01:070:111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Himalayas, Collateral Damage, Jewish Languages
27 Mar 2018
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Document Summary
Safe- languages in no danger of dying out because of official government support or large number of speakers. If we choose 100,000 speakers as a safe number, there might be 600. Safe languages out of almost 7,000 total languages in the world (depending on how you count dialects and languages) Endangered- languages that are still being learned by children but that will eventually cease to be learned by children in the coming century. Moribund- languages that are no longer being learned by children as their mother tongues and doomed to extinction. Dead- those languages that are no longer spoken by anyone, even if there are written materials or recordings in that language. Does not include dead languages such as latin, sanskrit, or ancient. Greek because what happened to them wasn"t death, but normal metamorphosis. They were transformed into their modern descendents (spanish, french, modern greek, hindi, nepali, etc) The top ten languages are spoken by almost of the world"s population.
