Languages

The death of a language is caused by a number of different factors. The first is that increased transportation and communication will increase the need for people to be able to communicate with each other. In some cases, this gives rise to a lingua franca, but in many cases it only gives rise to a majority language. A lingua franca like Chinook did not stick when the population of English-speakers became large enough to dominate conversations. Other lingua francas like Hindi or Malay give way to a third-party language like English because there is a lesser ethnic connotation associated with a third party language -- in a modern independent nation the colonial language is less offensive than one belonging to a dominant domestic group. Many languages developed only because there were conditions of geographic isolation that allowed the language to evolve over millennia into something distinct, so reversing that...
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