Dying minority languages in Europe
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"‘We’re a bit jealous of Kneecap’: how Europe’s minority tongues are facing the digital future", Stephen Burgen, The Guardian (11/26/25)
What does it mean to lose a language? And what does it take to save it? Those were the big questions being asked in Barcelona recently
The author tells us:
There’s an Irish saying, tír gan teanga, tír gan anam: a country without a language is a country without a soul. Representatives of some of Europe’s estimated 60 minority languages – or minoritised, as they define them – met in Barcelona recently to discuss what it means to lose a language, and what it takes to save it.
Language diversity is akin to biodiversity, an indicator of social wellbeing, but some of Europe’s languages are falling into disuse. Breton, for example, is dying out because its speakers are dying, and keeping languages alive among young people is challenging in an increasingly monolingual digital world.
In turn, Burgen surveys the current bill of health for Catalan (about 10 million speakers in Spain; doing quite well, thank you), Frisian (approximately half a million speakers in northern Netherlands), Irish (nearly two million speakers in the Republic, thanks in part to the popularity of the rapper group Kneecap), Welsh (more than half a miilion speakers in Wales, which is slowly depopulating), and Euskera (around one million speaker in the Basque region that straddles France; and Spain).
Burgen concludes by stating that those minority tongues living amidst larger languages do best when they do not insist on rigid purity, but, following the Kneecap effect, "loosen their grip").
Selected readings
- "The 'genetic singularity' of the Basque people" (4/5/21)
- "Why is Basque an Ancient Language?" (1/3/07)
- "Hiberno-English: it's a soft day" (2/18/25)
- "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch" (2/15/25)
- "The Welsh heritage of Philadelphia" (8/26/24)
- "Xina" (11/26/18)
- "Occitan and Oenology" (10/8/23)
- "How to pronounce the name of the president of Catalonia" (11/6/17)
- "Of reindeer and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/23/18)
[Thanks to Philip Taylor]
DJL said,
December 2, 2025 @ 7:40 am
Irish has 2 million speakers partly because of Kneecap? Shurely shome mishtake!
J.W. Brewer said,
December 2, 2025 @ 8:21 am
That article's claim that 624,000 of the people who know Irish use it on a "daily" basis is difficult to reconcile with the 2022 Irish census data (per wikipedia) saying that only 71,968 speak Irish daily.
The key difficulty is that quite a lot of adults in Ireland have some familiarity with the Irish language because, and only because, they were forced to study it in school. If you wanted to boast about how many people in the U.S. speak Spanish you could run up the numbers with tens of millions of functionally monolingual Anglophones who took a few years of high school Spanish and haven't forgotten all of it but rarely make active use of it.
On a brighter note I am pleased to note that I learned yesterday that a Spanish university whose grad students do linguistics scholarship on the English language is happy to celebrate and promote that research with a press release written in Galician, a regional language not even mentioned in the article. (In that language "philology" comes out as "filoloxia," rather than the "filologia" preferred by all three of Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish.) https://www.usc.gal/gl/xornal/novas/circulo-linguistica-inglesa-profunda-ilusions-gramaticais-case-sinonimos-vinculados
Jenny Chu said,
December 2, 2025 @ 9:00 am
@JW Brewer that's delightful! More press releases should be issued in minority languages.
I was covering environmental news for COP30 this past month and one thing I noted is that they issued a number of their press releases in indigenous languages. Not all of them, and not all of the languages, but it was a cool gesture and even if it didn't help people from the region (Para) read news about climate change, it did at least remind the rest of us that there's a lot more to Brazil than (Brazilian) Portuguese.