Battle to save languages

"... Another key determinant of the survivability of a language is whether it has a writing system. Some languages are only spoken or signed. In Nepal, for example, only 10 per cent of the more than 100 languages spoken in the country have writing systems ..."

Hhm. I wasn't aware of that.

erinja:I have found that many Esperantists are interested in minority languages, and many Esperantists are interested in supporting the rights of the people who speak minority languages, in order to preserve their cultures.

If anyone is looking for a "real" minority language to help preserve, may I suggest Lakhota. This language still has approximately 25,000 speakers among the seven Sioux Tribes of the Dakotas in the US.

Lakhota originally had no written form, but all 39 of it's consonants are now taught and written phonetically. The language is agglutinative, like Esperanto, so the modern concept of automobile ends up as "inanimate object that goes by itself".

You can learn it over the net. The difference is that after you learn it, you can travel to a definite place where lots of people speak it!

biguglydave:

erinja:I have found that many Esperantists are interested in minority languages, and many Esperantists are interested in supporting the rights of the people who speak minority languages, in order to preserve their cultures.

If anyone is looking for a "real" minority language to help preserve, (snippage)

Pennsylvania Dutch. It's not just "that Amish language;" it used to be spoken by all sorts of Pennsylvanians of German descent; Lutherans, Catholics, Mennonites, Brethren.

It was the "German" in the old quasi-urban legend about "German lost by one vote as the official language of the US" (the vote was actually whether or not to publish government acts in German as well as in English; it did lose by one vote.)

orthohawk:

biguglydave:

erinja:I have found that many Esperantists are interested in minority languages, and many Esperantists are interested in supporting the rights of the people who speak minority languages, in order to preserve their cultures.

If anyone is looking for a "real" minority language to help preserve, (snippage)

Pennsylvania Dutch. It's not just "that Amish language;" it used to be spoken by all sorts of Pennsylvanians of German descent; Lutherans, Catholics, Mennonites, Brethren.

It was the "German" in the old quasi-urban legend about "German lost by one vote as the official language of the US" (the vote was actually whether or not to publish government acts in German as well as in English; it did lose by one vote.)

Whoah, one vote away from some level of government supported bilingualism Sort of makes you wish the clock could turn back just a bit so someone could *ahem* "convince" that one voter to vote the other way around , even if only to see a minor change in the way things were done linguistically. And I reckon it'd be cool to have a choice of learning either "American Dutch" or German in highschool (being not american myself ).

In fact Pennsylvania Dutch is really just a dialect of German. I as a native speaker of German can really comprehend everything on pdc.wikipedia.org, and it seems like some mix of several other German dialects. So even if USA government acts were published in German, you probably couldn't learn Pennsylviania Dutch as a seperate language (let aside the fact that courses to learn Swiss German actually exist).

darkweasel:In fact Pennsylvania Dutch is really just a dialect of German. I as a native speaker of German can really comprehend everything on pdc.wikipedia.org, and it seems like some mix of several other German dialects. So even if USA government acts were published in German, you probably couldn't learn Pennsylviania Dutch as a seperate language (let aside the fact that courses to learn Swiss German actually exist).

That is a good point, but I would imagine that if it became an "official" langauge of the US, it'd start to diverge from Hochdeutsch even more, and since it resembles Plattdeutsch it might have had just enough difference to end up being considered a seperate language or at least prestige dialect of German (just as somehow US English is considered THE English by some). Who knows though, if the German influence was given a boost back then, perhaps US English and PD could have merged, or PD could have still fallen out of use and be learnt only by academics (and of course the actual core PD communities). But if PD was given a big enough boost back in the day, I doubt we'd think of it as german in the way that we do now, if WW2 occurred the way it did in this alternate-history (due to thinks like wartime propaganda).

Having a German dialect recognized as an official language way-back-when would certainly have given the US a different flavor than it has today.
At this point though, it would certainly seem like Spanish would be a much more reasonable choice. There are already millions of Spanish speaking citizens, plus an unknown number of Spanish speaking immigrants. It is the primary second language that is taught in schools, and one would be hard pressed to find any part of the country where there are not a large number of Spanish speaking laborers.
I would say that Spanish is already the unofficial official second language of the US.

I don't know much about Lakhota, but Pennsylavnia Dutch doesn't seem in danger of vanishing any time soon, since the small religious communities that speak it are self-isolating and self-perpetuating, to a degree. Plus the language is preserved in written form, mostly through old religious texts and songbooks and the like (iirc). There's not much advantage for outsiders to learn it, though, since I'd imagine that almost all of its speakers also speak English.

Maybe it would come in handy getting better prices on things at Reading Terminal .

Pharoah:There's not much advantage for outsiders to learn it, though, since I'd imagine that almost all of its speakers also speak English.

Your time is better invested in learning German. If you speak German and English, you won't have any problems understanding pdc.wikipedia.org - I have never met any PDC speaker in real life, so I don't know if you can understand them also in oral communication.

It really seems like some mixed German dialects plus English influence. An example is what pdc.wikipedia calls itself: an Uffguckbichli (look-up book-DIMINUTIVE). No German speaker would talk about an *Aufguckbuch but this aufguck- (normally nachguck- in German) seems influenced by English "look up".

darkweasel:In fact Pennsylvania Dutch is really just a dialect of German.

So, technically, is Letzebuergesch, and it (by virtue of being the national language of a sovereign state) is considered a separate language.

PaG/D is actually a derivative of the Palatinate dialects; I've been told my more than one person from that area of Germany that the Amish (other than the English loanwords) speak just like their neighbors in Germany.