Does your country have any native languages that are in danger of dying out or have died out recently?

19 comments

1. For the UK theres Jèrriais, Guernésiais, Manx and Cornish.

   Cornish is extinct as a 1st language and only 2nd language speakers remain. The last native speaker died in the 18th century but efforts are being taken to revive the language.

   Manx is similar. The last native speaker died in the 1970s but it is being revived on the Isle of Man.

   Guernésiais has about 200 speakers left on the island of Guernsey and Jèrriais has about 2,000 on Jersey

2. [Romansh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romansh_language) will probably die out in the next few generations. While in 2000 just above 60’000 people spoke it regularly or mainly that number dropped to about 40’000 in 2019.

   The situation is not helped by Romansh being a language with 5 different idioms which are only partially mutually understandable. Someone speaking Sutsilvan might only partially be able to talk to someone speaking Vallader (two of the five idioms). So these 40’000 are actually further split up into 5 groups who can’t really understand each other either.

   Despite all this Romansh is one of the four official Languages of Switzerland (besides German, French and Italian).

   Edit: [Click here if you want to listen to some Romansh ](https://youtu.be/WG_5NuzOr38) (subtitles in German)

3. Wymysiöeryś is a Germanic language native to no more than 20 elderly folks living in the village of Wilamowice. It’s on its way out sadly. There’s little one can do to stop it from happening at this point

   Edit: [Sample](https://youtu.be/lfg3jHV1TzE?t=176)

4. I think Low Saxon is the language in most danger. It probably still has more speakers than Frisian and Limbourgs, but it is declining very rapidly. Little children speak and hear more English than Low Saxon.

5. Many, unfortunately: dialects (or rather, regional languages) such as Piedmontese, Romagnolo and Friulian, but also a large part of the languages of Sardinia, spoken by just over 300,000 people, are in danger of disappearing. So is *Arbëreshë*, the Italo-Albanian dialect spoken in many areas of southern Italy, from Abruzzo to Sicily.

6. Lots. Manty is spoken by 900 people, Enets by 43, Vodi by 68, Ginukh by 5, Orok by 40, Oroch is probably dead. Yug is definitely dead, only one person spoke it in 2010. There’s dozens more.

7. [Meänkieli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me%C3%A4nkieli) is dying out, apparently. There’s about 70 000 people that either speak or understand it, but no newspapers or broadcasts. Most people instead use Swedish or Finnish.

8. Sorbian is a language used by a Slavic minority in eastern Germany (Brandenburg and Saxony), but it only has 32.000 speakers left, and it also suffers from actually being two languages, Upper and Lower Sorbian, so Sorbian will probably not survive forever.

9. Plattdeutsch/ Niederdeutsch is mostly only spoken by some elderly people and not really learned by many younger people. Same for Ostfriesisch and Saterfriesisch. Those are all Indogermanic languages.

   Niedersorbisch/ Wendisch and Obersorbisch are Slavic languages spoken in Germany that are dying out.

10. [Karaim tatar language](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaim_language).

    The Karaim people had been living in Trakai for centuries, ever since they’ve been brought there as hired soldiers by our grand duke. But their numbers had been shrinking, and now there’s only but a few dozen of them left, the language itself is mostly only spoken by their elderly, and I think there’s only 1 or 2 young people that still speak it.

    [Here’s](https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1686471/a-people-from-one-street-lithuania-s-karaim-community-struggles-to-preserve-its-language) a nice article on it.

11. The Eastern Sámi languages are a minority group among the Sámi (themselves a minority group in the Nordic countries). There’s a few languages within the East Sámi group, with about a thousand speakers in total.

    Kemi Sámi, spoken in southern Finnish Lapland, but gradually replaced by Finnish, died out around 1900. Skolt Sámi and Inari Sami each have around 300 speakers. Especially Skolt Sámi was once feared as moribund, with the youngest native speaker over 30 years in age, but now there are some children who speak the language at home.

12. In Spain apart from the famous ones such as Catalan or Gallego which in my opinion are in good health thanks to our hard efforts, we have other languages less known such as Aranès (occità in a small part of Catalonia) or Bable are very much disappearing. Even Euskera is in a vulnerable position according to UNESCO.

13. Sámi languages (also Sami or Saami). It is a group of languages spoken in northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland and northwesten Russia. Several dialects have extinct, most recently Akkala Sami when last speaker died in 2003. Technically it can’t be counted as ”died recently in your country” because it was spoken in Russia. But it was very near the border and considered as Finno-Samic language. There are currently nine living Sámi languages. Inari is the only municipality in Finland which has 4 official languages: Inari Saami, Northern Saami, Skolt Saami and Finnish.

    Also Meänkieli, which ”hedgehogsinhats” from Sweden already mentioned. It is spoken in a small area in northern Finland and Sweden. Meänkieli is considered as dialect of Finnish and it’s very understable for Finnish speakers. In Sweden it has an official status of minority language. I have some roots in Torne valley, Ylitornio/Övertorneå where Meänkieli is/was commonly used. Meänkieli means literally ”our language”. There is a famous book and movie ”Popular music from Vittula” in Meänkieli by Mikael Niemi. Vittula (or Vittulajänkä) is area in town Pajala, Sweden. Fun fact: The first five letters of the name Vittula form a profanity used in Finnish language the same way as English speakers use the f-word. It refers to female parts (Vittula could be translated to Pussy Village) and the story goes that it was named that way because people were very reproductive.

14. Livonian, a Baltic Finnic language, has been in decline ever since the 13th century. Although mostly gone to assimilation, the Great Plague of 1709/1710 saw them virtually disappear in the region of Vidzeme. In 1935 there were almost a thousand of them left, only remaining in a narrow stretch of coastal land in northern Kurzeme between Lūžņa and Ģipka. The Soviet Union declared it a restricted area and nowadays there are only 200 or so speakers left. The last native speaker died in 2013. Livonian had a great deal of impact on the genesis of the Latvian language such as the emphasis almost always being on the first syllable and hundreds of loanwords mostly associated with the sea. The unique rhythm characteristic to Livonian only remains in some dialects of Latvian spoken in northern Kurzeme and to a lesser extent in Vidzeme.

15. Spain has quite the group of languages different than spanish. Even though all of them suffer immense pressure from spanish (and spanish institutions) some are, by virtue of numbers and organisation, surviving much better than others. Catalan, Basque and Galician are the only ones apart from spanish with an official status, applied in (some) of the territories where they are spoken (plus Aranese, a gasconian dialect of Occitan, in a Shire in Catalonia).

    These three have widely different sutuations. Galician is on a downward trend due to spanishsation, a history of emigration from Galicia and lots of cases of broken transmission parent-child. Basque is actually going up slowly, and most kids in the Basque Country learn in basque at school, iirc. While catalan has been historically the strongest one, we’re on a downward trend due to low natality and high immigration, but the chain of transmission has never been massively broken.

    A part from these three there’s other languages with no official protection, which are, to some spaniards, sometimes even considered dialects of spanish (they aren’t). These are aragonese, asturleonese and extremaduran (usually grouped with asturleonese). An aragonese academy was created recently, so we’ll see how that goes, but the exctinction of the language is a very real possibility, especially since the Aragonese government doesn’t seem especially thrilled with aragonese (or even the catalan-speaking areas of Aragon, where catalan doesn’t have official status). Asturleonese, though, is very organised and they are probably going to get official status in Asturias and I hope that they get it in Llión as well.

16. We have many languages which are linguistic islands and so isolated both geographically and linguistically, which means they evolved in quite a different direction than their mother tongue, or the countries where those languages came from made a standard that is not recognised here and doesn’t match the archaic form of the language.

    E.g. * Tuitsch, a variant of Walser German, an Alemannic German dialect that is so archaic only people from Switzerland and especially Valais will understand. They tried to bring in German teachers in the schools, but Hochdeutsch is so different, it’s useless. They also suffer from being a double minority, i.e. they are a German speaking people in a French speaking region in Italy.

    * Arpitan, or Franco Provencal: it was originally spoken in a much larger area that includes most of Romandie in Switzerland and as far west as Lyon in France, but it’s dead in France, and rarely spoken in Lausanne or Geneva (or so I am told) and in Aosta valley it’s not much better. The region is 100k but the speakers of it might be less than 50k.

    * The archaic Bavarian dialects of Trentino and Veneto, called Mocheno and Zimbrisch. They are mostly unintelligible even for Bavarian speakers

    * the languages like Arbereshe or Croato Molisano. They are languages that were spoken by people who fled the Otttoman invasion in the XV century, so they had 5 centuries of divergence from Albanian and Croat. Croato molisano is particularly in danger, as loads of people left it because of povery and unemployment, and there are only 3 villages, where it’s still spoken. Same for Arbereshe, which is spoken in villages scattered in all the South and where people leave for the North or abroad in search of better employment.

    * Griko and Grekanico, Greek dialects spoken in Puglia and Calabria. Griko is a bit better, but still suffering. They are spoken by less than 50k people. In Puglia they tried to hire Greek teachers from Greece, but the language was so different it was not useful for preservation.

    On top of this what we call dialects here are not dialects of Italian but languages in their own right which evolved in parallel and independently from Tuscan (the base of Italian). The languages of the North are more at risk because there are more people from different parts of Italy and the world and more urbanised, e.g. Milanese, Piedmontese, Emiliano.

17. Csángó/Ceangăi are an ethnically hungarian catholic minority living in the Romanian regions of Moldavia and Transylvania. Aprox. 60.000 speakers in 2001, much less now. The language is an old hungarian dialect.

18. According to some reports Icelandic itself is in a bit of danger, I’m not too convinced but I think its best we take precautions now and not end like Irish

19. Most of the regional dialects are either dying out or died out ( except Corsican). Thing is Parisian french is hegemonic since the Third republic who unified the country culturally and having the same language was also meant to avoid situations like the slaughter of the Commune where the bourgeois government deployed regional troops in Paris because they didn’t spoke french and thus saw the Parisians as foreign people.

    Nowadays only elders and passionates people know or learn regional dialects at fluency level. Truth is you wouldn’t make your way in Brittany only knowing Breton or in Alsace only knowing Alsatian so it’s not saw as very worthy to study those languages anymore