How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbars Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks [2010] by Robin Dunbar

Author:Robin Dunbar [Dunbar, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harvard University Press [1st ed US hc]
Published: 2010-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

Gaelically speaking

Languages go extinct just like animals and plants, and we are currently witnessing a major period of language extinctions. Although there are thought to be just under seven thousand languages currently spoken in the world, no fewer than 550 of these are spoken by fewer than a hundred (mostly rather elderly) people and will certainly be extinct within the next decade or two. Perhaps as many as half of all the rest will be extinct within the next century. One of those could well be Gaelic, the language of [Page 152] the Scottish Highlands and islands for at least the past thousand years since the western seaboard was colonised by Gaels from Ireland. With only around sixty thousand, invariably bilingual speakers in Britain (ironically, there are more native Gaelic speakers in Canada, whither many Scots emigrated in the nineteenth century), Gaelic is already on the critical list: it will not take many generations of declining use in everyday contexts for it to slip over the edge of oblivion to join Latin, Sanskrit, Pictish (the language previously spoken in the Highlands when the Romans arrived in Britain) and the dinosaurs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.