Only 4% of Languages Are Used Online
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
Minor languages die because they're a detriment to native speakers, it's not a bad thing when they do.
Taken from http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Indeed it is. First of all, there are 7Bn people on the planet, and many languages have a small number of speakers. Loosely, today, less technology, the more languages (because there is less intercommunication). What we call France used to have hundreds of not-particularly-mutually-comprehensible languages until the Louis XIII and XIV made a point of eliminating them -- but it took the television to pull it off. Likewise, incomprehensible English dialects survived well into the 20th century.
In India there are dozens of languages that have never had a written form that gain an alphabet each year.
BTW What's a "language" and what's a "dialect" is a very political issue. It was said in the 1800s that you could walk from Paris to Rome, with each village speaking a dialect that its neighbors could understand, but by the time you arrived you'd gone from French-speaking Paris to Italian-speaking Rome. Also, politically, there is one "Chinese" language with other Chinese languages called "dialects." As a kid I heard Mandarin and Cantonese daily, and never would have called them the same languages, but I had neighbors who would have virulently argued the opposite.
The main reason is that the places with the greatest variety of languages also happen to be poorly developed areas with lack of Internet access. As their ability to access the Internet improves, the languages might find a way to thrive (or be defeated by the overwhelming amount of foreign-language content).
Another reason is poor Unicode/browser/font support for various languages. Even some thriving languages suffer from it like Japanese with no vertical writing and furigana support in most browsers. To say nothing of something like Mongolian script. This might also be fixed, which will increase the affected languages' usage on the Internet.
Chrome, IE, Safari and Opera have all supported the "ruby" tag, which is used for furigana, for a while now. Firefox has finally added support in version 38, released in May.
Now, I can start complaining about the number of sites that misuse ruby and break highlighting.
> The x axis (log scaled) gives the number of speakers (plus one, so as not to make dead languages fall off the scale). The y axis, also log scaled, shows the adjusted wikipedia size.
As is the real ratio
> real ratio, defined as the number of ‘real’ pages divided by the total page count
Not sure why they couldn't put the above in the figure legend (or better yet label the plot directly). I agree it is poorly done.
Most countries will pick up english or chinese for their official language. Most european countries will lose their native language due to the influx of immigrants polluting their culture.