zompist bboard

xxx wrote:You should post in your mother tongue...
The only way to preserve minority languages is to use them in modern media... Instead of English...

Not necessarily true, but a useful tool in decreasing the incentive to switch to a more widely spoken language. The only way to preserve a language is to have a large community willing to speak it and for their children to have a reason to stick with it and pass it to their children and so on. Hebrew was revived for ideological reasons and probably wouldn't be used beyond liturgy without those reasons.

mèþru wrote:The only way to preserve a language is to have a large community willing to speak it and for their children to have a reason to stick with it and pass it to their children and so on.

This reminds me of Esperantists...

GamerGeek wrote:

mèþru wrote:The only way to preserve a language is to have a large community willing to speak it and for their children to have a reason to stick with it and pass it to their children and so on.

This reminds me of Esperantists...

This way pass by the struggle against dominant languages... especially now on numéric media...
(that is the utopic purpose of IAL... it will lost if one day it becomes dominant...)

It's not a very good idea to post stuff in a language nobody in your audience speaks if you intend for them to understand you.

din wrote:Now that I live abroad though, I don't know if I would pass it on if we can get children. There would be no one for the child to speak it with, apart from the 5 people in my family I am in regular contact with. They also speak Dutch, of course, even though that comes less naturally to my grandma.

You see, it's an inherently local language, and it doesn't make any sense to learn or speak it unless you want to create some kind of 'in-group'. The vocabulary is far too limited for it to be able to function as a main form of communication in all contexts, so sometimes it's easier to simply switch to Dutch. For any child not living in Limburg, it is therefore much more useful to learn the national language.

Yet, I'd also feel bad about not passing it on. It's a pretty interesting language, and I feel quite passionate about it.

I face a predicament that's a bit similar to yours. I find the risk of not learning the national language overrated. If you had children, they would be surrounded by the national language. It's just like how Malayalee parents always worry that their kids aren't learning English, then they stop talking to them in Malayalam altogether and cry when they see that their kids grow up and can't speak their language anymore. The problem is that it's way easier for kids of such parents, such as myself, to learn English than it is to learn Malayalam because we're surrounded by English and couldn't possibly escape it no matter how hard we tried. I expect it's the same thing with Dutch and Limburgs, respectively; if everyone around you speaks Dutch anyway, then, well, what's the rush to learn Dutch? What are the odds that a kid just wouldn't learn Dutch under those circumstances?

I get that it's not useful outside the relatively small group of Limburgs-speakers, but your options as I see them basically boil down to either making as much of an effort as possible to speak to your (hypothetical) children in Limburgs or having them be unable to speak it at all. Malayalam is also unlikely to be useful for talking with (most) non-Malayalees, but it's a part of my heritage and I try to speak it whenever I get an opportunity to. Although it's technically possible to talk about technical subjects in Malayalam, this isn't possible for most speakers, so if I'm talking about those, then I try to explain things in plain terms as much as possible until I finally give up and switch to English because I'm running out of ideas and (in the sort of context I'm thinking of) I kind of know the listener will understand that more easily anyway. I would like to try to speak to my kids in Malayalam, too, and avoid English as much as possible. Since I have no idea where my wife would be from, though, I don't know how well that will work yet.

I had a similar story with Hebrew. I am terrible at its grammar, know enough only for short conversations with relatives (who I usually speak to in a hybrid Hebrew-English) and am almost illiterate. I keep intending to relearn it, but I have other projects and learning Hebrew won't really accomplish anything in my life in the States, where I meet only a handful of others who can speak it. Knowing it won't make me feel better about life. So, while I really want to learn it, it is not a high priority project.

Vijay wrote:It's not a very good idea to post stuff in a language nobody in your audience speaks if you intend for them to understand you.

din wrote:Now that I live abroad though, I don't know if I would pass it on if we can get children. There would be no one for the child to speak it with, apart from the 5 people in my family I am in regular contact with. They also speak Dutch, of course, even though that comes less naturally to my grandma.

You see, it's an inherently local language, and it doesn't make any sense to learn or speak it unless you want to create some kind of 'in-group'. The vocabulary is far too limited for it to be able to function as a main form of communication in all contexts, so sometimes it's easier to simply switch to Dutch. For any child not living in Limburg, it is therefore much more useful to learn the national language.

Yet, I'd also feel bad about not passing it on. It's a pretty interesting language, and I feel quite passionate about it.

I face a predicament that's a bit similar to yours. I find the risk of not learning the national language overrated. If you had children, they would be surrounded by the national language. It's just like how Malayalee parents always worry that their kids aren't learning English, then they stop talking to them in Malayalam altogether and cry when they see that their kids grow up and can't speak their language anymore. The problem is that it's way easier for kids of such parents, such as myself, to learn English than it is to learn Malayalam because we're surrounded by English and couldn't possibly escape it no matter how hard we tried. I expect it's the same thing with Dutch and Limburgs, respectively; if everyone around you speaks Dutch anyway, then, well, what's the rush to learn Dutch? What are the odds that a kid just wouldn't learn Dutch under those circumstances?

I get that it's not useful outside the relatively small group of Limburgs-speakers, but your options as I see them basically boil down to either making as much of an effort as possible to speak to your (hypothetical) children in Limburgs or having them be unable to speak it at all. Malayalam is also unlikely to be useful for talking with (most) non-Malayalees, but it's a part of my heritage and I try to speak it whenever I get an opportunity to. Although it's technically possible to talk about technical subjects in Malayalam, this isn't possible for most speakers, so if I'm talking about those, then I try to explain things in plain terms as much as possible until I finally give up and switch to English because I'm running out of ideas and (in the sort of context I'm thinking of) I kind of know the listener will understand that more easily anyway. I would like to try to speak to my kids in Malayalam, too, and avoid English as much as possible. Since I have no idea where my wife would be from, though, I don't know how well that will work yet.

I agree with you, Vijay, and if I'd lived in a Dutch speaking area, that would be a good approach. Brussels is predominantly French speaking though, and who knows where we'll be living in a couple of years

xxx wrote:You should post in your mother tongue...
The only way to preserve minority languages is to use them in modern media... Instead of English...

Surely this straw man will convince people of your point of view.

din wrote:You see, it's an inherently local language, and it doesn't make any sense to learn or speak it unless you want to create some kind of 'in-group'. The vocabulary is far too limited for it to be able to function as a main form of communication in all contexts, so sometimes it's easier to simply switch to Dutch. For any child not living in Limburg, it is therefore much more useful to learn the national language.

Don't knock in-group languages. My ex and I used German, but that's pretty risky in a city like Chicago, which gets lots of German tourists apart from the thousands of L1 and L2 speakers living here. I thought he should learn Alemannic (his surname was Swabian after all) or Irish (he's more Irish than German anyway), but he wasn't willing. We discussed Swedish as a compromise but didn't do much about it before splitting up.

I think "useful" too often gets equated with "generally useful". But languages can be put to a lot of uses, and for some of these, less widespread comprehension is actually a feature.

linguoboy wrote:

din wrote:You see, it's an inherently local language, and it doesn't make any sense to learn or speak it unless you want to create some kind of 'in-group'. The vocabulary is far too limited for it to be able to function as a main form of communication in all contexts, so sometimes it's easier to simply switch to Dutch. For any child not living in Limburg, it is therefore much more useful to learn the national language.

Don't knock in-group languages. My ex and I used German, but that's pretty risky in a city like Chicago, which gets lots of German tourists apart from the thousands of L1 and L2 speakers living here. I thought he should learn Alemannic (his surname was Swabian after all) or Irish (he's more Irish than German anyway), but he wasn't willing. We discussed Swedish as a compromise but didn't do much about it before splitting up.

I think "useful" too often gets equated with "generally useful". But languages can be put to a lot of uses, and for some of these, less widespread comprehension is actually a feature.

Sure! That's why I said that it doesn't make much sense to learn it unless you want to create an in-group. Since you'll only be able to do this with another (native) speaker of Limburgs, outside of Limburg* it's completely useful for this purpose where I'm currently located (and, probably, where any hypothetical children would grow up).

* (or more specifically central and southern Dutch Limburg and maybe the easternmost part of Belgian Limburg)