The Community
General Category => Literature => Topic started by: Zzzptm on June 01, 2018, 07:28:10 AM
-
So I was about to be clever for the sake of being clever and find something else that fit "BSO". Google revealed the Buso language, spoken by about 17,000 people in Chad. That led me to Ethnologue.com and the EGIDS chart that tracks numbers of users vs. how institutionalized the language is.
https://www.ethnologue.com/about/language-status
Buso is one of many endangered languages. Basically, if a language does not have formalization, written literature, and usage by all generations, it is on the path to decline and extinction.
Norwegian is doing just fine: nice purple dot in the upper left of the EGIDS chart. https://www.ethnologue.com/language/nor
I was going to check Finnish and then Ethnologue hit me with a paywall, so I had to start using cached Google search pages... it's also a nice purple dot, top left. Central Nahuatl, however, is Yellow - endangered with a chance of rescue.
Buso, however, is red. It may not be rescuable, as most of the fluent speakers are older and dying out. With a loss of language knowledge comes a loss of language itself.
-
After seeing the title, Endangered Languages, I was going to say how much I miss Fortran. :( But then I saw you were not talking about computer languages. :)
-
Lol, yeah, Fortran's not what it used to be, but it's still out there. So are AS-400 systems with mainframes making a comeback, now that everything is going cloud.
-
Meow-meow-meow! Russian is marked with a purple dot. But why do they say that it is a statutory national language, when it is spoken in CIS as the second one?
https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rus
I want Russian to be treated as an international language!
-
It certainly is a great language to know across Central Asia, but it's not quite as worldly as French or Spanish.
-
It certainly is a great language to know across Central Asia, but it's not quite as worldly as French or Spanish.
What do you mean by the utterance?
-
Both France and Spain had colonies in Asia, Africa, and South America. French is also spoken in North Africa and the Middle East. Russia's linguistic spread did not spread as wide as French, Spanish, or English. While China never spread an empire as the European nations did, there is a significant amount of Chinese living outside of China that can communicate with each other via Mandarin, so that language is also a global one. Arabic is pervasive in Africa and Asia because of Islam.
Russian is a major language, in the category of German, Japanese, Portuguese.
-
I think there are 300 millions speakers of Russian in the world.
Typology: SVO; prepositions; genitives after noun heads; adjectives, numerals before noun heads; question word initial; 1 prefix on a word; recursive addition of suffixes allowed; gender (masculine/feminine/neuter); no articles; case-marking (6 cases); verb affixes mark person, number; passives; tense and aspect; comparatives; 32 consonants, 5 vowels, 4 diphthongs; non-tonal; free stress.
Indo-European, Balto-Slavic, Slavic, East
Braille script [Brai]. Cyrillic script [Cyrl], primary usage.