Survival of minority languages

The cultural assimilation of immigrant groups can lead to loss of languages over time. This oft-repeated trend is behind the Catalan culture in Spain, French Montreal and Quebec in Anglophonic Canada, Taiwanese in the Republic of China, and also Scots. The same is true for Scots in Scotland.

Apparently, the Scots language has distinct roots from other offshoots of Norwegian or Germanic inflected-English that are considered accents or dialects. Written about years ago, the debate about the distinctiveness of Scots as a language has flared since Brexit has threatened to remove Scotland from the European Union along with the rest of the United Kingdom. As a 2020 article from the Economist says (and a 2022 article from Euronews confirms):

Naturally, the case for independence plays up characteristics that differentiate Scotland from England. Among them is language, which diverges from the talk south of the border in two main ways. One is Gaelic, a Celtic language impenetrable to outsiders (it is related closely to Irish and Manx but only distantly to English), which, however, is spoken only by around 50,000 people, or about 1% of Scotland’s population. The bigger difference is Scots—though quite how different it is remains a matter of debate.

Beyond Europe, New Mexico's indigenous Spanish is fading as well. As the New York Times reports, "The dialect has managed to survive for the nearly two centuries since the United States took possession of New Mexico in 1848, making it the oldest continuously transmitted variety of Spanish in the country. Still, in an era when immigration from Latin America has boosted the number of hispanohablantes in the United States to more than 41 million, the fortunes of New Mexican Spanish — and the region where it once flourished — have been going in another direction." 

 

MHC