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Comment by realusername | Hacker News Reader

I've witnessed the death of a language with my own eyes. My father still speaks the local dialect but I don't and nobody of my age does. I just know a few words of it. It's really sad to see the death of a language, when a language dies, everything dies with it, the spirit of a culture dies. And most of these languages are not even recorded anywhere, there is just no trace of it. (that's also the case of the dialect I'm talking about).

However, a language rarely dies completely. Even if the next generations are not speaking it anymore, some words remains when the concept the word is describing does not exist in the new language, some traces are still there.

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I don't want you to see this as a personal attack, but isn't it your father's fault not having taught you to speak this "dialect" (which, I guess, is a language called despectively a dialect)?

Blaming people contributes to this discussion how?

Well I'm not sure of iagooar's intent, but there is an important distinction here that only community members have the actually power to save a language. It isn't their 'fault' by any means because they have to balance the conformative expectations of the larger (usually oppressive) society with the desire to keep their culture alive, and none of us can really say which is the 'right' choice.

The important battleground here is misinformation. A lot of people think teaching their children a native language will impede them from learning the matrix language, but tons of evidence shows that this is not the case. Bilinguals might think slightly differently than monolinguals, but on most tests they actually perform above average. If we could make sure they know that, and provide resources to record media and train educators directly in the communities, a lot more languages would survive.

I don't want to blame anyone, that wasn't my intent. But how do I express my opinion, that passing a language from parents to children is the best way of preserving an endagered language?

I ask myself how is your "grumpy" post contributing to this discussion?

It's indeed part of the problem. It's clearly a chicken and egg problem, because it was already engendered at the time, he did not think it would be useful (and it was already a bit out of fashion). But yes I agree. I call it a dialect myself because it relies at least 20% on french (I'm french myself). But after all, I'm not a linguist, they might disagree with the appellation. Maybe it would be a good think to document it I guess, for future purpose.

> I call it a dialect myself because it relies at least 20% on french

"A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an...

My father tried quite hard to teach me and my brother Turkish when we were young. It's lucky Turkish isn't in any sense an endangered language, because today between us we know exactly zero words of Turkish. It's not exactly a foolproof process.

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