THE LOSS OF OLD LANGUAGES.S. This article by Peter Bakker at the ScienceNordic website (link via Real Clear Science) discusses how languages are dying and about how some new ones are created. There are estimated to be some 8475 languages. Experts estimate that only about 10% of them will survive until the end of this century. I was astonished to read that the average language is spoken only by from 3000 to 5000 people. No wonder most are expected to die out. I was reminded of the way that, as I posted here, in the 1800’s France was divided into 55 dialects and hundreds of subdialects.
Languages that have survived for a long time tend to develop distinctive complications. Bakker says that some languages have more than 30 ways of forming a plural; others have up to 15,000 verb tenses. It makes sense that for a language to maintain itself and maintain complications in grammar it should be isolated, and encounter few outsiders.