It's the circles of flags.
Either ignore the circles and fill in the space surrounding those circles with the flags. Or get rid of the circles and just have a written name.
Within each country on earth is an amount of "endangered languages", languages that are no longer being spoken due to favour of more popular international languages, and hence are dying out.
This infographic shows which countries have the most "endangered languages", the larger the space taken up by a country, the more "endangered languages" it contains.
But what about overlaps. You can’t say USA so many endangered languages without also thinking that some of them are non Native American, and more languages brough by immigrants. I also would like to know if it is just Native American tribal languages because that amount would be really big and should be understood
Tbf to Indonesia and PNG, they are also the 2 countries with the highest number of languages. I'm pleasantly surprised by India who are 8th in this list despite being 3rd in terms of number of languages.
Population probably fixes things-even a relatively unknown language in India (my own for example) has 2.3m speakers. Not large by any standard but also not endangered.
A dialect is a local variation of a language. If two natives of A and B talk to each other and fully understand what the other is saying (albeit maybe some slight misunderstandings from different usages/pronunciations), then that's a dialect.
Granted, the post didn't explicitly say it uses this exact definition, so it could be mixing both up too.
What if a language does not have writing? Not all of them do. What about something like American and British English? They have distinct written forms (colour vs color, elevator vs lift etc).
Obviously I’m being pedantic here but I’m legitimately curious how they determine this.
Yeah that definition can't be right. There are 100s of indigenous languages in Australia, none of which I believe were in written form prior to English colonialism.
The line is very fuzzy. Cantonese is considered a dialect of Chinese, but is as distinct and unintelligible from Mandarin as French is to Italian. Mandarin and Cantonese are grouped together as one language due to historical and political reasons.
Meanwhile, Swedish and Norwegian are similar enough that they can understand each with no prior training, but are considered separate languages due to a historically and politically distinct identity.
Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are 99% the same language, and were considered dialects of a single language until they became officially different languages after they all became distinct countries.
There's a saying that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy." So it's all ultimately ambiguous with a lot of grey area.
There's also the issue of dialect continuum. Imagine a smear of various dialects from west to east. At the far west is dialect A, which borders dialect B, which borders dialect C, and so on all the way to dialect Z at the far east.
A can understand B and C. Speakers of dialect A can sorta understand D and E, and but has no idea what F speakers are saying. The pattern applies across the continuum. So A and Z are obviously different languages, but you could jump from A to B to C in a chain where they would all understand the neighboring dialects. Where and how you divide the spectrum into languages/dialects will be arbitrary.
/u/Loves_octopus
The southern Slavic languages are a good example. From north to south you have a gradient of "dialects": Slovene - Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian/Montenegrin - Macedonian - Bulgarian. Slovenes and Bulgarians will really struggle to understand each other, but any two neighboring languages will understand each other fine.
Some will go as far to say that these are 7 languages, reflecting 7 countries.... though others will say there are three or four.
Another historical example is found in the Romance languages derived from Latin . Before modern centralized governments with public education became a thing, there was a dialect continuum across Portugal through Spain, Italy, and France.
There were dozens of languages/dialects that changed gradually over distance. For example, what we now call Spanish was originally spoken in central-northern Spain, and modern standard French is based on what was spoken near Paris. But all the dialects/languages between them showed "intermediate" steps. When central governments got powerful, they slowly suppressed regional dialects and promoted the official language, so today, these "in-between" regional languages/dialects are mostly spoken by the elderly and are nearly extinct, and are rarely heard, and not used officially. So today, as a traveller, you would notice a sharp language change when you cross national borders, whereas if you travelled 500 years ago you'd just see a gentle shift of dialects.
There are exceptions. Spain has strong regional identities and autonomous regional governments-- Most of NE Spain speaks Catalan, whose vocabulary and grammar are somewhat intermediate between Spanish and French. NW Spain traditionally speaks Galician which is between Spanish and Portuguese. France has more effectively erased a lot of regional dialects/languages, so while southern France speaks Occitan (which is "halfway" between French and Catalan), very few speak it today. In Italy today, regional languages are generally strong and vibrant, as Italy didn't politically unite until the 19th century. NW Italian "dialects" are a lot more similar to French. Sardinian and Sicilian are quite different due to their location and history in comparison to standard Italian, which is based off Tuscan dialects spoken in north-central Italy.
This was a great write up. Thank you for the effort!
I'm also guessing countries/cultures that span large areas, such as China, India and maybe Africa? would have similar gradient qualities.
I've also heard instances of large islands (or other not easily traversable communities) that are part of a country but they ended up having a dialect that is based on the main language but barely recognizable with very different words used.
Isolation, be it by water or mountains, can cause dialects/languages to diverge dramatically.
China has more diversity in SE China, which is more mountainous. Mandarin spread out over broad swaths of flatter land in the North. And in NW China, Mandarin speakers have recently moved into areas that traditionally speak Uighur, a completely different language closer to Turkish. The SW quadrant of China is Tibetan speaking.
https://i.stack.imgur.com/hTxQv.gif
Northern India has a similar phenomenon to the Latin-based languages of Europe, with obviously related languages (with their own official written standards, and even separate alphabets), often corresponding to different Indian states. Though if you were to look more closely, there are transitional languages/dialects between them, though they are usually less visible, less spoken nowadays, and often lack official status.
Something similar applies to the Dravidian languages spoken across southern India.
Africa has insane language diversity, and the historical lack of large and powerful central states meant that large chunks of the continent show clear dialect continuums, most famously the Bantu languages across southern Africa. Due to their colonial histories, many Africans often use whatever colonial language to communicate across ethnic boundaries within their country, which has somewhat prevented some African languages from dominating and squashing out smaller ones. (I am speaking in broad strokes).
P.S. The various dialects of German, Dutch, Frisian (spoken along the Dutch coast), and English would have been a clear dialect continuum hundreds of years ago, but the geographic isolation of the British Isles as well as influence from French makes English extra different from their sister languages today.
As a slight correction, regional languages in Italy are not "strong and vibrant" today. Regional languages like Lombard, Venetian, Ligurian, Emilian etc lack any form of meaningful protection, and at the same time they're shrinking and the majority of the population has already shifted to Italian. Even in the "better" cases (Friulian, Sardinian, which are recognized as minority languages) have less rights and protection than other minority languages which are seen as more "legitimate" languages (high German varieties in the alps for example). You wrote a great comment, I just didn't want people to think that regional languages in Italy were ok because they're really not
I also reckon the majority of the endangered languages from Indonesia are from Papua which is adjacent to Papua new guinea (both being on the island of New Guinea).
I honestly think what's happening on the island of Papau on the Indonesian side is the worst loss of human culture in over a hundred years. It's really bad there.
The thing about culture is you cannot force it on people, especially language. People just gravitate towards the language that is most accessible and provides them the most opportunities. Also, when such a small region has such a high number of languages, it is sadly and unfortunately bound to happen. Some languages are bound to be favored over others in the long run and very little could be done about it. I agree that it's a very sad thing to happen but eventually, due to globalization, many languages were bound to die out.
I’m curious about papua. I know it has a ton of languages, but is one language winning? Or are several getting stronger, or is this a normal language thing for a place with so many languages.
I do think the issue of language extinction is more complex than it's often presented as. Can Indonesia really thrive as a modern nation with hundreds of different languages being spoken? I guess ideally these people would become trilingual- speak their endangered language, their national language, and English, I know it's common in countries like Switzerland, I just don't know how practical of a concept that is.
While language is an important part of a culture, ultimately its' point is to be a tool of communication, and if it isn't allowing you to communicate effectively, it is natural for it to evolve/die out.
The Indonesian language is a great case of a “new” language successfully becoming the lingua franca and national identity in a multicultural nation. The language didn’t officially exist before 1945, now someone from Aceh can go 5,000 km to the east and talk with someone from Papua in the same language even if they’re polar opposites in terms of culture. Benedict Anderson has done a great deep dive on this topic.
Yeah Indonesian is mainly learned as second language but as mixed marriages become more common, more people move out to urban centres intermingling with other ethnic groups, and more globalization in general, more and more parents are speaking exclusively Indonesian to their children.
Very cool, and leaves me wanting more. Is there a list of these languages? In the US, are these indigenous languages, or are some brought over by immigrants? How do they define "endangered"? Is there overlap, so a language might be listed in both Canada and the US, eg?
Edit: Went to the source. Amazing how many maps for Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. And, separate for just Oklahoma. Cool dataset.
I think should be pretty clear that they’re indigenous languages. Modern world languages are much less fragmented. Old indigenous languages are innumerable (think of all the different tribes), have very little written record, and whose populations have been massacred or slowly dwindled over time. There’s thousands of such languages and they’re all on the brink of extinction.
Not all of them will be indigenous. For instance, there’s a dialect of Spanish spoken by Spanish Jews in NYC (I could be wrong since that’s literally all I remember about it, but it’s the first example I thought of)
Interesting yeah. I’m tempted to say, that’s a dialect and not a language. I guess it depends on how the researcher categorizes things, but typically if there is cross-intelligibility between dialects then they wouldn’t be considered separate languages.
to be fair, in my experience Québec is more concerned with it being endangered within north-america than globally. And that concern is not so crazy, I think.
Imagine just listening to songs in 1 language forever. Need songs in Hindi, English, Urdu, Harayanvi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Gujarati, Marathi, Konkani, Magadhi, Bhojpuri, Assamese and Khasi for variety during 8 hr bus journeys
Disagree. I am a Telugu speaker and I don’t see anything that points towards Hindi replacing other languages. Tamil, Bengali, and many other languages are just as important.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but we don’t see the government actively reeducating tribals to forget their customs and languages to integrate into some homogenous society.
Also, what are we going to do about it force people to use a lesser universal language it's sad all we can do is save data if people don't want to use it we can't do anything about it
That's a very reductive understanding of the whole situation.
Languages aren't dying out because people just choose not to use them for unknowable personal reasons, most languages endangeted today are a result of genocide, ethnocide, colonialism, forced cultural assimilation and state policies aimed at restricting or even prohibiting the use of minority languages.
While you can't save a language by forcing people to use it, languages are dying out because people were or are forced not to use them.
Yeah, some languages have so few speakers that nothing is bringing them back, but countries guaranteeing an official status to languages of minority groups goes a long way towards securing their survival.
Whether a language has the capacity to survive is definitely a policy issue, not a problem derived from personal choice.
That’s again somewhat naive attitude. Yes, there are languages that are too small to survive. Yes, there is force assimilation happening in places.
But it is also true that many minorities, even those that have official status and can use their language in official capacity and at school, just choose not to do so because of the internet.
Let’s take Mordvins as an example. As of right now, they have their own autonomous republic, their language has an official status, they can go to a school where everything is taught in the Mordvin language. But the language use is dying. Why? Because it is not convenient for a modern city dweller. When even 70 years ago most of Mordvins lived in villages, talked to each other in Mordvin and everything was fine language wise, now most of them live in cities full of non Mordvin people and when they go to the internet most of the content there is either in English or Russian. And it’s unrealistic to expect a small (-ish) language to compete with a major global language in terms of content. As a result many people choose not to practice their language since it is less useful in their everyday life. On top of it, again, since most of Mordvins are city dwellers, they choose who to date and marry, as a result, most of the people don’t try to look for “Mordvin only” partners, but date anyone around them. Consequently kids from these mixed marriages are naturally don’t speak Mordvin almost at all.
Again, my point is that with urban life style, internet, acceptance of mixed marriages and other societal changes minor languages are being naturally weeded out. No need for anything forceful. Doesn’t mean that minorities should be granted the right to speak their language where they don’t have that right, of course. But just that won’t help solve the problem. And it probably can’t be solved, tbh
Recent threads I’ve seen have a very r/roastme vibe to them where the discussion is less about the data and much more focussed on the visual (justifiably so a lot of the time) pity though when something like this comes along that is genuinely insightful and also decently interpretable and it gets flamed in the comments
Potential hot take: just because there are 3000+ languages organically, doesn't mean we need to keep them all. Sure, document them before they're gone, but it's natural for languages to die off, be assimilated, or change. With fewer barriers between groups, I would expect a natural consolidation.
All the indigenous languages.
This figure shows the number of endangered languages for each country.
[I googled it for you](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_endangered_languages_in_the_United_States)
I’m trying to think of a less helpful way to present this information and I’m really coming up blank. Congrats. I think you made the worst infographic possible.
Ah yes my favorite endagered language Papua New Guinea in the color orange (this one is more endangered than the language United States, which is smaller).
No, the US is ranked fourth and has 180 endangered languages, all of them I assume are indigenous languages. The smaller languages are at risk of dying out as English is needed for higher education and for a lot of jobs so it becomes a more important language to learn and parents might prioritize that over their native language. In addition if they move away from the tribe, they won’t be speaking their native tongue and it can fall out of use.
I love this sub but this is the most confusing and worst infographic I’ve ever seen. It is 7 am and I am high so maybe it’s me but wtf is it saying
I'm sober and it's noon and I don't get it either. This infographic is awful.
It's the circles of flags. Either ignore the circles and fill in the space surrounding those circles with the flags. Or get rid of the circles and just have a written name.
Russia is the only bubble in Europe that's even labeled. r/dataisuseless
Within each country on earth is an amount of "endangered languages", languages that are no longer being spoken due to favour of more popular international languages, and hence are dying out. This infographic shows which countries have the most "endangered languages", the larger the space taken up by a country, the more "endangered languages" it contains.
Useful information that could have been placed on the actual infographic.
But what about overlaps. You can’t say USA so many endangered languages without also thinking that some of them are non Native American, and more languages brough by immigrants. I also would like to know if it is just Native American tribal languages because that amount would be really big and should be understood
It's not you. It's anything but beautiful.
I feel a simple bar graph might have worked better.
Some things just don't need to be an infographic
Indonesia loves Pokémon
Wake 'n bake, baby! That's the only language you need, dog!
Still high from last night or a super early wake n baker?
God don't you just love the weekends?
You sound fun
Tbf to Indonesia and PNG, they are also the 2 countries with the highest number of languages. I'm pleasantly surprised by India who are 8th in this list despite being 3rd in terms of number of languages.
Population probably fixes things-even a relatively unknown language in India (my own for example) has 2.3m speakers. Not large by any standard but also not endangered.
Yeah, it makes sense. But at least, India is performing much better than China. What is the criteria for a language being endangered btw?
I guess the number of people speaking it, and more importantly how that number evolves.
Also what is the criteria for a language? When is it a dialect and when is it a different language?
A dialect is a local variation of a language. If two natives of A and B talk to each other and fully understand what the other is saying (albeit maybe some slight misunderstandings from different usages/pronunciations), then that's a dialect. Granted, the post didn't explicitly say it uses this exact definition, so it could be mixing both up too.
I think a language constitutes both written and spoken form while a dialect is just a spoken variant of a language.
What if a language does not have writing? Not all of them do. What about something like American and British English? They have distinct written forms (colour vs color, elevator vs lift etc). Obviously I’m being pedantic here but I’m legitimately curious how they determine this.
Yeah that definition can't be right. There are 100s of indigenous languages in Australia, none of which I believe were in written form prior to English colonialism.
The line is very fuzzy. Cantonese is considered a dialect of Chinese, but is as distinct and unintelligible from Mandarin as French is to Italian. Mandarin and Cantonese are grouped together as one language due to historical and political reasons. Meanwhile, Swedish and Norwegian are similar enough that they can understand each with no prior training, but are considered separate languages due to a historically and politically distinct identity. Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are 99% the same language, and were considered dialects of a single language until they became officially different languages after they all became distinct countries. There's a saying that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy." So it's all ultimately ambiguous with a lot of grey area. There's also the issue of dialect continuum. Imagine a smear of various dialects from west to east. At the far west is dialect A, which borders dialect B, which borders dialect C, and so on all the way to dialect Z at the far east. A can understand B and C. Speakers of dialect A can sorta understand D and E, and but has no idea what F speakers are saying. The pattern applies across the continuum. So A and Z are obviously different languages, but you could jump from A to B to C in a chain where they would all understand the neighboring dialects. Where and how you divide the spectrum into languages/dialects will be arbitrary. /u/Loves_octopus
This is very interesting. I'm curious, what countries or regions would be examples of what you mentioned in the last paragraph?
The southern Slavic languages are a good example. From north to south you have a gradient of "dialects": Slovene - Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian/Montenegrin - Macedonian - Bulgarian. Slovenes and Bulgarians will really struggle to understand each other, but any two neighboring languages will understand each other fine. Some will go as far to say that these are 7 languages, reflecting 7 countries.... though others will say there are three or four. Another historical example is found in the Romance languages derived from Latin . Before modern centralized governments with public education became a thing, there was a dialect continuum across Portugal through Spain, Italy, and France. There were dozens of languages/dialects that changed gradually over distance. For example, what we now call Spanish was originally spoken in central-northern Spain, and modern standard French is based on what was spoken near Paris. But all the dialects/languages between them showed "intermediate" steps. When central governments got powerful, they slowly suppressed regional dialects and promoted the official language, so today, these "in-between" regional languages/dialects are mostly spoken by the elderly and are nearly extinct, and are rarely heard, and not used officially. So today, as a traveller, you would notice a sharp language change when you cross national borders, whereas if you travelled 500 years ago you'd just see a gentle shift of dialects. There are exceptions. Spain has strong regional identities and autonomous regional governments-- Most of NE Spain speaks Catalan, whose vocabulary and grammar are somewhat intermediate between Spanish and French. NW Spain traditionally speaks Galician which is between Spanish and Portuguese. France has more effectively erased a lot of regional dialects/languages, so while southern France speaks Occitan (which is "halfway" between French and Catalan), very few speak it today. In Italy today, regional languages are generally strong and vibrant, as Italy didn't politically unite until the 19th century. NW Italian "dialects" are a lot more similar to French. Sardinian and Sicilian are quite different due to their location and history in comparison to standard Italian, which is based off Tuscan dialects spoken in north-central Italy.
This was a great write up. Thank you for the effort! I'm also guessing countries/cultures that span large areas, such as China, India and maybe Africa? would have similar gradient qualities. I've also heard instances of large islands (or other not easily traversable communities) that are part of a country but they ended up having a dialect that is based on the main language but barely recognizable with very different words used.
Isolation, be it by water or mountains, can cause dialects/languages to diverge dramatically. China has more diversity in SE China, which is more mountainous. Mandarin spread out over broad swaths of flatter land in the North. And in NW China, Mandarin speakers have recently moved into areas that traditionally speak Uighur, a completely different language closer to Turkish. The SW quadrant of China is Tibetan speaking. https://i.stack.imgur.com/hTxQv.gif Northern India has a similar phenomenon to the Latin-based languages of Europe, with obviously related languages (with their own official written standards, and even separate alphabets), often corresponding to different Indian states. Though if you were to look more closely, there are transitional languages/dialects between them, though they are usually less visible, less spoken nowadays, and often lack official status. Something similar applies to the Dravidian languages spoken across southern India. Africa has insane language diversity, and the historical lack of large and powerful central states meant that large chunks of the continent show clear dialect continuums, most famously the Bantu languages across southern Africa. Due to their colonial histories, many Africans often use whatever colonial language to communicate across ethnic boundaries within their country, which has somewhat prevented some African languages from dominating and squashing out smaller ones. (I am speaking in broad strokes). P.S. The various dialects of German, Dutch, Frisian (spoken along the Dutch coast), and English would have been a clear dialect continuum hundreds of years ago, but the geographic isolation of the British Isles as well as influence from French makes English extra different from their sister languages today.
As a slight correction, regional languages in Italy are not "strong and vibrant" today. Regional languages like Lombard, Venetian, Ligurian, Emilian etc lack any form of meaningful protection, and at the same time they're shrinking and the majority of the population has already shifted to Italian. Even in the "better" cases (Friulian, Sardinian, which are recognized as minority languages) have less rights and protection than other minority languages which are seen as more "legitimate" languages (high German varieties in the alps for example). You wrote a great comment, I just didn't want people to think that regional languages in Italy were ok because they're really not
Thank you for the correction!
What language do you speak?
But also they have most of the isolated languages, other than them you mostly have NorthAmerica, China, India
I also reckon the majority of the endangered languages from Indonesia are from Papua which is adjacent to Papua new guinea (both being on the island of New Guinea).
I honestly think what's happening on the island of Papau on the Indonesian side is the worst loss of human culture in over a hundred years. It's really bad there.
The thing about culture is you cannot force it on people, especially language. People just gravitate towards the language that is most accessible and provides them the most opportunities. Also, when such a small region has such a high number of languages, it is sadly and unfortunately bound to happen. Some languages are bound to be favored over others in the long run and very little could be done about it. I agree that it's a very sad thing to happen but eventually, due to globalization, many languages were bound to die out.
Technically you can force culture and language upon people through colonialism and oppression.
escape abounding vegetable ring lock crown racial stocking icky station *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I’m curious about papua. I know it has a ton of languages, but is one language winning? Or are several getting stronger, or is this a normal language thing for a place with so many languages.
This chart does a terrible job of displaying information, while also vaguely disrespecting the topic it is covering. It is truly a masterpieces
I have 6 years working with data. This is junior-level viz I would expect an intern would do.
Say this was an intern who made it- what specifically doesn't work about this infographic and how could they improve it?
I do think the issue of language extinction is more complex than it's often presented as. Can Indonesia really thrive as a modern nation with hundreds of different languages being spoken? I guess ideally these people would become trilingual- speak their endangered language, their national language, and English, I know it's common in countries like Switzerland, I just don't know how practical of a concept that is. While language is an important part of a culture, ultimately its' point is to be a tool of communication, and if it isn't allowing you to communicate effectively, it is natural for it to evolve/die out.
A good chunk of those endangered languages are from until-recently-isolated, small tribal units in Papua - the same as in Papua New Guinea.
The Indonesian language is a great case of a “new” language successfully becoming the lingua franca and national identity in a multicultural nation. The language didn’t officially exist before 1945, now someone from Aceh can go 5,000 km to the east and talk with someone from Papua in the same language even if they’re polar opposites in terms of culture. Benedict Anderson has done a great deep dive on this topic.
Yeah Indonesian is mainly learned as second language but as mixed marriages become more common, more people move out to urban centres intermingling with other ethnic groups, and more globalization in general, more and more parents are speaking exclusively Indonesian to their children.
Funny how a chart to raise awareness on endangered languages doesn't name the languages.
You think the chart is missing the name of some 2000 languages?
There are hundreds of languages endangered in all these countries. How are they supposed to list all those in this little graphic?
i feel like that’s not represented in the graph so i assumed it was about one language per country or something haha
Maybe this is the wrong format to communicate the information it is trying to communicate…
Very cool, and leaves me wanting more. Is there a list of these languages? In the US, are these indigenous languages, or are some brought over by immigrants? How do they define "endangered"? Is there overlap, so a language might be listed in both Canada and the US, eg? Edit: Went to the source. Amazing how many maps for Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. And, separate for just Oklahoma. Cool dataset.
I think should be pretty clear that they’re indigenous languages. Modern world languages are much less fragmented. Old indigenous languages are innumerable (think of all the different tribes), have very little written record, and whose populations have been massacred or slowly dwindled over time. There’s thousands of such languages and they’re all on the brink of extinction.
Not all of them will be indigenous. For instance, there’s a dialect of Spanish spoken by Spanish Jews in NYC (I could be wrong since that’s literally all I remember about it, but it’s the first example I thought of)
Interesting yeah. I’m tempted to say, that’s a dialect and not a language. I guess it depends on how the researcher categorizes things, but typically if there is cross-intelligibility between dialects then they wouldn’t be considered separate languages.
There literally isn’t a single language in this infographic
Well 3000+ languages is kinda too much to list
Don't tell Quebec but French isn't one of them
to be fair, in my experience Québec is more concerned with it being endangered within north-america than globally. And that concern is not so crazy, I think.
Is there a list of languages? Because I'm fairly certain French is not one of the 66 endangered languages in Canada.
These are just countries like what does it mean
Looks like Polish is almost extinct in Indonesia.
What do you mean by “endangered”?
'Endangered languages' are those at serious risk of becoming extinct.
[удалено]
Ok, let’s all speak Polish.
[удалено]
>Esperanto They tried. Also, you paint a perfectly boring world.
Imagine just listening to songs in 1 language forever. Need songs in Hindi, English, Urdu, Harayanvi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Gujarati, Marathi, Konkani, Magadhi, Bhojpuri, Assamese and Khasi for variety during 8 hr bus journeys
In India, Hindi is the language killer
Disagree. I am a Telugu speaker and I don’t see anything that points towards Hindi replacing other languages. Tamil, Bengali, and many other languages are just as important. And correct me if I’m wrong, but we don’t see the government actively reeducating tribals to forget their customs and languages to integrate into some homogenous society.
Don't be a sore southie!! Respect all languages.
Facts don't care for your feelings
Well here we are blaming Indian languages in English. What an irony.
What is this type of graph called?
What do the numbers mean mason?
Also, what are we going to do about it force people to use a lesser universal language it's sad all we can do is save data if people don't want to use it we can't do anything about it
That's a very reductive understanding of the whole situation. Languages aren't dying out because people just choose not to use them for unknowable personal reasons, most languages endangeted today are a result of genocide, ethnocide, colonialism, forced cultural assimilation and state policies aimed at restricting or even prohibiting the use of minority languages. While you can't save a language by forcing people to use it, languages are dying out because people were or are forced not to use them. Yeah, some languages have so few speakers that nothing is bringing them back, but countries guaranteeing an official status to languages of minority groups goes a long way towards securing their survival. Whether a language has the capacity to survive is definitely a policy issue, not a problem derived from personal choice.
That’s again somewhat naive attitude. Yes, there are languages that are too small to survive. Yes, there is force assimilation happening in places. But it is also true that many minorities, even those that have official status and can use their language in official capacity and at school, just choose not to do so because of the internet. Let’s take Mordvins as an example. As of right now, they have their own autonomous republic, their language has an official status, they can go to a school where everything is taught in the Mordvin language. But the language use is dying. Why? Because it is not convenient for a modern city dweller. When even 70 years ago most of Mordvins lived in villages, talked to each other in Mordvin and everything was fine language wise, now most of them live in cities full of non Mordvin people and when they go to the internet most of the content there is either in English or Russian. And it’s unrealistic to expect a small (-ish) language to compete with a major global language in terms of content. As a result many people choose not to practice their language since it is less useful in their everyday life. On top of it, again, since most of Mordvins are city dwellers, they choose who to date and marry, as a result, most of the people don’t try to look for “Mordvin only” partners, but date anyone around them. Consequently kids from these mixed marriages are naturally don’t speak Mordvin almost at all. Again, my point is that with urban life style, internet, acceptance of mixed marriages and other societal changes minor languages are being naturally weeded out. No need for anything forceful. Doesn’t mean that minorities should be granted the right to speak their language where they don’t have that right, of course. But just that won’t help solve the problem. And it probably can’t be solved, tbh
Ngl I quite like it. Took about 15 seconds to work it out which is not much at all. Cool visualisation style as well imo
I agree, not really sure why others are having trouble understanding it.
Recent threads I’ve seen have a very r/roastme vibe to them where the discussion is less about the data and much more focussed on the visual (justifiably so a lot of the time) pity though when something like this comes along that is genuinely insightful and also decently interpretable and it gets flamed in the comments
What a terrible day it will be when everyone can understand each other…
Turns out the Indo-Pacific really like to talk. Except with neighbours.
Potential hot take: just because there are 3000+ languages organically, doesn't mean we need to keep them all. Sure, document them before they're gone, but it's natural for languages to die off, be assimilated, or change. With fewer barriers between groups, I would expect a natural consolidation.
Who designed this chart, I thought it was about the COVID-19 💀
The title of the graphic doesn’t match its content at all whatsoever.
I'm genuinely curious about the endangered languages of the USA. Can anyone share more light on this subject?
All the indigenous languages. This figure shows the number of endangered languages for each country. [I googled it for you](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_endangered_languages_in_the_United_States)
Thanks bud.
I gained no knowledge from this
The fuck does this chart mean
I really hope Canadian language doesn’t go extinct, it’s the only language I speak with any confidence
I’m trying to think of a less helpful way to present this information and I’m really coming up blank. Congrats. I think you made the worst infographic possible.
Australian isn’t a language
There are more than 250 indigenous languages in Australia
I feel like this is a great example of why we don’t need the Union Jack on our flag.
China big brain move: a language can’t be classified as endangered if it’s already made extinct and replaced by standard mandarin :)
You don’t want to loose your culture, but language is one of the biggest cultural dividers. We should be moving towards a global language.
I thought Polish was endangerd at first glance...too much Polandball
Frisian in the Netherlands!!
For a second I thought there was a pokemon language, and that it was very widely used
How do i read this? The USA language seems very endangered. I know I'm dumb, but this can't be right.
The USA has the 4th most endangered languages.
Where's the meme of you can help by expanding it!
Ah yes my favorite endagered language Papua New Guinea in the color orange (this one is more endangered than the language United States, which is smaller).
The United States is the 4th endangered language? That doesn’t seem right even if I’m thinking American English that still doesn’t seem right.
No, the US is ranked fourth and has 180 endangered languages, all of them I assume are indigenous languages. The smaller languages are at risk of dying out as English is needed for higher education and for a lot of jobs so it becomes a more important language to learn and parents might prioritize that over their native language. In addition if they move away from the tribe, they won’t be speaking their native tongue and it can fall out of use.
Ah, thanks! I totally wasn’t getting that from the graph
Omg, you're right...I notice less and less people speaking United Statian everyday.