[dalbasal]

A generation ago, Dutch minority dialects & languages were really discouraged and some were nearly killed. Kids were disciplined in school for using them. A generation before that, British accents/dialects^ actively suppressed to give way to standard (King's) English.

I think there were almost no advantages to this dialect killing.

Small minority dialects are at a danger of dying out, not crowding out the bigger languages. This is how all of europe worked for hundreds of years. My Grandfather grew up speaking yiddish (german dialect) in school, czech in town & Hungarian at school. These are completely unrelated and individually difficult languages. He later went to college in German & Latin, later on English. He spoke 10 languages in total, most fluently. I knew him in a language that he learned in his 40s. This was normal in his day. They weren't afraid of languages then.

Anyway... if your "home" language is a tiny, local one. There is no danger that you will be monolingual in a commercially useless language. You will speak a big language too. Speaking 2 makes the 3rd one easier to learn.

^more on the dialect end of the spectrum than most people realize.

[ocschwar]

Jersey Dutch died out completely in the US, without any suppression by the government. Cajun French is on its last legs despite government support.

And it was purely the result of broadcast radio.

[_emacsomancer_]

The US culture/society also tends to kill off non-English languages. Spanish is large enough and with a 'renewable' resource of Spanish speakers from other parts of the Americas that it manages to survive, but other languages do not fare as well.

[schoen]

I don't think that's quite right. Chinese is a notable counterexample in a lot of places, as well as Vietnamese and Tagalog and some others. But Spanish definitely has a more universal geographic distribution in the U.S. than any other non-English language.

This article and map were pretty interesting:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/langua...

[_emacsomancer_]

There's enough immigration that other languages can get 'renewed' too, but the general pattern is for languages to die off by the second generation. This is in stark contrast to what happens, say, in India where speakers maintain ancestral languages much better even when they have been resident in area which employs a different language for many generations. It seems to come down to cultural handling of mono- vs multi-lingualism.