DailyDirt: Old Languages, New Languages

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Learning a new language as an adult is notoriously difficult to do, but there are various benefits for being bilingual. However, as the world communicates more globally, people are choosing to speak more common languages, and some languages are being spoken less and less. There may be no way to translate certain expressions, and we may lose some linguistic quirks if we don't try to preserve spoken languages that have few remaining native speakers. Here are just a few links on language diversity to check out if you're bored with l337 speak.

• The world speaks about 6,000 different languages now, but in the future, that number could be much lower -- perhaps just 600. "All those… moments… will be lost in time, like tears… in… rain." Will anyone care if no one speaks Yeli Dnye in a few generations? [url]
• Many languages have common roots, so it's nice to see how the sounds of different cultures are related in a tree-like depiction. Finnish is a strange outlier in Europe, but it's not the only language in the world that seems like a bit of a mystery. [url]
• No one speaks Volapük or Esperanto, but future languages could combine features of multiple languages and incorporate simpler grammar rules. Languages that aren't dead can evolve into other languages, so the dominant language of the world in the future might not be English or Mandarin, but some combination of both. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: bilingual, esperanto, finnish, grammar, l337, languages, volapuk, yeli dnye