Forums

In the same manner that plant and animal species have appeared and disappeared over millions of years, languages have evolved, grown, dispersed and eventually dwindled and died. However, during the last 100 yeas the rate of disappearance has increased dramatically.

True Ancor, but still it's worth making an effort to preserve languages, no? For example Coptic, which developed out of the ancient Egyptian language, was spoken in Egypt until the 17th century. What a pity! I'd love to have an idea of what ancient Egyptian might have sounded like. Seems to me there are many reasons to preserve minority languages - otherwise we will all end up speaking only one language ;)
See you,
Pieter

I think it can be avoided.
Polish survived more than 120 of Poland’s partition into different nations where this language wasn’t spoken or even taught, being one of the most difficult language to learn. And well, I think Catalan would have disappeared if we had Franco for 40 more years, as there’s a whole generation who’s unable to write the language properly as it was prohibited to learn the language at school or speak it on the street.
But if the governments take action to preserve languages I think that the risc of disappearance lowers consistently