Replace all the languages you are learning with ones that have less than 2 million speakers

[nooj]

If I want to turn my current but faintly hipsterish choice of languages into an expression of full-blown linguistic hipsterism / posturing / grandstanding / virtue-signalling / "anti-imperialism" (???), then I'd learn Meänkieli (*wink and nudge to my Finnish friends*), Northern Saami (I want payback for Norwegianism!), Meadow Mari (I'll show them Russkies!), Latvian (I'll show them Russkies! Again), and Rusyn (I'll show them Banderists!).

***

To add to Iversen's and emk's posts, it's naïve (and even rather arrogant) to go in thinking that one's longstanding studying of lower-profile languages regularly and genuinely inspires others similarly to go off the beaten path linguistically. Furthermore, who am I to needle someone, even subtlely, for digging into just FIGS, Mandarin, Russian, MSA or some other big, bad colonial language, while I happily plow through less commonly-taught languages?

What you learn is an asset to yourself and a liability to no one.

I don't know what virtue signalling is (it seems 27 is now too old to be in with the 'hip crowd'), but I do know when someone reads something that isn't there. This isn't a post about linguistic imperialism, if I want to do that, I would say it clearly, nor about 'saving' languages, a term I loathe with the fire of a thousand stars, and which falls into the pathetic romanticism of a white saviour figure, but about the love of languages, if you had to choose one that has less speakers, less resources. It is an exercise in creativity. All those languages that you wanted to learn but never tried because others were more 'useful', well now they are the kinds of languages that you must learn. That is a joyous thing to indulge in.

Also, this is not a thread necessarily about endangered languages. A language doesn't have to have more than 2 million speakers to be healthy. A language can have 100 speakers and be far more healthier than one than has 6-8 million native speakers (like Quechua).

[iguanamon]

All the languages you are learning, you have to abandon for let's say 5 years. You have to replace them with languages that have less than 2 million speakers. What language(s) do you pick?

I already speak Spanish, Portuguese and Haitian Creole and I don't "study" them anymore, so, I wouldn't have to give them up. I also have two languages already with under 2 million speakers- Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol has, according to most estimates, around 70,000 speakers left. Lesser Antilles French Creole has around a million or so speakers. So, where's my $2,000,000!!!

Learning minority languages has been of great benefit to me on a personal basis, so has learning large languages. Learning any language broadens the mind and opens a new world. I can't possibly learn all of the languages spoken in the Spanish/Portuguese-speaking world (Aymara, Maya, Nahuatl, Mirandes, Tupi-Guarani, Tetum, Tsonga and the hundred or more other languages), but I can have access to a large swath of that world because I can speak Spanish and Portuguese. I learned Ladino because I was fascinated by the culture of a people who preserved their language and made it unique, far from their homeland which expelled them 500 years ago. I learned Lesser Antilles French Creole because it's spoken here by a diaspora community.

I am not saving Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol by learning it. Ladino will not and cannot be revived because the unique circumstances and conditions that made it no longer exist and cannot be recreated. It's speakers are spread around the world. It will die as a spoken language in less than 40 years, but it can be preserved for future generations and many people are working to make that happen right now.

LAFC is alive and thriving. It's just that there is a small population. It will continue to be the language of its culture and people for a long time to come, as long as its speakers value it.

[jeff_lindqvist]

As many others, I could consider my big languages "learned", and stick to my smaller languages (Irish/Esperanto/Cornish/Toki Pona - even all of them if I wanted).

If I had to start with new languages, I could still study something related to my other ones (Manx/Breton/Ladino/Yiddish/Icelandic/Faroese).

I could choose a Sami language, Estonian, or some minority dialect of Swedish (we have one on the island where I live) if I wanted something geographically close.

I could choose a small conlang and never be able to speak it IRL (Quenya, Sindarin).

And I could ignore this thread, and learn a big language (e.g. Indonesian/Bengali/Korean/Wu) and still not have anyone to talk to. At least not where I live.

[David1917]

Lots of replies have me like ...I didn't read any "ideology" or "colonialism" in the original post, just an exercise in exploration. I think if the premise was changed instead of a 5 year blackout to like, a Matrix plug-in wherein you can add a language or two that have a small number of speakers - which would be most interesting? Or, you've already learned your current languages to a desired level, choose your next language as a smaller one. So as indicated, some people chose things like Frisian & Occitan to round out Germanic/Romance language interests, or taking Macedonian as a corollary to Bulgarian. I don't intend to speak for the OP, but that seems like the spirit of the game.

Excluding dead languages, I would most definitely do Icelandic, Scottish & Irish Gaelic, which I would like to do eventually do anyway, plus some minority languages in Russia like Chechen & Bashkir.

[Iversen]

Why exclude so-called dead languages? There are actually people who speak Latin and maybe also Ancient Greek, and I had a teacher at the university who had had studied Ancient French to such a degree that he could speak it. And those who try to revive Manx and Cornish definitely should be encouraged to continue their valiant efforts.

[emk]

So whatever got you into learning French (or some other big language) is just as applicable to a language of 2 million. Yours is a special case because you're married to a speaker, but I imagine if you were married to a speaker of Icelandic, you would also learn Icelandic, no?

I learned French because my wife said she was sick of constantly translating for me, and because she told that I would either need to learn enough French to communicate, or that I could just sit there confused half the time. This seemed perfectly fair, so I learned French.

I think, in general, that if your in-laws speak another language (and you and your spouse on speaking terms with her family, of course), that it's absolutely worthwhile aiming for B1.

Also why not think of it the other way around? Learn a language first, and then in order to practice, or in order to not feel bad about spending so much time learning a 'useless' language (if you're feeling pessimistic), seek out people and places to communicate regularly with speakers of that language.

I live in the boondocks, or at least right next to the boondocks, and I'm only a few hours from Quebec. I hear people speaking Spanish in public maybe once a year. I have to drive over an hour to attend the nearest French Meetup with advanced speakers. We do have a few local francophone friends, however, which is nice.

Plus, the older I get, the more things I have competing for my time. I want to spend time with my family, and do cool professional things, and stay in shape, and sometimes watch a movie or something. So each language needs to justify itself somehow: French because it's massively useful, and Spanish because it's effectively the second language of my country (and people will sell me books in it!), and Egyptian because it's a pure indulgence (and it never gets enough time). There are rivers to kayak, etc., and I want to write some deep learning OCR software, and so on...

Which brings me to Icelandic. I'd like to be able read Icelandic. My wife and I loved visiting Iceland. Plus, it's a pretty short flight from Montreal, and Icelandic is close to Old Norse (which also interests me). It has a small modern literature, but there are some world-class novels. But at the end of the day, Icelandic just doesn't add up for me, personally. I know that many of the existing Icelandic courses are not really to my taste. I don't know enough Germanic languages to get a discount. I'm not going to find more than a handful of Icelandic speakers anywhere nearby. So in reality, if I were going to add another language, I might try Japanese (lots of media!) or Chinese (professionally useful for hardware!).

See, this is one of the reasons why the original incarnation of my post included a billionaire dangling a million dollars for each language you learned.

If somebody were going to pay me obscene sums of money to learn languages, then I'd probably retire and work on tools like substudy for a while, learning languages as I go. Of course, this would mean finding a 2-million person language with interesting subtitled video content, or at least some audiobooks & text.

[mick33]

Very interesting idea mentioned in the OP. I think what I would most likely do is delve into regional minority languages like Elfdalian, Karelian, or Silesian since they are somewhat related to languages I already have a little knowledge of.

[basica]

Since no one took my bait , I'll give a bit more of a serious answer

I've found Native American languages to be really interesting. To my ears they sound so bizarre. Sure, there are languages from other regions that also fit the "sound bizarre" bill, but I think the reason for my attraction is from the Mel Gibson film Apocalypto so Modern Mayan would probably be one of them.

I've also got a vague interest in Scandinavian languages. I don't think I'll ever learn one, but if I were paid to do so and the bigger ones were out of the question (and they are according to these rules) I would pick Icelandic. It's reputation of being a fossilized language if you will are intriguing to say the least.

And, lists always look better in 3s, so I'll add one more I'd say Maori would be another language. I know it'd probably make more sense to learn an Aboriginal language since I'm in Australia, but I encounter more Maoris than Aboriginals (significantly more in fact), even in the small city I live in now (I could probably count on one hand, maybe two how many Aboriginal people I've seen in person, ever) so it'd be more useful and it'd probably give me a helping hand with Tongan and some other Polynesian languages I'd likely encounter here.

[tarvos]

In that case Icelandic, Esperanto, Breton and a few others would have me covered for the next couple years... but why?

[Xenops]

Since no one took my bait , I'll give a bit more of a serious answer

I liked your post: does that count? And no Sindarin or Quenya? There's neo words developed by fans you know.

On that note, I realized that I should learn Nansha...Because it's my own constructed language, and not only does it have less than 2 million speakers, it currently has less than 200 words. If I expect my characters to speak it, the writer should too, right? But my current struggle is making a font for the script so I can write in the words into Anki.

For languages with a few more people, lately I've been curious about Manchu, mainly for its linguistic features, and how it was used as the nobleman's language in China. I've also loved the sound of Irish since I discovered Moya Brennan years ago, but trying to learn the pronunciation without local native speakers looks like a hurdle.

For dead languages, ancient Greek would be one, and it would be a battle between Latin and Biblical Hebrew...So difficult.