Personally I'm hoping that globalisation prunes out as many languages as possible before we end up with brain implants automatically translating everything for us and no one can communicate without these chips.
Becoming bilingual is one thing. Completely extinguishing a language is a totally different matter. It is usually associated with migrating away from the geographic area of the language and/or physically losing speakers (old age, wars, genocides, etc.)
To make an example and be blunt: I do not expect any European country official language to get extinct anytime during our lifespan unless that country gets destroyed, which obviously won't be a good thing.
There are several reasons a language can go extinct, and while the reasons you mentioned are included there are several other reasons that you didn't consider. The most common way language death occurs is through contact with a prestige language, which results in social pressure that makes the non-prestige language become less and less commonly spoken[1]. A community becoming bilingual is part of this process -- it doesn't always result in language death, but it is an early stage of that form of language death.
As for a European country official language (strange line to draw), Icelandic is already in a state where younger Icelandic natives speak to each other in English because smartphones do not support their native language. It is entirely possible that Icelandic will be in danger of extinction this century[2].
(I guess we've skipped over the discussion about whether language death can occur without genocide.)
> it's a bit of a mistake to say latin disappeared but I digress
Latin is a dead language. It's not extinct (because it's used for ceremonial reasons by the Catholic Church) but it has no native speakers. This is not a remotely controversial statement. Old Church Slavonic has a similar role in Slavic Orthodox Churches and is also a dead language for the same reason.
> Nowhere in the article says that. And most smartphones do even have support (including the Icelandic keyboard).
In my defense, I can't read the article -- I linked it because this Tom Scott video[1] uses that article as a reference for the Icelandic example he gave where he explicitly says that Icelandic is not supported by modern smartphones. My phone does have Icelandic support now so I guess the statement was only true at the time he said it?
You're of course right about "Latin is dead" (for practical purposes). But there's lots of nuances that get lost in this statement
Latin is dead in the same way as Middle English is dead. The Latin that died is the one around the late Roman Empire time that was "photographed" and frozen in time as Ecclesiastical Latin (oversimplification, of course)
And of course the modern romance languages derived from it, but there's no exact time where those "flipped the switch" and became modern French, Spanish, Catala, Portuguese, etc. So in a way it could be argued that they're Latin 3.0 w/ DLCs (which I'll totally give that it's a big stretch)
By your criteria no language that has survived to now will disappear without a major global calamity. Effectively, latin is a not a language for a native speaker that wants to go through their life and leave future native speakers.
Regarding Icelandic, I know little about it except that it has a lot of non-ANSI if written properly. I already know many latin language dialect speakers that developed their behavior when the limits of SMS unicode were significantly smaller than ANSI, with long term repercussions. I'm not sure why facts like that would need to be in the article to discuss here?
Yes, I’d be happy to learn a new language if it was the step to one unified language. Of course there is no way to back that up since it will never happen but I at least assume I’d do it if that was the case.
Would you not feel even slightly unhappy that your children (or grandchildren) would not be able to read the original versions of Shakespeare, Dickens, or Austen or that they wouldn't be able to watch the original versions of movies and shows you've enjoyed? They would only be able to watch and read translations, and all of the linguistic artistry would be lost to them.
It's not just about becoming bilingual, a population becoming bilingual in a "prestige language" is the first stage of language death (though of course it doesn't /always/ lead to language death).
That isn't the case for every language, I'm just trying to come up with an equivalent explanation of why wishing for languages to die out is a bad thing.
How would you feel about being the one that has to teach your children a language that will hinder their prospects instead of one that will help them succeed, just so that the speakers of the bigger language feel good about themselves that they are good people or something?
I could not think of a more obvious way of telling everyone that you are monolingual than implying that knowing another language is a burden. Children are not burdened by being multilingual.
It is true that social pressures kill off local languages, but it's usually not because parents don't want to teach their children their mother tongue, it's that people stop using the language to communicate because of the influence of the "prestige language". My parents (and all of the parents in the immigrant community I live in) went through great pains to teach their children their native language.
English is, of course, my second language, maybe that's why you didn't quite grasp what I was saying.
The burden is not in knowing another language, the burden is in making the "less useful" language your main one.
Your parents and all of the parents in the immigrant community you live in are very happy that English is now your main language which you acquired through school, friends, tv etc. Or maybe they put you in your-language-only schools, made sure you socialized with your-language-only friends and watched your-language-only media?
I don’t think I my prospects in any way is hindered by being a native speaker of a fairly small language. If anything, I prefer having English as a second language.
How would you feel if your kids only learned Chinese[1], and not a word of English?