Re: The chain-of-dialects

Gerry here:
Concerning Standard Estonian and Standard Finnish, I again forgot about
factoring in "class" and "education". It appears that when a group is
uneducated, not only do they not leave a written history, they also
don't leave their spoken language for posterity. So when trying to
include ALL language families into a particular structure, the task then
becomes impossible to attain.

Mark writes:
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.

Gerry: Yes, the internet will strengthen local dialects but only for
the "upper" classes or those who can afford to purchase a computer and
then take the necessary classes to learn how to operate it. A while
ago, I thought perhaps Spanish would be the language of "choice" because
it was so simple to learn. But, again factoring in "class" and
"education" I think you may be correct is saying that English just might
turn out to be the "common language". And if French or German were my
first language, I'd be up and arms also.

Question: In this discussion of language, you've only included the US
and Europe. Is that because you don't see any of the other language
families as presenting a viable challenge to English?

Gerry