Dying minority languages in Europe

"‘We’re a bit jealous of Kneecap’: how Europe’s minority tongues are facing the digital future", Stephen Burgen, The Guardian (11/26/25)

What does it mean to lose a language? And what does it take to save it? Those were the big questions being asked in Barcelona recently

The author tells us:

There’s an Irish saying, tír gan teanga, tír gan anam: a country without a language is a country without a soul. Representatives of some of Europe’s estimated 60 minority languages – or minoritised, as they define them – met in Barcelona recently to discuss what it means to lose a language, and what it takes to save it.

Language diversity is akin to biodiversity, an indicator of social wellbeing, but some of Europe’s languages are falling into disuse. Breton, for example, is dying out because its speakers are dying, and keeping languages alive among young people is challenging in an increasingly monolingual digital world.

In turn, Burgen surveys the current bill of health for Catalan (about 10 million speakers in Spain; doing quite well, thank you), Frisian (approximately half a million speakers in northern Netherlands), Irish (nearly two million speakers in the Republic, thanks in part to the popularity of the rapper group Kneecap), Welsh (more than half a miilion speakers in Wales, which is slowly depopulating), and Euskera (around one million speaker in the Basque region that straddles France; and Spain).

Burgen concludes by stating that those minority tongues living amidst larger languages do best when they do not insist on rigid purity, but, following the Kneecap effect, "loosen their grip").

 

Selected readings

• "The 'genetic singularity' of the Basque people" (4/5/21)
• "Why is Basque an Ancient Language?" (1/3/07)
• "Hiberno-English: it's a soft day" (2/18/25)
• "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch" (2/15/25)
• "The Welsh heritage of Philadelphia" (8/26/24)
• "Xina" (11/26/18)
• "Occitan and Oenology" (10/8/23)
• "How to pronounce the name of the president of Catalonia" (11/6/17)
• "Of reindeer and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/23/18)

[Thanks to Philip Taylor]