junk
Gerry asks: What happened with Estonian?
Standard Estonian and Standard Finnish, both of which are Uralic
languages,
did not exist until the 19th century. These were just obscure mostly
unwritten
languages at the periphery of Europe. Anybody with any education spoke
a different, more prestigious language. The two were once just two
Finnic
dialects. Now, they are two separate, mutually unintelligible languages.
I have another question. Universal education and television have
weakened this chain-of-dialects. Will the internet manage to "dissolve"
it? And if that is the case, what will replace the chain?
If anything, the internet will strengthen local dialects. It lets
kind
meet kind in a wonderfully convenient way. In the end, however, I think
most non-standard local dialects, world-wide, are going the way of the
Dodo. There are a lot of people who are afraid that even the standard
languages
will be pushed to the fringe by the dominance of English; in Europe, the
French and Germans both are up in arms about how English is routinely
used
by all the other members.
Mark.