>waluk@... writes:
>QUESTION: What happened with Estonian?
-- Estonian is closely related to its neighbor across the gulf, Finnish --
they're both Finno-Ugrian languages.
To the south of Estonian are languages of a completely different
(Indo-European, Baltic sub-group) language family.
Latvian has spread into the territory of and replaced a Finno-Ugrian language
close to Estonian, since the early medieval period.
>Gerry: 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?
-- English, probably.
Languages tend to spread and be adopted as they become more useful. Modern
southern French people mostly speak Standard French, not Provencal, because
under modern conditions (which require literacy and frequent movement and
long-distance communication) Standard French is more useful. Back in the
medieval period, Provencal was more useful to a peasant in Provence; few
people he encountered were likely to speak anything else.
On the Internet, English is the most useful language. Not only are a very
large number of posters themselves English-speaking, but it's the language
that speakers of various other languages are most likely to know. A Russian
and a Hindi-speaker, for instance.