Random thought
What population size and density do you need to keep a language alive?
Are languages slowly over generations going away in small european countries?
What population size and density do you need to keep a language alive?
Are languages slowly over generations going away in small european countries?
IMHO, the answer depends more on the lifestyle than on the number of speakers. As long as everyone lives in a homogenous community along with their grandparents and parents, the new generations learn the language. When people move to larger towns where the majority speaks a dominant language, their children at best speak the minority language at home while the grandchildren rarely acquire it at all, and its death is imminent. Anecdotal evidence follows.
* Manx. In 1874: 16,200 speakers (30% of the population of the Isle of Man); in 1974: last native speaker dies. [0]
* Belarusian. In 1999: 36.7% of Belarusian citizens spoke it at home; in 2009: 11.9%. [1] Remarkably, it is better preserved among the Belarusian minority in Poland which is concentrated in a few rural communes.
* Lower Sorbian in Germany. In the 1880s: 70 thousand; in the 1990s: 7 thousand; around 2010: 2 thousand. Folk dances, costumes, and customs will outlast it like an empty shell outlasts its resident.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Number_of_speake...
This happens somewhat often: people emigrate from a country/region, and the culture becomes 'frozen' with-in them at that time, while in the source location there is still change and evolution.
The large Italian diaspora in the New World often have dialects that died out from the Old Country because of mass communication:
> He speaks a language particular to a small town of about 3,000 people in the region of Calabria in southern Italy. This tongue is closer to Latin than typical Italian because of the region’s late Romanization. Back home, younger generations like his don’t speak Santonofrese — named after the town of Sant’Onofrio —because it is seen as “lowbrow.” He says that thanks to Toronto’s large Italian community, there may be several endangered languages and dialects like his preserved in the city as people continue to speak them with their family.
* https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/09/30/linguist-documen...
See also Endangered Languages Alliance (Toronto):
On the contrary, small countries are the ones most likely to keep languages alive.
Consider Luxembourg: with less than a million population, they still have their own distinct official language, Luxembourgish (in addition to French and German). If you picked any Luxembourg-sized chunk of Europe and went back 200 years, you'd find a similar situation with a small community speaking a language as distinct as Luxembourgish is from other official languages in Europe.
But the formation of nation states with a centralized compulsory education system also meant compulsory instruction in a standard language, internal migration of people who only speak the standard language and not the local dialect and eventually mass media only available in the standard language. So by now, "one language per country" has become pretty much the norm, with only limited recognition for sub-national languages.
Even in Luxembourg, not everyone speaks Luxembourgish (Wikipedia says 50.9%, but that's suspiciously also the proportion whose nationality is Luxembourgish, suggesting some confusion between the two concepts). But if I had to choose whether Luxembourg or some random city in Germany is more likely to preserve a distinct language, I'd definitely bet on Luxembourg.
For instance, most large languages in India are dying off quite rapidly even in regions with high speaker density, since the Indian state and people prefer a discriminatory class system that privileges a foreign language. There are very few opportunities for non-English speakers, either educationally or economically. Normal speech has turned into a crass pidgin of English and the local vernacular; schooling has turned 'English-medium' entirely, thus creating a generation of idiots, fluent neither in English nor in their own native languages.
The Indian state being essentially the same as the colonial British Raj, will never tolerate empowering the natives of India, even if political cronies have and will continue to give it a sense of legitimacy by appealing to ethno-religio-linguistic rabble rousing.
See, http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/
Welsh is looking pretty stable after a deliberate effort. Whereas Irish had more speakers but is now more endangered. So I think it's more a function of how much people want - or don't want - to keep a language alive, than just of number of people.
IIRC: Losing its distinctive grammatical features; becoming much closer to Swedish, and also adopting large numbers of loanwords from English.
> Is for instance today's English degenerated in comparison to the English of 100 years ago?
I've read that grammatical irregularities are being (slowly) flattened out, so in a limited sense yes.
This also affects written communication. Most modern English speakers can't understand Shakespeare properly. They could, if they put in hundreds of hours of study, but in practice they don't. English hasn't changed very much over the last 100 years, I'd claim, compared with many other languages, but it's hard to measure that objectively. To start off with, what do I really mean by "English"? I suppose I mean the standard written language rather than colloquial forms...
One could perhaps also argue that a language that has changed a lot recently can't have built up the vocabulary, connotations, and all the rest of the stuff that is required for high-quality, nuanced communication and is therefore likely to be a less precise means of communication even between people who are tracking the changes. But that's speculative and I don't know how you could measure it.
So, to conclude this waffle, I suspect it does make sense to talk about a language "degenerating", but it's very hard to be scientific about it.