorship, and a slave economy, so very different to Britain. Low-land Scotland was linguistically and culturally anglo-saxon before James VI of Scotland became James I of England.

An interesting comparison might be between the Republic of Ireland (established 1922), and the State of Israel (established 1948). The Israelis united around an almost dead language, Hebrew, and made it their everyday language, the Irish did not unite around Irish-Gaelic, why was that?

[Le Baron]

An interesting comparison might be between the Republic of Ireland (established 1922), and the State of Israel (established 1948). The Israelis united around an almost dead language, Hebrew, and made it their everyday language, the Irish did not unite around Irish-Gaelic, why was that?

Probably because the Irish felt secure in the idea of belonging to a land continuously, where the creation of Israel decided to re-implant a language to create differentiation.

[Iversen]

The Eastern and Western Roman Empire was a military dictatorship, and a slave economy, so very different to Britain.

Well, the things Oliver Cromwell did to Ireland were not very polite.. but the point is that the Irish language did NOT (almost) die out at that point - its darkest hour only came in the 19. century, and things have gone downwards since then (in spite of the support from the government in the now independent Eire - and maybe also because the alternative, English, was more useful). The potato famine was one turning point, and then the school system and administrative pressure to use English did the rest. But speaking about Celtic languages: the Normannic invasion in 1066 did not mean that Anglosaxon was pushed out of existence - instead it changed into Middle English while the new overlords sat on their castles and babbled in French. In contrast the Saxon-Angel-Jutish invasion in the mid 500s (possibly in conjunction with a civilian Frisian influx) meant that the Celtic languages definitely were killed off in what now is England (albeit with some delay in the case of Cornwall). So what was the difference between those two invasions?

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.

[DaveAgain]

But speaking about Celtic languages: the Normannic invasion in 1066 did not mean that Anglosaxon was pushed out of existence - instead it changed into Middle English while the new overlords sat on their castles and babbled in French. In contrast the Saxon-Angel-Jutish invasion in the mid 500s (possibly in conjunction with a civilian Frisian influx) meant that the Celtic languages definitely were killed off in what now is England (albeit with some delay in the case of Cornwall). So what was the difference between those two invasions?

I don't think that's true. I believe the current theory is that Celtic and Anglo-Saxon commnunities co-existed for a long period of time, rather than being killed off. Welsh was still spoken in parts of England in Elizabeth I's time.

I think the key difference between the two was the plague. New French speakers stopped arriving, and the thinning out of the ones already there forced the survivors to interact more with the Anglo-Saxons.

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.

The point is it is do-able, so why was the Republic of Ireland unable to revive a living language in the same period?

[Xenops]

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

[DaveAgain]

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?

[Cainntear]

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)

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.

So I can imagine that Hebrew has a serious advantage in that learners have no model to be compared to and be corrected on not speaking. Modern Hebrew is more or less an invention as much as GME Gaelic or Urban/New Irish are, without any actual native heritage speakers who can literally tell people that they're speaking wrong, so effectively the learners have ownership of the language. Or rather "have had ownership", because Hebrew may have effectively been a "(re-)invented" language during it's revival, but it has effectively become a living language because there's at least a generation of native speakers. What is now "correct" and what language did it borrow from?

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!)