the increase is probably because of the secret language made by me and bro in 5th grade

About Arabic it's technically neither. It's classified as a "Dialect continuum" basically A can understand B which understand C which understands D which understands E but E and A can't understand each other.

Politics also play a big part in this topic, at least in Europe! My home country of Finland alone has multiple dialects of finnish that were considered their own languages; in fact standard finnish is a rather recent language and is mostly based on what was then considered an academic language. I also speak a minority language that isn't officially recognised anywhere.

I feel extremely sad when language die it like a piece of history dies Infront of us

The distinction between one language and another is deeply political. Arabic and Mandarin have mutually unintelligible speakers and are usually considered single languages, yet Serbo-croatian, scandinavian languages, and Malay which have high mutual intelligibility are split into multiple languages, mostly following national borders

Even the dividing lines between what we think of as well-established separate languages is blurrier than we think. I've seen conversations take place between Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese speakers where literally no one speaks the same "language" but there are zero comprehensibility problems, and it just looks like a perfectly normal conversation between three people. And to be honest, I know that Scots people speak English fine, but when they talk to one another -- in English -- I can get maybe one word in ten, if I'm lucky. Otherwise, I can't even tell it's English. I've had the same experience of some very quick, very fluent backcountry American accents, and I'm American!

Frisian is a official langues in The Netherlands, but over time less and less people speak it. And even thought it should be allowed to be in parliament, its rarely used. The dutch goverment did put more effort and funds recently into preserving the frisian langues.

And here I thought the answer was going to be "Tolkien".

As a Sami, we have lost a lot of our language. There uses to be several different Sami languages, however only the big 3 are remaining, however even these 3 are under threath. Take northern Sami as an example. It's the most spoken out of all the Sami languages, however it's losing it's value. Words are forgotten, especially those that speak of nature and especially reindeer herding. A lot of Norwegian words are mixed in with the Sami language, and more and more words are forgotten about. So while i don't think the language will dissapear anytime soon, the words definetly are, and it's a shame, since the Sami language is a wordy language, with tons of different words describing nature

I'm Canadian of Irish descent. I like speaking English and being able to communicate with so many people around the world but part of me wishes I was able to speak the language of my ancestors as well

I wonder if what you described with Arabic language is is anything similar to what is going on with Portuguese and Spanish?

I'm not sure that it makes sense to say that Yorok is 10,000 years old. It's like saying English is 6,000 years old, just because we can trace back English around that far back all the way to PIE

At first I thought they started counting programming languages too 🧑‍💻

2:44 Oh no, why did you end your video with Ithkuil 😂

1:21 As a native Arabic speaker, I feel obligated to correct something here. Most of these are dialects. *NOT* separate languages. I speak Kuwaiti Arabic, but that's just a dialect. I can perfectly understand Omani Arabic, Hijazi Arabic, Levantine Arabic, and so on, even though I was never taught them. However, if you move far enough to the northwest of Africa, you do start to get dialects that are very very different than those in the middle east. But most Arabic speakers still consider that Arabic even though they barely understand it.

This probably was not brought up because of the current situation, but Hebrew used to be extinct, yet now a great number of people speak it as revival

I wonder if at some point we'll start seeing new internet based languages.

2:46 you thought you could sneak some ithkuil into your video without me noticing? I will start translating it now, be back in 10 years with the translation.

1:30 but are those giraffes diverse enough to not be able to have children? or are they just different breeds?

Great video

It also probably helps that while it's been awhile since we stopped creating new spoken language, new sign languages are constantly being created and developed which would be such an interesting video in itself

1:23 by this argument English also doesn’t count as one single language since there is tons of dialects, some which has a huge difference from the standard! Is that sounds right to you?

How to tell if Yurok had been spoken 10 000 years? That would be extremely long age for a language, especially without written records.

When someone wants to learn Arabic, they learn Traditional Arabic first and for a reason Traditional Arabic is the official language of all these "dialect speaking" regions and people, in learning the source you can understand the branch, all these dialects formed from Quranic Arabic which most of these regions and people adhere to its religion "Islam" and was for extended centuries under Islamic Kingdoms and Sultanates that had Traditional Arabic as the official language and it affected them all, the Egyptians moved from old Egyptian to Egyptian Arabic, Yemen moved from Ḥaḍramautic, the Levante moved from Nabatian, Hebrew, Armenian and old Greek, Iraq moved from Aramaic, north Africa from Tamazight, Taryfit, Kabyle, Tamashaq some of these survived at the outskirts and with Bedouin populations that didn't interact too much with the urban areas which adopted its own dialect of Arabic, they still get influenced by it and learn it for various interactions with said urban areas So if a person focuses on learning a single dialect of Arabic without learning Traditional Arabic itself, he will quickly find out the dialects are just for informal speaking as all these regions and people read & write in traditional Arabic they learn that in schools, unless its a local song or poem etc

As long as we have records to the dying languages we can still revive it

Like Former Yugoslovia croat,bosniak,serb or Assamese,Bengali,Rohingya Or German & Austrian Are different language because of political or mutual hatered

"PHILLIPINES" - it's spelt Philippines

Ancient languages are vital as they are the key to constructing newer languages. Let's appreciate every single one of them!❤🎉

That fact that people made the afford to learn Yurok even though no one was speaking it and then proceeded to teach it to kids makes me so happy for some reason :D

question..... if some makes a Conlang, and then get enough people to speak it would that add to the official count? example if lots of folks learn Esperonto as the auxiliary tongue it was meant to be, or if enough enthusiastic Fans learn to be fluent in Elvish, or Vulcan, or Klingon, or some other fictional language..... would that count?

This is a great example of the script following a prescribed path even though the data doesn’t support the claim that the video was planned to make.

I am a native speaker of arabic and I feel that you misunderstand the difference between arabic dialects and seperate languages.like everyone in the middle east and egypt fully understands each other and even places outside the middle east I can understand extremly well saying omani arabic and saudi arabic are different languages is like saying people in new york and people in texas speak seperate languages. And saying people from egypt and people from libya speak different languages is like saying us and uk speak different languages. But what you said wasnt full false there are some places the speak arabic that is different to how others do its pretty tough to understand. Its like you trying to understand an irishmen living in a rural remote area. These people somewhat blur the line between dialect and language

2:46 yo can someone write a whole paragraph explaining what that last language says and yes, one paragraph, it looks like Ithkuil, and I'm scared.

"A Language is just a Dialect with an army and navy." -Some clever guy

Languages are also constantly evolving. Like right now I speak English that has very noticeably differences compared to the English I was taught.

As a conlanger I am doing my part to increase this number

So true . Im a lebanese and i can barely understand sudanese . Even though i refer to both as “arabic” . So i was shocked when i knew that the UK or USA alone “have different accents”

Nice, my conlang made the count increase.

That matches one of my theories on the title. I have come up with two more, one is that militaries are inventing new languages so the enemy has no clue what they are saying, the other is sci-fi has invented languages which fans decide to learn how to speak.

While the revival efforts for a language like Yurok may one day save the language, it's transmission that defines a language, not simply having living proficient speakers, or else Latin would be considered a living language. Basically, a language is only really "alive" if you have living L1 speakers, that is, people who acquired the language during primary language acquisition. They don't need to have acquired it from parents/caregivers who are also L1 speakers, though, which is why teaching kids how to speak it in school is a great and probably necessary step. That said, it's more important to keep the language culturally relevant, because if those kids who learn it in high school don't speak it at home when they grow up, their children won't grow up as native speakers.

warlpiri mentioned 🎉

It's not very clear cut. There used to be a language called Serbo-Croat but since the break up of Yugoslavia we now have Serbian and Croatian. The same thing with Czech and Slovak although people across the former Czechoslovakia seem to understand each other pretty well. I was once in the Czech Republic with a Polish guy who was able to talk to local people in his own language with only the occasional word not being understood. I also heard someone from Southern Sweden and another from Southern Norway conversing with no difficulty whatsoever but they both said that they found it hard to understand people from Trondheim in Northwest Norway

don't worry, soon we will have the java script problem where people will say: "why are there so many languages? we need one that does everything" so they make a new language that 'does everything' now there is one more language. so others will say: "why are there so many languages? we need one that does everything"

I bet is just new “discovered” before they are gone…

I feel like having less languages yet more people is a good thing. It means we can all understand more % of the population and it gets us a but closer to one true universal language

Makes me wonder about Elvish, Klingon, and Esperanto...how many languages are being created?

at 2:47 that looks like it says: "help"

So I'm Australian, but cant understand a word spoken in thick Scottish. Can barely understand a guy at work with some sort of dialect in England. Are they considered 3 different languages, or just English, like the Arabic example?

As English is the most spoken language I think we should really all be learning that so we can all communicate. That said even with it being the most spoken language only 1.5 billion people speak it as 1 of their languages which is 19% of the world. The other important thing about English is that it is most spoken as a second language so it must be easy enough for people to learn where as the second most spoken language (mandarin) is spoken by on 200 million people as a second language which means people that are not raised Chinese are mostly not interested in learning it. Asia is the market we really need to get English language into if we want there to be a common world language as most people are from Asia but the percentage of people who speak English there is much lower than the west and I feel like this widens the gap of cultural differences and hostilities between west and east.

Well the example about arabic always gets something wrong and is also highly politicized; whats really the case is more complicated than that: 1. Arabic is a diglossia, there is standard arabic, which includes arabic read in the qur'an, religious purposes in general, newspapers and news broadcasts, TV, cartoons, dubs and subs, speeches, school education and high education, UI, literature, etc. And there is colloquial arabic which are the dialects and slang that are used in everyday communication, texting, entertainment, etc. Standard and colloquial arabic are intellgible but its more one sided as all colloqial-standard divides are in all languages, thats why foreigners learning standard arabic often struggle with colloquial one, despite it seeming intuitive to us natives because colloquial arabic is still overwhelmingly arabic words, many of which are among the most common used in standard too (but foreign learners may not easily catch this at first), its just that we take shortcuts with things like pronunciation and grammar, and other shortcuts, also the use of certain phrases and expressions, and some suffixes/prefixes. But overall being a diglossia meaning you grow up with both colloquial and standard, which also means the distinction between both can get porous in practice, since both are the same language there is no explicit rule to how much standard you can insert within colloquial (but if you do this in mundane speak you will sound either silly, or pretentious). It feels more protective the other say around not letting colloquial seep into standard but it happens sometimes for a number of reasons. 2. Dialect contiuum: when it comes to colloquial arabic, its divided into mashriqi (east) and maghribi (west) with the dividing line being somewhere in libya. Eastern dialects have a slight contiuum going from egypt to levant to arabia but are mutually intellegible among each other, not only that, theyre also intelligible to maghrebis, thid especially due to cultural reasons like egyptian cinema making the egyptian dialect understandable for everyone, syrian dubs of turkish drama and general levantine representation in other stuff, saudi cultural exports especially on the internet in the early 2010s when they took over arab yoitube, etc. Maghrebi dialects are very mutually intellegible among each other too but are less acessible to outsiders, theyre still understandable (speaking from a pov of a mashriqi) but you cant mimic them basically. This is less because of the non arab (mostly french) expressions used, most of it is still arab; its just because of unfamiliarity of some the structure mashriqis are used to in their colloquials, you can still point out to arabic words and maghrebu affixes individually when its written out (btw i have fun sometimes listening to videos of maghrebis because even though i do understand it, its stimulating enough) Hope this cleared out some of the misconceptions a bit!

How many distinct English languages are there?

sina toki pi toki pona ala :(

Yurok did NOT die in 2013, there are still active speakers. It did not die in any point, please try not to be misleading.

mrmryrwrk' is still my most favourite word of all the langauges.

The Netherlands has two official languages. Can you name them? Thing is, several regions in the Netherlands now want their regional accent to be recognized as a language 🤷 so the "new language" thing makes me wonder ...

If we all spoke the same language. I feel we would get a lot more done together and share information more easily.

We like to preserve old things. I think it's for our innate fear of full death, that being, being forgotten. So we want to save as much information as possible, i.e. dying languages. But maybe we should also recognise that it's the way of things. Yes, thousands of year old languages are being forgotten each year, but that has been happening for thousands of years! There is an untold number of forgotten languages. And on the other hand more are being discovered each year, some just as old or even older. And add to that the fact that we're not done creating new languages. Conlangs and real ones are born each year, as well

I wonder about languages that diverge into more languages…

If you ever need to find out where North is and your hand a northern and southern giraffe, you can let them walk around a bit, not observe them so they become probability fields and then observe them and repeat a few times and then there’s a high likelihood you find north by the positions of the giraffes relative to each other. That’s the trick they used in airplanes until Rutherford invented the new atom on 1911. (probably the right year)

Colloquial hindustani IS still one language and always have been. When Pakistan and India seperated, the government forcefully changed the form and literary languages to be different.

A language is the soul of a cutlure. If one dies, the other soon follows.

but the number of language family is decreasing, which is irreversible.

Siavosh language is so unknown and so few people speak it and I think that there are only 15 people left who can speak it

I don’t know anything about Yurok, but there is no way it’s the same language as 10k years ago!

So basically what happened was we had a puzzle piece which turned out to be made of puzzle pieces... Does English have that? Bc thats more of dialects rather than a separate language?

It seems generally better that everyone is trending into a few major languages (moreso if it gets down to everyone speaking just one). By all means, it is important to keep a historical knowledge of these languages and to record as much of them as we can before they disappear (I personally wish I had a more complete dictionary of my ancestors' language), but world wide communication and understanding would benefit so much from not requiring translators.

It’s Philippines…..

I wonder if this is a similar pattern found in ASD diagnosis incidence.

Given that our planet is globalizing and homogenizing as we work towards a universal language (English most probably), isn't the idea of learning dead languages conflicts with it? What is the reason for us to study language if we're not to use it to communicate? I find it strange that we want to have both diversity and homogenity at the same time.

I love how the Philippines was misspelled. It always amuses me how people struggle to spell that word and it's demonym.

Sooo.. As an English speaker, I can barely understand the "English" of some of the folks in some obscure places in Scotland or Ireland.. Using the same example as the Arabic, what does this mean for the 2 very different "English" languages?

We are living before the fall. Embrace it!

Is Valyrian from ASOIAF Quenya and Sindarin LOTR considered official language?

Hebrew is one of the few examples of a language being revived on a national scale

Unangam tunuu still has some living speakers and only went extinct in Russia

I never understood why or how, new languages come about. There should be more than a handful

Me and two friends made our own language its called No man Language. Where still planning changing it since thats not creative or ogrinal. Where the only ones who know it so ig My languge our languge is official

Veeeery small correction: Philippines not Phillipines at 0:45 onwards :)

So, would it be fair to think that instead of one dead language, we might have lost a few, just because we didn't knew it good enough? I mean, it is a thought with maybe no value, but even if they were dialects, the different words and different meaning for some words, are just too precious to not be known. I know it is part of everything, but I don't like extinctions.

How do new languages evolve?

Sorry, but I kinda can’t get over the misspelling of “Philippines” at 0:45. >_

So dialects are just diffrent languages?

nah, it must be all the new conlangs people make these days

We all speak german in germany. But damn, I cannot understand a bavarian, swabian or saxon speaking german any more than I can understand french. Might be their own language at this point...

Magnum fac Latinum iterum.

Very good example with Arabic as an Algerian it's very unlikely that a middle eastern understand our language

Dang I thought this was gonna be about conlangs

me looking at video thumbnail: conlang?

Is cockney its own language?

A dialect is a language of its own

Losing

That's a relief, only the number of *_counted_* languages is increasing, not the *_actual_* number of languages

A language is a dialect with an army

85 million Cantonese speakers in the world and this language is still disappearing within a decade because of the politics and authority speak Mandarine.

Giraffes are not “evolving” but as with most other animals they are merely expressing different traits originally coded into the DNA of the organism, similar to the hundreds of dog breeds.

So dialects are languages now?

My native language of Acadien isn't on the list yet

Is the UMA Languaje's fault.

1:22 they are not distinct languages, they are dialects of Arabic

Native Arabic speakers are nowhere near 1 billion, I don't even think that counting second-language Arabic speakers would increase the number to 1 billion. 1:08