Multilingualism in Nations and Individuals Kullko jezikou clovig zna, tali'ko clovig vaja. (‘However many languages a person knows, that’s how much a person is worth’ - Croatian folk saying) ‘A high school teacher in the provincial capital of Surin in northeast Thailand speaks the Northern Khmer language of the area to her neighbors and in many other informal situations around town. She learned it by living and working in the city for several years. On the other hand, she speaks Lao with her husband, a government official, because that is his mother tongue. She learned it (and met him) when she was in training as a teacher in the Lao-speaking area of the northeast. She teaches in Standard Thai, which she herself learned in school. She talks to her children in Lao or Northern Khmer or Standard Thai, as seems appropriate at the time. When she returns to her home village, an hour’s ride by bus to the east of Surin, she speaks Kuy, her own native language, the language of her parents, the language in which she grew up.’ (Linguistic Diversity and National Unity: Language Ecology in Thailand, by William Smalley, 1994, p. 1) ‘One female B-Mlabri speaker impressed me particularly when, within one hour of Smalltalk, she switched between four different languages depending on the addressee: (1) Mlabri (spoken to her father), (2) Tin Mai (spoken to her husband, who was bom a Tin), (3) Hmong (spoken to Hmong villagers entering the hut), and (4) Northern Thai, the lingua franca of the whole area (spoken in a subsequent conversation involving both her father and some Hmong people).’ (Minor Mlabri: A Hunter-Gatherer Language of Northern Indochina, by Jorgen Rischel, 1995, pp. 54—5; northern Thailand) ‘Throughout this period [1750-1858] most of the communication between Whites and Indians was in the trade language known as
The quotation about Votic becoming Izora is from Paul Ariste’s 1970 article ‘Die Wege des Aussterbens zweier finnisch-ugrischer Sprachen’ [‘The routes to death of two Finno-Ugric languages’]; the quoted sentences are my translation of his German sentences (‘Ishorische Worter und grammatische Ztige sind ins Wotische fast unmerklich eingedrungen, bis sie das Uberge- wicht bekamen. Dann war die Sprache dieser Woten nicht mehr Wotisch, sondem schon ishorisch’). The quotation about Lenca (and two other languages of El Salvador) is from p. 1960 of Lyle Campbell’s 1994 article ‘Language death’. On the same page Campbell cites two other articles, Wolfgang U. Dressler’s ‘Language shift and language death - a protean challenge for the linguist’ (1981) and Jane Hill’s ‘Language death in Uto-Aztecan’ (1983), as sources for discussion of what he calls ‘sudden language death’ and ‘radical language death’. The quotation about the inevitability of structural change in a (gradually) dying language is from p. 12 of Sasse’s 1992 article ‘Theory of language death’ (cited above). Nancy C. Dorian’s comment about East Sutherland Gaelic’s morphological boots is from her 1978 article ‘The fate of morphological complexity in language death: evidence from East Sutherland Gaelic’; one of the many authors who cite this comment is Lyle Campbell, on p. 1963 of his ‘Language death’ article, where he also cites several other sources that report lack of morphological reduction in language death. On the same page, Campbell mentions that shortening long words has been reported as a feature of language death.
into existence and old countries change their names or official languages. In addition to official languages, the list includes some major ‘national’ languages - those spoken by large numbers of people in a country even though they are not widely used in government or education - and languages that are official in particular regions but not in the country as a whole; languages in these two categories are given in parentheses. But sometimes the boundaries among these categories are unclear, so there may be a few discrepancies in the list. Alternate language names are separated by a slash. Afghanistan Pashtu, Dari/Afghan Persian Albania Albanian Algeria Arabic Andorra Catalan Angola Portuguese Antigua and Barbuda English Arab Emirates Arabic Argentina Spanish Armenia Armenian Australia English Austria German Azerbaijan Azeri / Azerbaij ani Bahamas English Bahrain Arabic Bangladesh Bengali Barbados English Belarus Byelorussian, Russian Belgium French, Dutch (German) Belize English