Hi, I am just learning Sardinian, a minority language in Italy. Do you speak a minority language and how is the situation for minority language speakers in your country?
Minority languages 政治与政府
For me the minority languages are destined to disappear. Personally I don’t understand the necessity to learn a local language of the past that will not allowed you to contact a lot of people. Where I live also there was a regional language and sometime some words or way of speaking could change at few kilometers of distance. The actual Occitan language is a synthesis of that and doesn’t correspond exactly with the reality of the past. You are German, I was one time in Bavaria. I remember that Bavarian had a dialect that couldn't understand other Germans. Why learning that if that is another way to separate people?
English is the actual international language. We could think it’s bad or good but I think it's more important first to know it. Of course I will not impeach somebody to learn an old language very specific of a little territory. But for me it's wasting time, it's better to learn a living language if you want to communicate with other peoples.
As a French, I also agree that french minority languages are bound to disappear. However I don't think that it's a waste of time to learn them and that it's separating people. My grandparents and great-grandparents don't know proper French, so by rejecting that old culture and the ancient languages we are actually marginalizing them. It is part of our identities, we don't have to speak one universal, proper language. I think about all the languages of colonized peoples which have disappeared because they were thought to be too primal and because Europeans wanted to crush and whitewash their cultures !
In Picardie, north of France, we are trying to save our dialect and our very rich culture, but it's quite hard. There is a book shop and a publisher which published famous tales in 'picard', and we offered one book to our german friend, who is very very interested in learning the dialect ! Like, seriously, there is one class of picard language at university and two out of ten students are germans. 🙂
In my opinion it's not different languages that seperates people. Of couse a common language makes communication much easier. However the active use of a minority language does not exclude the parallel use of a lingua franca.
There's people here that speak the same German, use the same words as me - and still we have completely different opinions. In a way, we seem not to speak the same language.
I think a language is like a vessel or a tool that gives our thoughts a form. Thinking about a theme in another language often offers a different perspective on that topic. And maybe offers different solutions we would otherwise not have found. For me the diversity of human languages is a treasure we should not waste.
Hey, how about Franc-Comptois in France?
When I was at school I had prepared a project about it, but I didn't know how to read in Franc-Comptois. Unfortunately, I didn't find anyone who could
Unfortunately, there are tens of minor languages already listed in the endangered languages of the world. We can't simply say that they are not important at all since we have some "lingua franca". Language is not just a tool connecting two opposing minds but a living memory of millions lived so far. Diversity brings the variety, and variety creates the harmony. Life is not a matter of understanding but of perspectives. Uniformed perspective brings no good for humanity. We already learnt this fact in most bitter ways. Sometimes a "minor" loss in a device, may cause a "major" damage.