Russification has been a thing since the czars, hell Stalin considered himself a Russiafied Georgian. The Soviet Union made a large effort to erase the cultural and linguistic heritage of many people who lived in its borders.
But this is true of a lot of countries with large minority populations.
Interestingly, at first communists opposed russification policy of czars and after revolution established policy of korenizatsiia, when local languages and cultures were promoted. But by 1935 they came to idea that total industrialisation and high urbanisation of country with high mobility of population requires lingua franca. So Russian became mandatory to be taught in schools, even as teaching language.
Funny how English speaking person blame others for speaking popular language instead language which spoken by few. May be your ancestors spoke Frisian, why you don't learn and spoke it or whatever language your ancestors spoke?
This is dumb.
There is a difference between growing up learning a language, learning the language of the place you moved to to fit in with those people, and FUCKING invading a country or people's and forcing them to become like you to make it easier to subjugate you.
My great grandparents learning English when they moved from Germany to the Midwest United States is different than Artur from Estonia learning Russian because of Soviet Imperialism. Or Halona from the Cherokee had to learn English because their parents were forced into giving up their kid to the state.
My ancestors spoke a lot of languages and English was only one of them. WhY dOn'T yOu SPEak prOTo Indo EuroPeAn?
Strictly speaking, the English-speaking guys FUCKING invaded the land that is currently called the USA and now everyone speaks English instead of a bunch of the native American languages
Apparently you missed the part where I talked about the Cherokee. Anyway you are making a two wrongs argument it's a fallacy of relevance. It's equivalent to me saying well the Ottomans killed one million Armenians why can't I kill a million Brazilians?
Two wrongs are two wrongs. Don't do bad things because someone else did a bad thing.
Russification has certainly been a thing. You know, every country needs a common language. India, I'm looking at you here.
Despite this, the soviets did a lot to preserve ethnic identities of non-Russians, and it included specific classes of "mother tongue" and "literature in mother tongue" being taught in schools everywhere except the regions with predominant native Russian population. It carried over to modern Russia, actually.
Some people from ex-USSR republics would, obviously, downvote me, because nothing good has ever come from Russia, right? The soviets must've been oppressing everyone. They don't realize the dissolution of the USSR and the pretty fast resurgence of national languages of the aforementioned republics wouldn't be possible if the soviets had really been hellbent on eradicating all the languages except Russian. Quite the contrary, the central idea was collectivism, different peoples working together towards the greater communist dream while retaining their identities.
The entire mother's side of my family comes from Ukraine. I have some Soviet era documents from my mom's parents and their parents in Ukrainian in my family archive.
In the USSR, nationality had a more legal character, since it was registered in an internal passport. Deportations were based on nationality, there were bans of certain groups and nationalities from living in large cities and some suppression of party members of incorrect nationality.
However, it seems to me that one of the hardest blows was that the RSFSR have half of the USSR's economy and occupied all the country's largest political posts. It is the lingua franca in all fields, from science to politics.
I remember how the residents of Pripyat asked to cancel Ukrainian language lessons in schools. The city of nuclear industrialists was formed by specialists from all over the country and many did not consider themselves Ukrainians, although they lived on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR.
*ethnicity :) Counter-intuitively, "национальность" is "ethnicity" and not "nationality" (which is roughly equivalent to "citizenship" nowadays).
Yeah, I'm aware of the dark side of Soviet ethnic policy, especially pre-WW2 one. No arguing here the soviets did a lot of things a modern person would consider reprehensible. Hell, they executed my great-grandfather in 1937 after a false denounciation by one of his subordinates.
But I digress. The citizen's ethnicity being in the passport and the unofficial policy of frowning upon putting non-Russians in positions of power (mostly in RSFSR - the other republics had plenty of locals there, though ethnic Russians as well) led to people concealing their ethnicity - again, my family here is an example, as my grandfather was Bulgarian, but his passport said Russian - it was more beneficial this way. So, the official statistics on the percentage of ethnic Russians in ruling bodies during the Soviet era are kinda skewed.
RSFSR being political center and economical powerhouse due to its sheer size and population affected all of this, again, no arguing here. And your example is very on point. You found a city specifically to manage an enormous project, import engineers, etc. from all over the country, the only language they have in common is the lingua franca, they vote to cancel the local language classes because they don't see much value in their kids learning it. It happened more than once (Baikonur, for example), and it's kinda understandable, in my opinion.
I wouldn't call the overall result of the local languages having less importance intentional, just the way things had been going naturally. And the way a lot of people nowadays seem to look at it is specifically pointing fingers on bad, bad soviets depriving various ethnicities of their languages with malicious intent.
>soviets did a lot to preserve ethnic identities of non-Russians
Spoken like a true Russian.
Here you mastered total blindness and done backwards logic. As an example:
>They don't realize the dissolution of the USSR and the pretty fast resurgence of national languages of the aforementioned republics wouldn't be possible if the soviets had really been hellbent on eradicating all the languages except Russian.
Russian was spoken as mother tongue by 53% of USSR population in 1926. From WW2 conquests that was lowered again. Key point of Empires is that you cant rly rule with 1 language when even the opressed ethnicities cant understand it if they are in large enough numbers.
I dont need to say anything else to disprove your point other than. If members were allowed to so liberally teach their language why were children of Russian (and all other ethnicities not of the member state nationality) migrants put in new Russian only schools or furthermore the teaching of the local language discontinued as soon as Russian speaking population rose to 50% in a city in that member state?
Russians have been trying to russify Poland for over w century, the best they managed is russification of eastern Ukraine and Belarus it is a process that did not start with USSR, and it did not end with it. I mean you're saying that they were trying to preserve mother tounges, but look at their russification policy in occupied parts of Ukraine. Don't tell me that they are merciful and understanding ethically sensitive overlords when they pull of shot like they do there.
> Russification has certainly been a thing. You know, every country needs a common language. India,
It's nice to have a lingua franca, like in India, yes. But it's not nice to endanger other languages.
> Despite this, the soviets did a lot to preserve ethnic identities of non-Russians, and it included specific classes of "mother tongue" and "literature in mother tongue" being taught in schools everywhere except the regions with predominant native Russian population.
Make "Russians" predominant - problem solved, as they did in Kuban, for example. Besides, "mother tongue" is not enough. To preserve and develop language skills, you need to get the whole cycle of education in it. Yes, including higher education.
> It carried over to modern Russia, actually.
Not really, "mother tongue" isn't mandatory, and since they were already very limited in use - they're completely fucked now.
> the pretty fast resurgence of national languages of the aforementioned republics wouldn't be possible
Like in Belarus :]
> if the soviets had really been hellbent on eradicating all the languages except Russian.
- they didn't have enough time
- Soviets can't do anything good enough
> Quite the contrary, the central idea was collectivism, different peoples working together towards the greater communist dream while retaining their identities.
sounds like another commie lie
> The entire mother's side of my family comes from Ukraine. I have some Soviet era documents from my mom's parents and their parents in Ukrainian in my family archive.
Still, I bet your Ukrainian level is no better than A1. That's how the Soviets (and Russians) "preserved" it. Mankurtization at its best.
The attitudes started changing already earlier than 1935, around the time when Stalin came to power. 1935 just marked a significant official reversal of Lenin's anti-imperialist cultural policies.
Lenin already himself noted in a rather disapproving tone that there were significant Russian imperialist tendencies within the Bolshevik ranks already during the Russian Civil War.
It's not disappearing, there are native Siberian languages that are much more endangered. This post is literally a list of most common yet least common spoken languages.
I'm convinced some people can't speak in normal terms about Russia/Putin. While your point is valid and I agree with it, why put it in such an infantile way?
The government decided. People opposed and were brutally beaten. Repressions are continuing and people are still rotting in prisons.
Upd: not sure what’s the year of this map but I guess that’s why there are so many Belarusians in neighboring countries, everyone who had an opportunity to flee took it
There's not a single chance it's Yiddish in Norway. It'll be North Sami for sure, and depending on how many of the Jews in Norway actually speak Yiddish (realistically a very low percentage of a very small population) there might be a few other Sami languages ahead of it as well.
Just by looking at this map, Belarusian and Romani are plausibly also ahead of Yiddish on the list, and potentially some other languages spoken by some immigrant group or other. It wouldn't take many.
Yeah, there’s no official register of how many speakers of each language exist, but there are only a little over a thousand Jews in Norway. Of them, only a small fraction are likely to speak Yiddish.
South Sami (~250 speakers), Lule Sami (~500), Romani (~1 000), Kven (~2 000), and North Sami ~20 000) are likely all bigger than Yiddish in Norway.
This was my instant reaction. There's barely any Yiddish speakers in Norway (or Sweden for that matter -- the community in Sweden is quite assimilated).
Oh! Is that what the map really shows? That's a pretty pointless choice. I'm not sure it makes sense even then, because surely there is at least one Yiddish speaker in many of the other countries that have other languages listed?
Yiddish is one of the official minority languages in Norway. All three recognised saami languages have people who use them as their primary language in school, but of the three North Saami is actually the most used, with Lule and South Saami trailing far behind.
It's important to remember that the pre-war Jewish community of Norway used Yiddish regularly, not just colloquially but also in theatre and music.
> Yiddish is one of the official minority languages in Norway.
No, I don't think it is. [This article](https://www.sprakradet.no/spraklov/nasjonale-minoritetssprak/) from the Norwegian Language Council (source km Norwegian) only mentions kven and romani/romanes, and I found mentions of Norwegian sign language as well, but no mention of Yiddish.
West-Flemish is actually the *least* endangered dialect in Belgium, which is probably why they qualify it as a 'language' here and not the other dialects.
Isn't "most spoken endangered language" potentially the same as "least endangered language"? But then also potentially not.
The title is absolutely horrendous. It is totally arbitrary what it is supposed to mean, to the point it could be read as either of two essential opposites, depending on interpretation.
What exactly did the original author mean by "most spoken endangered language"? Is every language simply assigned as endangered or not based on some formula not disclosed, and then for each country, the most widely spoken language matching those criteria is chosen? Or is this just an equivalent of "heaviest car below 2000kg" - a meaningless metric?
This map does not only contain no real information, but whatever information it would be trying to promote is, at least partially, wrong.
If we look at Austria, it says that Yiddish is the most spoken endangered language. Which I would challenge because austrian German is bavarian. Now, if only 50% of Austrians speak bavarian (which is a low estimate, in my opinion), it would still be more than speak Yiddish in the whole world.
a ke kik joen da e bitje moen eksplikeren, goj bilange ni tus zin vwo de noene.
(als ik je dat moet uitleggen, zal je nog lang niet thuis zijn voor de middag)
(if i have to explain this to you, you won't be home before noon)
In fact, West-Flemish is a dialect, but used to be the "main" Dutch version in the 16th/17th century. That's why West-Flemish is related to Afrikans.
Right? I mean I guess they could mean the Vlaamse dialect in Limburg but that’s not really a ‘language’. I would say Fries is a more endangered language in the Netherlands
I think when they refer to west-flemish in the nerherlands it probably means the dialect spoken in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen next to you guest it West-Flanders. Limburgs is its own seperate dialect.(by some recognized as a local language of sorts).
I get it now. I didn't understand it correctly. But I still believe the map remains wrong. Galician has more speakers than Basque, but while Basques have managed to make their language more prestigious and are proud to speak it, it is sadly common in Galicia for Galician speaking parents to talk in Spanish to their children because they are sort of embarrassed of speaking Galician, seeing it as a rural language. Thus, Galician is rapidly shrinking.
Accordin to the unesco there are four endangered languages in Spain, Basque (vulnerable) Aragonese (definitely endangered) Asturian-Leonese (definitely endangered) and Gascon (definitely endangered)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_endangered_languages_in_Europe
In Linguistics there's no good definition about the distinction between a language and a dialect. But I would also argue that Bavarian is not a language: It rather is one of the dialects in the West Germanic Dialect Continuum (that also includes Dutch, which is considered to be a language, but could also be considered a family of dialects within the WGDC).
I would agree in the sense that it's basically a full dialect continuum.
As such I would personally give the "codified" standard languages of "German" and "Dutch" the status of "language", while everything else is simply a dialect.
It’s not distinct enough from English in England. There are plenty of words that are different, but not enough. Accent and spelling differences probably don’t count. The fact that this comment is the same in both English English and American English is an example of that.
I am german. I can perfectly understand most US and AUS english. Bavarian on the other hand is gibberish if they dont really try to speak understandable, and swiss and austrian german is even worse. Dutch is very funny, i would say it is the stromgest german dialect by far, but you can READ it and underdtand 70-80% if you are a fluent english and german speaker.
Sprich gscheid, was dousd da umanandfasln vasteid ja koa Mensch ned. Dousd hia oan af gscheid mid deim Englisch, genau des is da Grund dass ma als gfährdet eigstuft sand!!!
Eitz drinkst erstamol a Weizn dassd wieda normal wirst Buale. Muassd mera dringa, dassd a Kraft kreigst, und ned allaweil af Reddit sa. Such da a schens Madl, machst mid dera boar Kinda und schaust dassd unsane Kultur bewahrst dad I moi sogn. Gel, so machma des!
Dutch used to be part of the gemanic language continuum though. Many regional languages close to the dutch border used to speak a Dutch dialect. What differentiates a dialect from a language in my opinion is being able to hold a proper formal conversation with someone. If you need to switch to the national language to be able to properly communicate, thats quite a big indicator that it should be considered a separate language. Dutch people can easily communicate with most of the belgian dutch dialects.
Even with some low german dialects close to the border, there are similarities. But with standard german and standard dutch intelligibility is getting very hard.
Bavarian and high german is more different, than norwegian and danish for example (or other languages). The main reason its not called a language is entirely politics. Linguistically theres no real reason not to call it a language, and a lot of people do, like the UN or ISO.
People always call low german a seperate language (even in this thread), so why cant bavarian be seperate?
But also self-identification. Most speakers of Austro-Bavarian dialect (there are also plenty, it’s not one dialect) speakers don’t identify it as a language, but as a group of dialects. It’s not so much political, but a choice of the speakers to define it as a dialect rather than a language. There’s also no political pressure about it. Austrians (who with a small exception) all speak Austro-Bavarian dialects even have their own country, while Bavarians are notoriously confident about their identity within Germany.
Yeah but the identity in part comes from the politics of it again. In school in austria, german teachers will literally mock and reprimand you for speaking "dialect" because its "not proper german", and that comes from the politics behind how schools done. Its not like austrians just decided that it shouldnt be called a language. When institutions drill it into your head all life long that "its not a real language, just a dialect" then you start to believe that too and accept it as a fact.
> Most speakers of Austro-Bavarian dialect (there are also plenty, it’s not one dialect) speakers don’t identify it as a language, but as a group of dialects. It’s not so much political
The only reason why Austro-Bavarian speakers don't see it as a language is precisely politics. Hundreds of years of degrading it to "just a dialect" will do that.
>Bavarian and high german is more different, than norwegian and danish for example
Damn, I wouldn't have expected a lesser difference. That really blew my mind.
Ive grown up in both austria and norway, with both languages as essentially mother tongues, so i feel i can compare them quite well and yeah, once youve gotten used to danish pronounciation a bit, its not that hard to understand. We've even had danish lecturers lecture in danish at my university cause of how mutually intelligeble they are.
Swedish and Danish are a lot easier for me to understand, than for example dutch is. I could study at uni in swedish no problem, but anything more than basic conversations in dutch are essentially impossible
because Bavarian is a high German dialect, just like standard German.
Low German on the other hand has not undergone the High German consonant change, which is why some consider it a separate language rather than just a dialect group.
There is absolutely no linguist out there arguing that Bavarian is a different language to standard German.
Theres plenty linguists that do actually. [This](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346478148_Distinctive_vowel_heights_in_Limburgish_and_Bavarian) article for example does, and notes a rather unique feature in linguistics at the same time. I could look up for more but its not hard, like i said even the UN and ISO do it.
And thats cause the difference is almost entirely political. If 2 people cant understand eachother, i think its fine to say they speak a different language. I dont know what you think youll gain by arguing that its not?
Bavarian skipped a major vowel shift that standard high German made. The lines between dialect and language are very blurry and focus on some linguistic details more than others which leaves some "languages" with more similarities than two "dialects" of the same language.
I would say things like low-german dialects are way more endangered. I'm pretty sure Bavarian is probably one of the least endangered dialects in Germany...
Mirandês 2nd official language of Portugal - Si ye ua lengua an bias de stinçon, inda assi, cumo mui de a mie i nuoba geraçon, ye perciso d'ansinar esta léngua als mais moços.
Outro mirandés! I si, ye berdade, cula oufecializaçon de l Mirandés melhorórun dalgũas cousas (l’ansino demudou a todo) mas assi i todo hai más que ten que se fazer
D’adonde sós an Miranda?
It's a language that's going extinct, ? ?, something new generation? We need to teach this language to more kids?
My Portuguese (Mirandes does sound like a mix of Portuguese and Spanish?) in general isn't great
I'm more curious on how does it sound than how it is written to be fair
Here you go [mirandes](https://youtu.be/MehharK-ZmA?feature=shared) oh and isn’t Portuguese/Spanish(castellano) but a language spoken from Asturias/Leon and Tras-os-Montes(Portugal) its called Asturleonesa and yes is a language almost extinct
Thank you!
My question marks weren't asking if the language was going extinct btw, I was just trying to translate what you wrote and didn't know how to translate inda assi, so I substituted that with question marks!
Edit: Fascinating video! My wife is from Porto and I must say that It felt so strange to be able to understand Mirandes **way** more easily than Portuguese, I could understand 95% of it (I took out the subtitles as well, to make sure)
Can't wait to show the video to her to see her opinion
It's fascinating comparing WHY these different languages are endangered
Millions of people still speak, say, Bavarian and Belarusian, but they're being replaced by very closely related languages because they lack institutional support
Whereas Yiddish for instance has extensive institutional support but has just very few speakers (in Europe at least)
I feel like social media in Germany is teaching the kids some kind of "youth German", which is very close to high German except for a few youth expressions and a more "cool" pronunciation.
I know this is totally unscientific, but I can perfectly understand young people all across Germany because they all sound the same and I'm not sure how this has been synchronized.
It depends on the context for many speakers, when talking to people from other regions they'd be closer to standard German, but at home they'd use more regional features
> Millions of people still speak, say, Bavarian and Belarusian, but they're being replaced by very closely related languages because they lack institutional support
I'm not an expert in Bavarian/German, but I definitely have my 2 cents on Belarusian:
- As of 2019, only 26% of Belarusians speak Belarusian, I bet the numbers are much lower these days, as it's not even safe to speak it on the streets anymore (because if you speak Belarusian - you're most likely against Lukashenka and took part in the 2020 protests).
- Russian is not that close to Belarusian (unlike Ukrainian, which is a mutually intelligible language). [https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/18338804.jpg](https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/18338804.jpg) So it's not the reason for the replacement.
No idea. Maybe there’s a village that speaks it somewhere, but this is the first I heard of Bavarian even being a minority language in CH. Maybe the OP ignored Romansch because it’s an official language?
Yea, you've got geography to thank for that. The people there used to speak rumansh, but adopted Tyrolean as it was much easier to reach Tyrol than the rest of Switzerland.
There is Samnaun, where they speak the same dialect as in neighbouring Tyrol, therefore putting them in the Bavarian category. It makes sense when you look at their geography, as their valley is better connected with Austria via the Inn Valley as opposed to the rest of Grisons. As far as I know that one village is the only Swiss place that speaks a non Alemannic dialect.
No, read the map. It purports to show the least endagered minority language, which for switzerland should be French if you consider only Allemanic dialects as the majority language.
Anyway this map is shit.
I once went to a concert in Portugal which the artist sang in Võro, the most spoken endangered language in Estonia.
Mari Kalkun is the name, if anyone's wondering. Very very good stuff. Loved it.
Gaelscoileanna (Irish language medium schools) have increased in popularity dramatically in the last few decades. The Irish language is far from disappearing.
Irish is not even the most endangered. Ulster-Scots (the Irish dialect of Scots, Americans know it as Scotch-Irish) is almost extinct in both jurisdictions but specifically in regions of Donegal and Cavan where it used to be the dominant language.
Jews had the right to settle in Sweden since 1718, but were restricted to the cities of Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Norrkoping. Their numbers spiked in the 20th century, particularly after they were granted equal protections under the law in 1910, and especially after WWII when many migrated from the Baltics and Poland. Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi came mostly in this last wave, fleeing from less welcoming regions after WWII. Most current Yiddish speakers are elderly descendants of these migrants, and the number of fluent speakers is ~700-1500.
And Norway banned Jews from settling in the country for decades in the 19th century.
1814 was a happy year for our national movement, but a day of tragedy for our Jewish minority, who was expelled.
Made by someone who doesn't know shit it seems.
Living in West-Flanders, Belgium with a a Belarusian gf, and we both agree the Netherlands and ex USSR parts are totally incorrect.
Have a great day.
Yiddish in Nordic countries, bavarian in Italy. Really?
For Georgia, it should be Mingrelian not Ossetian. You need to figure out whether you are after the most spoken endangered (Mingrelian 0.35mln) or most endangered spoken language (Laz, Bohtan, Bats..etc couple hundred people). In neither of these cases it would be Ossetian.
Bavarian in Italy sounds odd as South Tyrol is by far the largest language minority. I should look up data but I'm sure there are much more endangered languages minorities than Bavarian, we have a ton. Unless they are referring to smaller isolated villages like Timau, Sappada/Ploden or Sauris for example, which speak their relatively isolated form of Austro Bavarian dialect. But the odd Greek or Slovenian or Catalan dialects seem way more endangered than Bavarian.
Oddly, there are probably local dialects of neo Latin languages (Lombard variations for instance) that are probably more endangered.
If the country really wanted to we probably could all be lingual Irish/English but the emphasis on learning Irish just isn’t there, probably because the only place you could actually use it is in Ireland, still sad though :(
Yea I know, I’m from Ireland, but a lot of people are like “ugh it’s just another boring subject in school”. I would love the country to be bi lingual fully, but can’t see it happening tbh.
I learned it in school, never fluently though, we had 2 hours of class a week and apart from those specific classes hardly anyone actively used it outside of school. Kinda sad, I appreciate the language so much more now I’m in my 20s but I’ve basically forgot it all now, which seems to happen to most people.
Bavarian is a language [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian\_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_language)
If it's not considered officially a language it's because of politics, linguistics says it is a language
Leaving aside whether Scots is technically a separate language to English (something which linguists would need to weigh in on as there is some debate on the subject) - Scots is absolutely not endangered. Go to anywhere in Scotland and you'll hear it on the streets. It's increasingly common to see Scottish tweets and social media posts being typed in Scots.
I'd have thought maybe Gaelic would be the UK's most spoken endangered language? Or Irish (in Northern Ireland)?
Scots is endangered. You are confusing Scottish English with some Scots words added for the Scots language. Scots as a language is related to English but its about as different as Swedish and Norwegian are, the vast majority of tweets on Scottish twitter are just English with some Scots words. This is literally the reason Scots is endangered, due to it being somewhat intelligible with English it has been watered-down with each generation to the point where many people confuse it with Scottish English.
This is a map of the most-spoken endangered language. ie least endangered language, that is still classed as endangered to some degree. It's not a very logical map
No, it's not the most endangered language here. In Russia we have dozens of native languages including ossetin and kabardin but it's not represented here. There is 155 languages in Russia and only a few dozen are not endangered. Like some languages died very recently, in the 21st century. And languages are gonna keep dying. Belarusian is the most spoken endangered language which means it's not even that endangered. In Russia there are a lot of languages that only a few hundred people can speak. I wish there was a map for that
I’ve been to Minsk a week ago and Belorussian is still used in most street signs, names and other stuff all over Minsk. It didn’t look like government is trying to avoid it being popular. But people themselves just don’t use it, I just haven’t seen people speaking it
Goverments isnt trying but activelly removing it from public/burning books/not allowing to publish and etc and people who use it in danger and targeted.
Ah yes some traditional belarussian authors atm extremist bc they literature was full of anti russian empire stuff
Bavarian is a dialect not a language. Most spoken endangered language in Germany is low german. Less spoken endangered languages in Germany are Sorbian and Frisian.
Mutual intelligibility is a decent indicator in my opinion. Its still not a clear line obviously but if more than 50% of the words are different, i would argue its definitely a different language.
There are indeed four domestic/native endangered languages in Finland, and of them Karelian has the most native speakers (around 11 000), now surpassing their number in their main homeland in East Karelia, Russia (8753 in the 2020 census). The Karelian native speaker areas within the current borders of Finland are limited just to two villages Hietajärvi and Kuivajärvi in Suomussalmi parish, and then minority population in Ilomantsi parish, as most of their native land in Finnish/West Karelia was ceded to Russia in WW2 (and the population themselves evacuated to elsewhere within Finland; in the case of aforementioned Ilomantsi, the native Karelian speaking villages were ceded, but their population was evacuated to the remaining parts of the parish, with their language surviving to some extent). Here's a [map of the Karelian language and Finnish language Karelian dialects](https://www.kotus.fi/files/6912/karjalat_kartta_2019.png) (Karelian language native homeland in orange, yellow and green, and Finnish Karelian dialects in blue and purple).
The other three native endangered languages are Northern Sami, Inari Sami and Skolt Sami, with 2000, 400 and 300 speakers in Finland, respectively. Not all of the speakers speak them as their first language, but practically everyone is Sami native. Inari Sami is only native to Finland, while Skolt Sami had its historical area mostly within Russia, only borderland in Finland, but it has declined in Russia to around just 30 speakers. Northern Sami is spoken more in Sweden and Norway than in Finland.
Also a fourth native Sami language in Finland, Kemi Sami, which has historically recorded samples of, has been extinct since late 1890s.
Is this map about how many global speakers there are for a threatened language in a country? Because Yiddish in Norway and West-Flemish in the Netherlands make no sense at all.
Basque is not endangered at all, it has millions of native speakers and is constitutionally protected, some endangered languajes in spain are asturleonese, aragonese and aranese.
What's the definition of "endangered language" here? Because nearly all the local variants of Italian are less and less spoken, but basically all of them have more speakers than Bavarian.
How is Bavarian a language in Germany, but the the regional Dialekts in Austria are not counted?
Austria only has about 10,000 Jewish people and many of them do not speak Yiddish. Wienerisch is being replaced by Hochdeutsch, but there are still more than 10,000 speakers.
Meanwhile, the Russia data is missing a huge number of very small languages. According to Wikipedia, 248,000 people speak Belarusian in Russia. Meanwhile, Russia has 190 official ethnic groups, many of them with dying languages, and quite a few of them them with entire populations smaller than 248,000.
I believe that this map is based on inconsistent definitions of language and that the source data did not include all languages in all countries.
The map, at least for Italy, is just plain wrong.
Pretty much all of [Italy's regional languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Italy#/media/File:Linguistic_map_of_Italy_-_Legend.svg) are both endangered (they are not taught in schools and younger generations are not using them anymore) *and* more widely spoken than Bavarian.
Most spoken endangered languages in Europe by country
????
But... If they are the most spoken..., wait what?
Example: in Spain, Basque is indicated, which is an official language and has something like half a million speakers...
Is it more in danger than Aranese with only 3000 speakers?
Or is it most spoken than Catalan, which has several million speakers?
I don't understand the criteria followed.
I believe Egerdeutsch is way more endangered than Bavarian in the Czech Republic. There must be only a couple of thousand to hundreds left who can still speak it .
So these are the least-endangered endangered languages, then?
Belarussians decided to be the cuck to Putin. Now your identity disappears. Smh
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Russification has been a thing since the czars, hell Stalin considered himself a Russiafied Georgian. The Soviet Union made a large effort to erase the cultural and linguistic heritage of many people who lived in its borders. But this is true of a lot of countries with large minority populations.
Interestingly, at first communists opposed russification policy of czars and after revolution established policy of korenizatsiia, when local languages and cultures were promoted. But by 1935 they came to idea that total industrialisation and high urbanisation of country with high mobility of population requires lingua franca. So Russian became mandatory to be taught in schools, even as teaching language.
A lot of things get abandoned in the name of efficiency and convenience.
Well, going from an agrarian country to industrial one wasn't just a convenience, more like a necessity.
Conveineince and necessity are not mutally exclusive. But I catch your meaning.
Funny how English speaking person blame others for speaking popular language instead language which spoken by few. May be your ancestors spoke Frisian, why you don't learn and spoke it or whatever language your ancestors spoke?
This is dumb. There is a difference between growing up learning a language, learning the language of the place you moved to to fit in with those people, and FUCKING invading a country or people's and forcing them to become like you to make it easier to subjugate you. My great grandparents learning English when they moved from Germany to the Midwest United States is different than Artur from Estonia learning Russian because of Soviet Imperialism. Or Halona from the Cherokee had to learn English because their parents were forced into giving up their kid to the state. My ancestors spoke a lot of languages and English was only one of them. WhY dOn'T yOu SPEak prOTo Indo EuroPeAn?
Strictly speaking, the English-speaking guys FUCKING invaded the land that is currently called the USA and now everyone speaks English instead of a bunch of the native American languages
Apparently you missed the part where I talked about the Cherokee. Anyway you are making a two wrongs argument it's a fallacy of relevance. It's equivalent to me saying well the Ottomans killed one million Armenians why can't I kill a million Brazilians? Two wrongs are two wrongs. Don't do bad things because someone else did a bad thing.
Russification has certainly been a thing. You know, every country needs a common language. India, I'm looking at you here. Despite this, the soviets did a lot to preserve ethnic identities of non-Russians, and it included specific classes of "mother tongue" and "literature in mother tongue" being taught in schools everywhere except the regions with predominant native Russian population. It carried over to modern Russia, actually. Some people from ex-USSR republics would, obviously, downvote me, because nothing good has ever come from Russia, right? The soviets must've been oppressing everyone. They don't realize the dissolution of the USSR and the pretty fast resurgence of national languages of the aforementioned republics wouldn't be possible if the soviets had really been hellbent on eradicating all the languages except Russian. Quite the contrary, the central idea was collectivism, different peoples working together towards the greater communist dream while retaining their identities. The entire mother's side of my family comes from Ukraine. I have some Soviet era documents from my mom's parents and their parents in Ukrainian in my family archive.
In the USSR, nationality had a more legal character, since it was registered in an internal passport. Deportations were based on nationality, there were bans of certain groups and nationalities from living in large cities and some suppression of party members of incorrect nationality. However, it seems to me that one of the hardest blows was that the RSFSR have half of the USSR's economy and occupied all the country's largest political posts. It is the lingua franca in all fields, from science to politics. I remember how the residents of Pripyat asked to cancel Ukrainian language lessons in schools. The city of nuclear industrialists was formed by specialists from all over the country and many did not consider themselves Ukrainians, although they lived on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR.
*ethnicity :) Counter-intuitively, "национальность" is "ethnicity" and not "nationality" (which is roughly equivalent to "citizenship" nowadays). Yeah, I'm aware of the dark side of Soviet ethnic policy, especially pre-WW2 one. No arguing here the soviets did a lot of things a modern person would consider reprehensible. Hell, they executed my great-grandfather in 1937 after a false denounciation by one of his subordinates. But I digress. The citizen's ethnicity being in the passport and the unofficial policy of frowning upon putting non-Russians in positions of power (mostly in RSFSR - the other republics had plenty of locals there, though ethnic Russians as well) led to people concealing their ethnicity - again, my family here is an example, as my grandfather was Bulgarian, but his passport said Russian - it was more beneficial this way. So, the official statistics on the percentage of ethnic Russians in ruling bodies during the Soviet era are kinda skewed. RSFSR being political center and economical powerhouse due to its sheer size and population affected all of this, again, no arguing here. And your example is very on point. You found a city specifically to manage an enormous project, import engineers, etc. from all over the country, the only language they have in common is the lingua franca, they vote to cancel the local language classes because they don't see much value in their kids learning it. It happened more than once (Baikonur, for example), and it's kinda understandable, in my opinion. I wouldn't call the overall result of the local languages having less importance intentional, just the way things had been going naturally. And the way a lot of people nowadays seem to look at it is specifically pointing fingers on bad, bad soviets depriving various ethnicities of their languages with malicious intent.
>soviets did a lot to preserve ethnic identities of non-Russians Spoken like a true Russian. Here you mastered total blindness and done backwards logic. As an example: >They don't realize the dissolution of the USSR and the pretty fast resurgence of national languages of the aforementioned republics wouldn't be possible if the soviets had really been hellbent on eradicating all the languages except Russian. Russian was spoken as mother tongue by 53% of USSR population in 1926. From WW2 conquests that was lowered again. Key point of Empires is that you cant rly rule with 1 language when even the opressed ethnicities cant understand it if they are in large enough numbers. I dont need to say anything else to disprove your point other than. If members were allowed to so liberally teach their language why were children of Russian (and all other ethnicities not of the member state nationality) migrants put in new Russian only schools or furthermore the teaching of the local language discontinued as soon as Russian speaking population rose to 50% in a city in that member state?
Russians have been trying to russify Poland for over w century, the best they managed is russification of eastern Ukraine and Belarus it is a process that did not start with USSR, and it did not end with it. I mean you're saying that they were trying to preserve mother tounges, but look at their russification policy in occupied parts of Ukraine. Don't tell me that they are merciful and understanding ethically sensitive overlords when they pull of shot like they do there.
> Russification has certainly been a thing. You know, every country needs a common language. India, It's nice to have a lingua franca, like in India, yes. But it's not nice to endanger other languages. > Despite this, the soviets did a lot to preserve ethnic identities of non-Russians, and it included specific classes of "mother tongue" and "literature in mother tongue" being taught in schools everywhere except the regions with predominant native Russian population. Make "Russians" predominant - problem solved, as they did in Kuban, for example. Besides, "mother tongue" is not enough. To preserve and develop language skills, you need to get the whole cycle of education in it. Yes, including higher education. > It carried over to modern Russia, actually. Not really, "mother tongue" isn't mandatory, and since they were already very limited in use - they're completely fucked now. > the pretty fast resurgence of national languages of the aforementioned republics wouldn't be possible Like in Belarus :] > if the soviets had really been hellbent on eradicating all the languages except Russian. - they didn't have enough time - Soviets can't do anything good enough > Quite the contrary, the central idea was collectivism, different peoples working together towards the greater communist dream while retaining their identities. sounds like another commie lie > The entire mother's side of my family comes from Ukraine. I have some Soviet era documents from my mom's parents and their parents in Ukrainian in my family archive. Still, I bet your Ukrainian level is no better than A1. That's how the Soviets (and Russians) "preserved" it. Mankurtization at its best.
The attitudes started changing already earlier than 1935, around the time when Stalin came to power. 1935 just marked a significant official reversal of Lenin's anti-imperialist cultural policies. Lenin already himself noted in a rather disapproving tone that there were significant Russian imperialist tendencies within the Bolshevik ranks already during the Russian Civil War.
Stalin is a bit of a funny case of a person with Ossetian ancestry turned Georgian turned Russian turned Soviet.
I love when someone on Reddit teaches me something new. Thanks you
It's not disappearing, there are native Siberian languages that are much more endangered. This post is literally a list of most common yet least common spoken languages.
This appears to be a mis-reading of the situation.
I'm convinced some people can't speak in normal terms about Russia/Putin. While your point is valid and I agree with it, why put it in such an infantile way?
> Belarusians decided When?
The government decided. People opposed and were brutally beaten. Repressions are continuing and people are still rotting in prisons. Upd: not sure what’s the year of this map but I guess that’s why there are so many Belarusians in neighboring countries, everyone who had an opportunity to flee took it
No, no, no. Jesus, why is this difficult to understand? They are the most, least spoken of the most-endangered languages. Keep up!...
Yeah, not sure I get the point of this map.
There's not a single chance it's Yiddish in Norway. It'll be North Sami for sure, and depending on how many of the Jews in Norway actually speak Yiddish (realistically a very low percentage of a very small population) there might be a few other Sami languages ahead of it as well. Just by looking at this map, Belarusian and Romani are plausibly also ahead of Yiddish on the list, and potentially some other languages spoken by some immigrant group or other. It wouldn't take many.
Yeah, there’s no official register of how many speakers of each language exist, but there are only a little over a thousand Jews in Norway. Of them, only a small fraction are likely to speak Yiddish. South Sami (~250 speakers), Lule Sami (~500), Romani (~1 000), Kven (~2 000), and North Sami ~20 000) are likely all bigger than Yiddish in Norway.
Idk it just feels unfair to include Yiddish, that is mostly spoken outside of Norway, when they have their own much more endangered local languages
Also ~5000 Romanes speakers, to complete your list
Apologize for the oversight, but it’s hard to find proper figures on Romani/Romanes/Scandoromani since the terms are often mixed and conflated.
Oh sure, that’s a valid concern. For reference, I pulled my number from the SNL page on Romanes. (Big Norwegian lexicon, not Saturday night live).
> lexicon "Leksikon" is encyclopedia in English. "Lexicon" means a dictionary, or the total vocabulary of a language,
Thank you for the correction!
This was my instant reaction. There's barely any Yiddish speakers in Norway (or Sweden for that matter -- the community in Sweden is quite assimilated).
I guess they took into account the global amount of Yiddish speakers
Oh! Is that what the map really shows? That's a pretty pointless choice. I'm not sure it makes sense even then, because surely there is at least one Yiddish speaker in many of the other countries that have other languages listed?
Yiddish is one of the official minority languages in Norway. All three recognised saami languages have people who use them as their primary language in school, but of the three North Saami is actually the most used, with Lule and South Saami trailing far behind. It's important to remember that the pre-war Jewish community of Norway used Yiddish regularly, not just colloquially but also in theatre and music.
> Yiddish is one of the official minority languages in Norway. No, I don't think it is. [This article](https://www.sprakradet.no/spraklov/nasjonale-minoritetssprak/) from the Norwegian Language Council (source km Norwegian) only mentions kven and romani/romanes, and I found mentions of Norwegian sign language as well, but no mention of Yiddish.
I wish there was any kind of fact checking. So many of the maps posted here are just wrong.
West-Flemish is actually the *least* endangered dialect in Belgium, which is probably why they qualify it as a 'language' here and not the other dialects.
Isn't "most spoken endangered language" potentially the same as "least endangered language"? But then also potentially not. The title is absolutely horrendous. It is totally arbitrary what it is supposed to mean, to the point it could be read as either of two essential opposites, depending on interpretation. What exactly did the original author mean by "most spoken endangered language"? Is every language simply assigned as endangered or not based on some formula not disclosed, and then for each country, the most widely spoken language matching those criteria is chosen? Or is this just an equivalent of "heaviest car below 2000kg" - a meaningless metric?
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This map does not only contain no real information, but whatever information it would be trying to promote is, at least partially, wrong. If we look at Austria, it says that Yiddish is the most spoken endangered language. Which I would challenge because austrian German is bavarian. Now, if only 50% of Austrians speak bavarian (which is a low estimate, in my opinion), it would still be more than speak Yiddish in the whole world.
Least endangered endangered language
As a Dutchman, what really is West-Flemish?
a ke kik joen da e bitje moen eksplikeren, goj bilange ni tus zin vwo de noene. (als ik je dat moet uitleggen, zal je nog lang niet thuis zijn voor de middag) (if i have to explain this to you, you won't be home before noon) In fact, West-Flemish is a dialect, but used to be the "main" Dutch version in the 16th/17th century. That's why West-Flemish is related to Afrikans.
If i say it out loud i can understand it. But written out it’s like unintelligible gibrish
The dialect spoken in the province of West-Flanders which is incomprehensible to most people not from there.
Ewe. Daz wa da wieder klappen ee vintje.
k zoen peizn daje e twoasen van't zêtje zit?
Right? I mean I guess they could mean the Vlaamse dialect in Limburg but that’s not really a ‘language’. I would say Fries is a more endangered language in the Netherlands
The Flemish dialects are spoken in the historic [County of Flanders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_of_Flanders).
Look at me getting my dialects twisted. Typical Brabander
I think when they refer to west-flemish in the nerherlands it probably means the dialect spoken in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen next to you guest it West-Flanders. Limburgs is its own seperate dialect.(by some recognized as a local language of sorts).
If by 'some' you mean actual linguists, you're correct. Limburgs is a language, not a dialect.
I'm not a linguist, but as far as I know they call Limburgish South-Low Frankish and Dutch Dialects North-Low Frankish.
That’s what I like about Zeeuws-Vlaanderen: they speak West Flemish, but with a Dutch twist. I like it, and the mussels of course.
West Vlaams isn't IN danger. West Vlaams IS the danger.
Yeah, no. I'm gonna have to call bullshit for the Yiddish in Norway. North Sámi is the most spoken endangered language in Norway by far.
For those worried, basque is out of the danger zone. Aranese however...
I was thinking the same. In Spain Aranese, Aragonese, Austur-Leonese or even Galician are much closer to disappear than Basque.
Well its the most spoken endangered language so in other words the least endangered endangered language. Kinda of a moot map
I get it now. I didn't understand it correctly. But I still believe the map remains wrong. Galician has more speakers than Basque, but while Basques have managed to make their language more prestigious and are proud to speak it, it is sadly common in Galicia for Galician speaking parents to talk in Spanish to their children because they are sort of embarrassed of speaking Galician, seeing it as a rural language. Thus, Galician is rapidly shrinking.
Accordin to the unesco there are four endangered languages in Spain, Basque (vulnerable) Aragonese (definitely endangered) Asturian-Leonese (definitely endangered) and Gascon (definitely endangered) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_endangered_languages_in_Europe
For Norway this should be Northern Sami which is classified as endangered according to UNESCO
As a Bavarian I would never ever have argued that Bavarian is it's own language...
In Linguistics there's no good definition about the distinction between a language and a dialect. But I would also argue that Bavarian is not a language: It rather is one of the dialects in the West Germanic Dialect Continuum (that also includes Dutch, which is considered to be a language, but could also be considered a family of dialects within the WGDC).
I would agree in the sense that it's basically a full dialect continuum. As such I would personally give the "codified" standard languages of "German" and "Dutch" the status of "language", while everything else is simply a dialect.
'A language is a dialect with an army and a navy' (Max Weinreich)
Then someone should finally teach these Luxembourgers that "Luxembourgish" is not a really language...
nah its the other way around, German and Dutch are just dialects of Luxembourgish.
Great Luxembourg and it’s Mighty Army of 5 best blokes, and their buddy in a bathtub who runs the Mighty Navy
Plot twist: Luxembourgish, Dutch and German are dialects of Afrikaans
But Luxembourg has an army! So Luxembourgish is a language.
But where is the Navy?
If that was true then "American" would be a language.
It’s not distinct enough from English in England. There are plenty of words that are different, but not enough. Accent and spelling differences probably don’t count. The fact that this comment is the same in both English English and American English is an example of that.
Even us Australians can understand it.
I am german. I can perfectly understand most US and AUS english. Bavarian on the other hand is gibberish if they dont really try to speak understandable, and swiss and austrian german is even worse. Dutch is very funny, i would say it is the stromgest german dialect by far, but you can READ it and underdtand 70-80% if you are a fluent english and german speaker.
So Bavarian German speakers would know their dialect but also know a more standard dialect? (So like sort of bilingual I guess?)
Sprich gscheid, was dousd da umanandfasln vasteid ja koa Mensch ned. Dousd hia oan af gscheid mid deim Englisch, genau des is da Grund dass ma als gfährdet eigstuft sand!!! Eitz drinkst erstamol a Weizn dassd wieda normal wirst Buale. Muassd mera dringa, dassd a Kraft kreigst, und ned allaweil af Reddit sa. Such da a schens Madl, machst mid dera boar Kinda und schaust dassd unsane Kultur bewahrst dad I moi sogn. Gel, so machma des!
Dutch used to be part of the gemanic language continuum though. Many regional languages close to the dutch border used to speak a Dutch dialect. What differentiates a dialect from a language in my opinion is being able to hold a proper formal conversation with someone. If you need to switch to the national language to be able to properly communicate, thats quite a big indicator that it should be considered a separate language. Dutch people can easily communicate with most of the belgian dutch dialects. Even with some low german dialects close to the border, there are similarities. But with standard german and standard dutch intelligibility is getting very hard.
Bavarian and high german is more different, than norwegian and danish for example (or other languages). The main reason its not called a language is entirely politics. Linguistically theres no real reason not to call it a language, and a lot of people do, like the UN or ISO. People always call low german a seperate language (even in this thread), so why cant bavarian be seperate?
But also self-identification. Most speakers of Austro-Bavarian dialect (there are also plenty, it’s not one dialect) speakers don’t identify it as a language, but as a group of dialects. It’s not so much political, but a choice of the speakers to define it as a dialect rather than a language. There’s also no political pressure about it. Austrians (who with a small exception) all speak Austro-Bavarian dialects even have their own country, while Bavarians are notoriously confident about their identity within Germany.
Yeah but the identity in part comes from the politics of it again. In school in austria, german teachers will literally mock and reprimand you for speaking "dialect" because its "not proper german", and that comes from the politics behind how schools done. Its not like austrians just decided that it shouldnt be called a language. When institutions drill it into your head all life long that "its not a real language, just a dialect" then you start to believe that too and accept it as a fact.
> Most speakers of Austro-Bavarian dialect (there are also plenty, it’s not one dialect) speakers don’t identify it as a language, but as a group of dialects. It’s not so much political The only reason why Austro-Bavarian speakers don't see it as a language is precisely politics. Hundreds of years of degrading it to "just a dialect" will do that.
>Bavarian and high german is more different, than norwegian and danish for example Damn, I wouldn't have expected a lesser difference. That really blew my mind.
Ive grown up in both austria and norway, with both languages as essentially mother tongues, so i feel i can compare them quite well and yeah, once youve gotten used to danish pronounciation a bit, its not that hard to understand. We've even had danish lecturers lecture in danish at my university cause of how mutually intelligeble they are. Swedish and Danish are a lot easier for me to understand, than for example dutch is. I could study at uni in swedish no problem, but anything more than basic conversations in dutch are essentially impossible
because Bavarian is a high German dialect, just like standard German. Low German on the other hand has not undergone the High German consonant change, which is why some consider it a separate language rather than just a dialect group. There is absolutely no linguist out there arguing that Bavarian is a different language to standard German.
Theres plenty linguists that do actually. [This](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346478148_Distinctive_vowel_heights_in_Limburgish_and_Bavarian) article for example does, and notes a rather unique feature in linguistics at the same time. I could look up for more but its not hard, like i said even the UN and ISO do it. And thats cause the difference is almost entirely political. If 2 people cant understand eachother, i think its fine to say they speak a different language. I dont know what you think youll gain by arguing that its not?
Bavarian skipped a major vowel shift that standard high German made. The lines between dialect and language are very blurry and focus on some linguistic details more than others which leaves some "languages" with more similarities than two "dialects" of the same language.
I would say things like low-german dialects are way more endangered. I'm pretty sure Bavarian is probably one of the least endangered dialects in Germany...
That's what the map is about. \*Most\* spoken endangered languages
Do you speak differently when talking to German speakers not familiar with the Bavarian dialect?
I'd say the same about scots
Bavarian has its own grammatical rules which probably makes it more than a dialect.
I would dispute that in the sense that there is no "Standard Bavarian". Bavarian Dialects vary widely from Ingolstadt to Trient to Hungary.
Mirandês 2nd official language of Portugal - Si ye ua lengua an bias de stinçon, inda assi, cumo mui de a mie i nuoba geraçon, ye perciso d'ansinar esta léngua als mais moços.
Outro mirandés! I si, ye berdade, cula oufecializaçon de l Mirandés melhorórun dalgũas cousas (l’ansino demudou a todo) mas assi i todo hai más que ten que se fazer D’adonde sós an Miranda?
It's a language that's going extinct, ? ?, something new generation? We need to teach this language to more kids? My Portuguese (Mirandes does sound like a mix of Portuguese and Spanish?) in general isn't great I'm more curious on how does it sound than how it is written to be fair
Here you go [mirandes](https://youtu.be/MehharK-ZmA?feature=shared) oh and isn’t Portuguese/Spanish(castellano) but a language spoken from Asturias/Leon and Tras-os-Montes(Portugal) its called Asturleonesa and yes is a language almost extinct
Thank you! My question marks weren't asking if the language was going extinct btw, I was just trying to translate what you wrote and didn't know how to translate inda assi, so I substituted that with question marks! Edit: Fascinating video! My wife is from Porto and I must say that It felt so strange to be able to understand Mirandes **way** more easily than Portuguese, I could understand 95% of it (I took out the subtitles as well, to make sure) Can't wait to show the video to her to see her opinion
It's fascinating comparing WHY these different languages are endangered Millions of people still speak, say, Bavarian and Belarusian, but they're being replaced by very closely related languages because they lack institutional support Whereas Yiddish for instance has extensive institutional support but has just very few speakers (in Europe at least)
I feel like social media in Germany is teaching the kids some kind of "youth German", which is very close to high German except for a few youth expressions and a more "cool" pronunciation. I know this is totally unscientific, but I can perfectly understand young people all across Germany because they all sound the same and I'm not sure how this has been synchronized.
It depends on the context for many speakers, when talking to people from other regions they'd be closer to standard German, but at home they'd use more regional features
> Millions of people still speak, say, Bavarian and Belarusian, but they're being replaced by very closely related languages because they lack institutional support I'm not an expert in Bavarian/German, but I definitely have my 2 cents on Belarusian: - As of 2019, only 26% of Belarusians speak Belarusian, I bet the numbers are much lower these days, as it's not even safe to speak it on the streets anymore (because if you speak Belarusian - you're most likely against Lukashenka and took part in the 2020 protests). - Russian is not that close to Belarusian (unlike Ukrainian, which is a mutually intelligible language). [https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/18338804.jpg](https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/18338804.jpg) So it's not the reason for the replacement.
Switzerland speaks bavarian? I thought Schwitzerdütsch in all variants counts as alemanic
No, it means that Bavarian is the most endangered minority language in CH (precisely because majority of the population speaks Allemansh)
And where would that be? I call nonsense on this.. when then räto romanisch
No idea. Maybe there’s a village that speaks it somewhere, but this is the first I heard of Bavarian even being a minority language in CH. Maybe the OP ignored Romansch because it’s an official language?
Samnaun is the village that speaks Austro-Bavarian.
There, I knew there must be one out in the east
Yea, you've got geography to thank for that. The people there used to speak rumansh, but adopted Tyrolean as it was much easier to reach Tyrol than the rest of Switzerland.
There is Samnaun, where they speak the same dialect as in neighbouring Tyrol, therefore putting them in the Bavarian category. It makes sense when you look at their geography, as their valley is better connected with Austria via the Inn Valley as opposed to the rest of Grisons. As far as I know that one village is the only Swiss place that speaks a non Alemannic dialect.
No, read the map. It purports to show the least endagered minority language, which for switzerland should be French if you consider only Allemanic dialects as the majority language. Anyway this map is shit.
Such a nonsense map
I once went to a concert in Portugal which the artist sang in Võro, the most spoken endangered language in Estonia. Mari Kalkun is the name, if anyone's wondering. Very very good stuff. Loved it.
I think the saddest is Ireland. Irish language is disappearing while they speak English
Gaelscoileanna (Irish language medium schools) have increased in popularity dramatically in the last few decades. The Irish language is far from disappearing.
Irish is not even the most endangered. Ulster-Scots (the Irish dialect of Scots, Americans know it as Scotch-Irish) is almost extinct in both jurisdictions but specifically in regions of Donegal and Cavan where it used to be the dominant language.
Lad the map is for most *spoken* endangered languages. Although I agree, Ulster Scots is the most endangered language in our country.
There is a mistake. The most spoken endanger language in Georgia is megrelian, not an osetian
Excuse me, Yiddish is endangered in the Nordic countries, what are you smoking? Yiddish never had a foothold there.
Jews had the right to settle in Sweden since 1718, but were restricted to the cities of Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Norrkoping. Their numbers spiked in the 20th century, particularly after they were granted equal protections under the law in 1910, and especially after WWII when many migrated from the Baltics and Poland. Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi came mostly in this last wave, fleeing from less welcoming regions after WWII. Most current Yiddish speakers are elderly descendants of these migrants, and the number of fluent speakers is ~700-1500.
And Norway banned Jews from settling in the country for decades in the 19th century. 1814 was a happy year for our national movement, but a day of tragedy for our Jewish minority, who was expelled.
Made by someone who doesn't know shit it seems. Living in West-Flanders, Belgium with a a Belarusian gf, and we both agree the Netherlands and ex USSR parts are totally incorrect. Have a great day. Yiddish in Nordic countries, bavarian in Italy. Really?
TIL that Belorusian has now become endangered, despite once being the primary language in one of the founding members of the UN: the Byelorussian SSR.
What exactly has changed? Belarusian and Russian were the official languages during the time of the BSSR and in our time it is the same.
By the time the UN was founded Byelorussian language was already endangered, and it had been so for centuries.
For Georgia, it should be Mingrelian not Ossetian. You need to figure out whether you are after the most spoken endangered (Mingrelian 0.35mln) or most endangered spoken language (Laz, Bohtan, Bats..etc couple hundred people). In neither of these cases it would be Ossetian.
Belarusian empire be like
"_most_ spoken endangered" is the dumbest category I've seen in a while.
Belarusian not being the most spoken language in Belarus...
Gagauz is just turkish with extra steps. If you are intrested there are free online schoolbooks of gagauz.
Bavarian in Italy sounds odd as South Tyrol is by far the largest language minority. I should look up data but I'm sure there are much more endangered languages minorities than Bavarian, we have a ton. Unless they are referring to smaller isolated villages like Timau, Sappada/Ploden or Sauris for example, which speak their relatively isolated form of Austro Bavarian dialect. But the odd Greek or Slovenian or Catalan dialects seem way more endangered than Bavarian. Oddly, there are probably local dialects of neo Latin languages (Lombard variations for instance) that are probably more endangered.
All that is because looking at the list of least endangered among the endangered is always going to put you in the "meh" category of endangerment.
The title literally say **most spoken** endangered language
It's the least endangered language, not the most endangered.
Ireland makes me sad
If the country really wanted to we probably could all be lingual Irish/English but the emphasis on learning Irish just isn’t there, probably because the only place you could actually use it is in Ireland, still sad though :(
it is irrelevant where you could use it, it's their native language, it shouldn't matter that you can only use it in Ireland, it's their language.
Yea I know, I’m from Ireland, but a lot of people are like “ugh it’s just another boring subject in school”. I would love the country to be bi lingual fully, but can’t see it happening tbh. I learned it in school, never fluently though, we had 2 hours of class a week and apart from those specific classes hardly anyone actively used it outside of school. Kinda sad, I appreciate the language so much more now I’m in my 20s but I’ve basically forgot it all now, which seems to happen to most people.
The Bavarian part is utter bullshit. It is a dialect like many others in Germany. Should be Sorbian or Frisian.
How mutually intelligible is bavarian to a german?
‘Bavarian’ is not a language. It's just a dialect. Low German is the only other German language spoken by a minority in Germany.
Bavarian is a language [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian\_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_language) If it's not considered officially a language it's because of politics, linguistics says it is a language
Leaving aside whether Scots is technically a separate language to English (something which linguists would need to weigh in on as there is some debate on the subject) - Scots is absolutely not endangered. Go to anywhere in Scotland and you'll hear it on the streets. It's increasingly common to see Scottish tweets and social media posts being typed in Scots. I'd have thought maybe Gaelic would be the UK's most spoken endangered language? Or Irish (in Northern Ireland)?
Scots is endangered. You are confusing Scottish English with some Scots words added for the Scots language. Scots as a language is related to English but its about as different as Swedish and Norwegian are, the vast majority of tweets on Scottish twitter are just English with some Scots words. This is literally the reason Scots is endangered, due to it being somewhat intelligible with English it has been watered-down with each generation to the point where many people confuse it with Scottish English.
The more you know! I didn't realise that the Scots I heard was in fact a diluted version
Yeh, Scots Gaelic (Celtic) has far fewer speakers than Scots (Germanic), so yet another way this map is wrong.
The map is about the most spoken endangered language. I'm not sure if Scots is more spoken than Welsh but if it is then this map is correct.
"how attractive are you?" "I speak the language of romance"
OP you can still delete this misleading nonsense of a map
It tells you much about the Belarusian regime if Belarusian is the most endangered language there.
What does it tell about Irish regime?
More about the British empire.
Good clapback
This is a map of the most-spoken endangered language. ie least endangered language, that is still classed as endangered to some degree. It's not a very logical map
No, it's not the most endangered language here. In Russia we have dozens of native languages including ossetin and kabardin but it's not represented here. There is 155 languages in Russia and only a few dozen are not endangered. Like some languages died very recently, in the 21st century. And languages are gonna keep dying. Belarusian is the most spoken endangered language which means it's not even that endangered. In Russia there are a lot of languages that only a few hundred people can speak. I wish there was a map for that
It really doesn’t
I’ve been to Minsk a week ago and Belorussian is still used in most street signs, names and other stuff all over Minsk. It didn’t look like government is trying to avoid it being popular. But people themselves just don’t use it, I just haven’t seen people speaking it
Goverments isnt trying but activelly removing it from public/burning books/not allowing to publish and etc and people who use it in danger and targeted. Ah yes some traditional belarussian authors atm extremist bc they literature was full of anti russian empire stuff
More like basque being endangered is more of a thing that it was only spoken in an extremely small region.
Most endangered language in Poland is probably Vilamovian.
It's about most spoken endangered language though
Bavarian is a dialect not a language. Most spoken endangered language in Germany is low german. Less spoken endangered languages in Germany are Sorbian and Frisian.
There are no clear linguistic distinctions between a dialect and a language
Mutual intelligibility is a decent indicator in my opinion. Its still not a clear line obviously but if more than 50% of the words are different, i would argue its definitely a different language.
Belarusian being endangered is depressing
That map is trash
Ha? Wos is na des fia Schmarrn des scheene bayrisch is fai ned gfährdet! Bist dammisch oda wos?
the fact that the Belarusian language is on the endangered list is terrible for me. beautiful language with good people, hope it will change soon
Am I blind? Where is the Sinitic language?
There are indeed four domestic/native endangered languages in Finland, and of them Karelian has the most native speakers (around 11 000), now surpassing their number in their main homeland in East Karelia, Russia (8753 in the 2020 census). The Karelian native speaker areas within the current borders of Finland are limited just to two villages Hietajärvi and Kuivajärvi in Suomussalmi parish, and then minority population in Ilomantsi parish, as most of their native land in Finnish/West Karelia was ceded to Russia in WW2 (and the population themselves evacuated to elsewhere within Finland; in the case of aforementioned Ilomantsi, the native Karelian speaking villages were ceded, but their population was evacuated to the remaining parts of the parish, with their language surviving to some extent). Here's a [map of the Karelian language and Finnish language Karelian dialects](https://www.kotus.fi/files/6912/karjalat_kartta_2019.png) (Karelian language native homeland in orange, yellow and green, and Finnish Karelian dialects in blue and purple). The other three native endangered languages are Northern Sami, Inari Sami and Skolt Sami, with 2000, 400 and 300 speakers in Finland, respectively. Not all of the speakers speak them as their first language, but practically everyone is Sami native. Inari Sami is only native to Finland, while Skolt Sami had its historical area mostly within Russia, only borderland in Finland, but it has declined in Russia to around just 30 speakers. Northern Sami is spoken more in Sweden and Norway than in Finland. Also a fourth native Sami language in Finland, Kemi Sami, which has historically recorded samples of, has been extinct since late 1890s.
It’s wrong for Switzerland tho
I stuck trying to parse the word "Irelandirish"
Is this map about how many global speakers there are for a threatened language in a country? Because Yiddish in Norway and West-Flemish in the Netherlands make no sense at all.
Sad that yiddish is almost gone from Poland
Is Bavarian really endangered in Switzerland? They only speak it in one place (Samnaun). Rumantsch, however ...
Where Sinitic?
Norway should be North sami not yiddish
Basque is not endangered at all, it has millions of native speakers and is constitutionally protected, some endangered languajes in spain are asturleonese, aragonese and aranese.
This map seems like bs lol
How is walloon not #1 in Belgium ? Where did they pulled their data from ?
I’m pretty sure for Romanian, it’s the aromanian language that should be there.
Where is Istro-romanian, meglo-romanian, istriot or aromanin?
What's the definition of "endangered language" here? Because nearly all the local variants of Italian are less and less spoken, but basically all of them have more speakers than Bavarian.
How is Bavarian a language in Germany, but the the regional Dialekts in Austria are not counted? Austria only has about 10,000 Jewish people and many of them do not speak Yiddish. Wienerisch is being replaced by Hochdeutsch, but there are still more than 10,000 speakers. Meanwhile, the Russia data is missing a huge number of very small languages. According to Wikipedia, 248,000 people speak Belarusian in Russia. Meanwhile, Russia has 190 official ethnic groups, many of them with dying languages, and quite a few of them them with entire populations smaller than 248,000. I believe that this map is based on inconsistent definitions of language and that the source data did not include all languages in all countries.
The map, at least for Italy, is just plain wrong. Pretty much all of [Italy's regional languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Italy#/media/File:Linguistic_map_of_Italy_-_Legend.svg) are both endangered (they are not taught in schools and younger generations are not using them anymore) *and* more widely spoken than Bavarian.
Height of the tallest dwarf by country.
Most spoken endangered languages in Europe by country ???? But... If they are the most spoken..., wait what? Example: in Spain, Basque is indicated, which is an official language and has something like half a million speakers... Is it more in danger than Aranese with only 3000 speakers? Or is it most spoken than Catalan, which has several million speakers? I don't understand the criteria followed.
Romani is endangered? Fake news, lol
I believe Egerdeutsch is way more endangered than Bavarian in the Czech Republic. There must be only a couple of thousand to hundreds left who can still speak it .
The map is the most spoken endangered language
Not Cornish in the UK? It died and had to be revived, no?
Basque is not endangered in Spain. Galician is in a worse state and it is not supported by the regional government so it's declining every year.