1185: Globalization and Language Mar 8, 2018

It used to be the case that languages and dialects could easily be tied to people-groups, but with the rise of globalization, people are abandoning their older languages for more profitable languages and creoles. As has been discussed here before, most of the world's languages are spoken by the minority of people; an estimated 10% of people speak 95% of all languages, with everyone else speaking the same handful. Historically, colonization and other national and regional foreign-occupations lead to the displacement or replacement of different languages, the affect of which is still present in the Americas and Australia especially, but this has happened everywhere. There are a number of reasons for this, but mostly it is that people abandon their "local languages" in order to gain access to economic opportunities. While those are sinister or unfortunate, those sorts of issues are indeed more preventable than another large cause, which is globalization does not lead people to adopt certain lingua franca for economic reasons, or the purposes of cross-cultural communications, but also people move around more in general, which means that even non-endangered languages, and dialects thereof, are changing in increasingly broader senses. It is not really possible to halt this type of natural language-change.
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