Are language learners more sensitive to minoritised languages?

[mick33]

But once I began reading more about specific endangered minority languages I realized that the only people who can revive these languages are the natives, if they wish to do so. Some speakers of various minority languages may appreciate outsiders learning their languages, or they may not, but I probably won't actually change anything by learning any of these languages.

Hmmm... here's a bit of my thinking.

People would tell me how "wonderful" it was that I was learning Gaelic as it gave me a chance to "save a dying language".
I would respond by saying that I'm not trying to save anything, I'm just trying to stop killing it.

Being a member of the majority language community, my presence would be an reason for members of the minority language community to speak my language rather than their own, and that's something which is harmful to the minority language. Me not knowing their language would therefore be contributing to language decline, so me learning their language was simply refusing to contribute further.

It was the same thinking that led me to learn Catalan. I would be hanging around with groups of Catalan speakers, and they would end up speaking Spanish so as to not leave me out of the conversation... even when they were talking about their mutual friends from their hometown, and I didn't know these people at all.

I see that I should have been clearer. I realise I was thinking more about Native American languages, and more specifically the languages of the Pacific Norhtwest region of North America. As I understand the history of the peoples who were here when the Europeans came, tribal languages were spoken only by the members of certain tribes, but not usually by outsiders. Thus, Lushootseed (or variations of it) was spoken by about 10 tribes here, and they never expected anyone else to speak it unless you traded with them. Even before Europeans settled here, the tribes were open to learning other languages for cross-cultural communication, and at least one pidgin language known as Chinook Jargon was developed for this purpose, but I don't know how many people still speak it. They only objected to having their own languages actively suppressed.

[rdearman]

I wouldn't bother, and the reason is in the name: minority. I don't want to speak to a minority of people, I want to speak to the majority of people. So learning the larger language gives me more bang-for-the-buck. Same amount of effort with a bigger payoff by learning the larger language.

With respect, though, I think you've basically made a pretty definitive statement without actually talking about the various factors that I mentioned before -- including (perhaps most importantly) what a minority language actually is.

The number of speakers is something that's used a lot to ask language learners "why would you want to learn Italian? Spanish is spoken by more people!" and if you think that's reductio ad absurdum, try this on for size: "why do people here bother learning any language? English is the only language you need in today's world!" And yes, it's reductio ad absurdum, and it's a logically valid argument -- people have asked me about it in several languages, and sometimes they've even provided decent estimates of the number of speakers the language has, to which my response has been to point out that it would be highly unusual for any human being to have conversations with that number of people in their entire lives, and I'm unlikely to run out of people to talk to!!

Yeah but that wasn't the question. The question was if I went to Spain, would I learn Catalan.

[Cainntear]

Yeah but that wasn't the question. The question was if I went to Spain, would I learn Catalan.

I'm sorry, I just mustn't have read the quoted question you were responding to. I mean, that wasn't the question in the thread title, and the previous posts had talked about a couple of languages such as Javanese, so it's just as well you quoted the post you were answering, and I must apologise for not reading that part of your post...

[nooj]

Edited to add:
The uniqueness of the language also matters to me. I would be more motivated to do my part to preserve Basque than one of the dozens of small Romance languages like Occitan.

It seems to me a stringent criteria, given that there's few or no languages in Europe with a pedigree as weird as Basque. I've heard from people saying that Basque deserves to be saved, but others don't because they're just ordinary languages like any other. I personally cannot get into that logic. Basque has made me appreciate the Romance languages much more.

You speak German. Given your familiarity with German, does that mean you'd be less inclined to learn minoritised other Germanic languages like Alemannic?

Perhaps the best way to get into minoritised languages, is to enter into it cold turkey without learning the dominating language. Alemannic will certainly be more exotic and strange to someone who doesn't learn German first, than someone who has already learned German and for whom the banality of learning Alemannic would be too boring, because it's "just another Germanic language". Keeping things as fresh as possible, and so forth and so forth

[vonPeterhof]

I would definitely be willing to learn the local minoritized language if I were to move to an area where one is spoken for long-term residence, but the amount of effort I would dedicate to that end would depend on a number of factors, including my current level of command of the majority language, the amount and quality of learner materials and media, the institutional presence of the language, the likelihood of encountering a monolingual speaker, the general attitude of the native speakers towards outsiders learning the language and many others. To use the examples given in the OP, I'd probably rate Catalan as highest priority of the three and would probably dedicate about as much effort to learning it as to improving my Spanish, while I would rate Alsatian the lowest priority.

The logic is similar for when I plan short-term trips, with perhaps more consideration given to my current level in the majority language and how practical it would be to get around the country without having basic command of it. As an example, I'll be going on a trip to Uzbekistan in a little more than a week and as part of my itinerary I'll be visiting areas where the locals speak Tajik (the country's second largest native language and the majority language of two major cities yet having no official status and little to no institutional presence) and Karakalpak (an official language of the autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan, where about a third of the population speak it as a first language). I'm focusing most of my efforts on learning Uzbek, which I've dabbled in before but never really had to actively use. For Tajik I'm mainly trying to refresh my knowledge of Dari, while reading up on the differences between it and the colloquial varieties spoken in Uzbekistan (unfortunately, unlike for Dari and Iranian Persian, there seem to be extremely few Tajik learning materials that go into detail about the differences between the literary language and everyday speech). For Karakalpak I'm currently limiting myself to occasional passive media consumption, mostly because it has a high degree of mutual intelligibility with Kazakh. Of course, with how little time is left I don't expect to get to a level where I'll never have to fall back on Russian, but I'd like to do my best to make sure this happens as little as possible.

[Cainntear]

Edited to add:
The uniqueness of the language also matters to me. I would be more motivated to do my part to preserve Basque than one of the dozens of small Romance languages like Occitan.

It seems to me a stringent criteria, given that there's few or no languages in Europe with a pedigree as weird as Basque. I've heard from people saying that Basque deserves to be saved, but others don't because they're just ordinary languages like any other. I personally cannot get into that logic. Basque has made me appreciate the Romance languages much more.

Yup -- all very arbitrary.

You won't get many people saying that Portuguese should be left to die because it's so similar to Spanish, but you will hear the same thing said about regional languages spoken in Italy even though they are more linguistically different from Italian than Portuguese is from Spanish, not to mention how the Langues d'Oc are a whole subfamily that doesn't have the advantage of having even one country, whereas the Langues d'Oïl have France, and the Langues de Sic have Italy, Monaco, Portugal and Spain... never mind Brazil and all the former colonies of Spain.

Given that Portugal was nearly incorporated into Spain at about the same time as the union of Scotland with England, it's an interesting thing to see how Portuguese has been preserved as not "just a dialect" and compare that to the situation of Scots, which was relegated to "dialect" status after the union.

[Oops... had left some orphan quote text in. Now deleted.]

[Iversen]

The problem seen from my angle is not whether I know the dominating language of an area - it's the lack of resources and speakers which this has resulted in for the underdog. In fact knowing a related language might be the thing that made it possible to battle with a repressed minority language (or dialect) despite its situation. I could get a foothold in Scots because of an online dictionary with lots of expressions, and I could learn to understand Low German because of a TV program in the 60s and the availability of a number of small book later ons, but those resources would not have been sufficient if I hadn't also known English and High German.

As for Portugal: it exists because of a number of fortuitous accidents. The first was that a certain Afonso Henriques declared himself king of his territory, thereby founding a kingdom that developed into the country Portugal, and it was only dynastic complications that prevented Galicia from also being included into that country. It almost was swallowed up by Spain because a king died without a heir and it was left to - off all possible possibilities - the Spanish king to find a solution. And as you could expect his solution was to take the crown himself. Portugal regained its independence because the Portuguese nobility including the family Bragança refused to obey the Spaniards under their greedy moron king Felipe III, and they miraculously got away with it.

[Cainntear]

Edited to add:
The uniqueness of the language also matters to me. I would be more motivated to do my part to preserve Basque than one of the dozens of small Romance languages like Occitan.

Actually... this raises an interesting question: does the same go for minority Germanic languages...? Alsatian? Platt? Frisian? Franconian?

[lichtrausch]

It seems to me a stringent criteria, given that there's few or no languages in Europe with a pedigree as weird as Basque.

I find Irish and Welsh similarly compelling in this regard.

I've heard from people saying that Basque deserves to be saved, but others don't because they're just ordinary languages like any other. I personally cannot get into that logic. Basque has made me appreciate the Romance languages much more.

Just to be clear, I am not making any value judgment about what language "deserves" to be saved. I'm just talking about what motivates me personally.

You speak German. Given your familiarity with German, does that mean you'd be less inclined to learn minoritised other Germanic languages like Alemannic?

Not just minority varieties like Alemannic. I'm less inclined to learn all other Germanic languages, although Swedish does tempt me on account of belonging to a separate subfamily. I actually lived in Baden for a year, and the only language learning I did there was Japanese and French (and improving my German).

[Cainntear]

You speak German. Given your familiarity with German, does that mean you'd be less inclined to learn minoritised other Germanic languages like Alemannic?

Not just minority varieties like Alemannic. I'm less inclined to learn all other Germanic languages, although Swedish does tempt me on account of belonging to a separate subfamily. I actually lived in Baden for a year, and the only language learning I did there was Japanese and French (and improving my German).

So are you saying that the West Germanic vs North Germanic is a big enough gap for you, but Weser-Rhine vs Elbe isn't?

Cos technically, English is considered Weser-Rhine by many, so is closer on the family tree to German than Swedish is, and in a similar spot to Dutch...