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Why do ethnic and programming languages ​​die out, and how do they help save them on social networks

Hello, Habr! We at MNFST are developing a platform for brands and microinfluencers. Our experience shows that influencers can realize themselves in various fields of activity. Some attract attention to environmental problems, others help save endangered languages.

In the article I will talk about the second category of influencers.


Annie Spratt - Unsplash

Why do languages ​​die out


The total number of languages ​​on the planet exceeds 7 thousand , but a significant part of them is threatened with extinction. As writes Discover Magazine, half will disappear by 2100. Already, many of them are spoken by no more than a thousand people, but there are more extreme cases - there are only two native speakers of the North American Indian dialect Mansi in the world , and they are more than 70 years old.

Linguists consider the disappearance of languages ​​a natural process, due to historical factors and migration. Back in the 70s they celebratedthat small ethnic groups lose their languages ​​and move to more common in their region. But in recent years, globalization, social networks and the Internet have significantly accelerated this process - from the point of view of professional development in any field, it makes little sense to limit yourself to using a language without international status. On the other hand, technology - from digital archives to social networks - helps people save a significant layer of cultural heritage. I will share examples.

Who and what saves


Algonkin , Chippewa , Mississauga, and Ottawa tribes live on a number of US and Canadian provinces . Between themselves, they communicate in the Ojibwe language . In the XVII century, he played an important role in the fur trade between the Indian tribes from the Great Lakes region and the French. It was the Ojibwe that gave the world culture the words of the lodge and totem. Today, it uses only 200 Indian tribes - this is about 55 thousand people. To correct the situation and save the disappearing language, two speakers strive - James Vukelich (James Vukelich) and Roy Tom (Roy Tom). Using Facebook, they are trying to popularize Ojibwe and teach it to everyone.

, . — 2,5 .

Another example is related to the Chikasawa Indians, who live in Oklahoma. The last person to speak his language ( chikaso ) died in 2013. The remaining representatives of the tribe almost completely switched to English. To bring ethnic language back to life, a member of the Chikasawa tribe, Joshua Hinson, developed a special app to study this dialect.

Similar projects exist in Russia - developers from Tuva have released an iOS application for learning the Tuvan language . It is spoken by about 230 thousand people in Siberia and Mongolia, various literature is published, newspapers are published and radio and television broadcasts are conducted. But despite this, UNESCO linguists carried it ten years agoto the class of "causing concern." Developers from Tuva hope that their application will help support those who continue to use this language, and will attract a new audience to learn it.


Stéfano Girardelli - Unsplash

Linguist David Harrison, together with National Geographic, also runs its endangered language conservation project. The professor travels the world, looking for representatives of rare nations and recording their speech. One of the works he dedicated dialect koro aka North India, which owns about a thousand people. Until 2008, he remained unknown to the scientific community, and Harrison's group managed to find him. Researcher shares his findings on the YouTube channel EnduringVoices. Thus, the author wants to capture and preserve ethnic languages, even digitally, if they are destined to disappear.

Yiddish is another example of a language for which there is a struggle. Before the start of World War II, more than 10 million people spoke it. Today, this figure has decreased to 500 thousand and continues to decrease, as more and more Jews prefer to communicate in Hebrew. Corrects the situation and draws attention to the problem translator Nick Block (Nick Block). He opened a Twitter account and publishes Yiddish words that cannot be found in dictionaries, and even makes educational cartoons .

What about programming languages


Not only spoken languages, but also programming languages ​​(YPs) enter the category of endangered ones. For example, fewer people write on Perl - its TIOBE index (which measures the popularity of languages ​​based on search queries on Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and other sites) has been falling for 14 years and is only 0.9% .

Major manufacturers of operating systems have already begun to abandon Perl. Apple decided to remove the pre-installed Perl interpreters in newer versions of MacOS. But most likely, the language will not completely disappear - enthusiasts lead thematic groups in the social. networks that discuss the problems of nuclear weapons and related news. This group can be found on Facebook.- Now there are four thousand people in it, and about fifty new participants come there every month. Such world communities are a good platform for influencers with expertise in the topic and influence within the language community. Such people help to draw attention to the outgoing YP.

The Objective-C language turned out to be in a similar position . In 1983, it was developed by engineers Brad Cox (Brad Cox) and Tom Love (Tom Love), as employees of the telecommunications company ITT Corporation. Ten years ago, many IT companies, such as Apple, actively used this language. The corporation has its own implementation of Objective-C and a runtime library . But Objective-C began to lose ground: currently its TIOBE ratingless than one percent , and Apple prefers another language - SWIFT. But there are people who want to restore the status of this PL. In 2016, a group of enthusiasts developed a compiler - mulle-objc . To promote the product, they came up with a hashtag - #MakeObjCGreatAgain. The news about the compiler appeared on Hacker News , where it gained more than a hundred pluses and forty comments.

Another YP that is almost forgotten is SPITBOL . This is an implementation of the SNOBOL4 language from the 60s, which includes 28 thousand lines of code. His task is to work with text, symbols and pattern recognition. SPITBOL is almost never used today, but 70-year-old Dave Shields, who worked at IBM and contributed to the development of the Jikes compilerseeks to save the tongue. To do this, he passed his source code to open source.

The engineer alone adapts SPITBOL to work on modern OS and port it from assembler to other PLs. He publishes all the code in the repository on GitHub .

The Shields project began as a simple hobby, but his work attracted the attention of the IT community to "rare" technology. SPITBOL was even used to analyze the stolen personal data of the Ashley Madison website .

Saving tongues is important


With the disappearance of languages ​​- both spoken and designed for writing programs - part of the historical heritage is leaving. This fact can have a serious impact on science and technology. For example, assuming that there would be no Samoan speakers in the world, we might not have discovered a cure for the first type of immunodeficiency virus. The inhabitants of Samoa were familiar with the healing properties of the plant Homalanthus Nutans (Mamal tree), containing the necessary active substance.

Influencers on social networks perform an important task - they help save endangered dialects, fostering interest in them within the framework of their community. Who knows, maybe some of the languages ​​will help create a new medicine or breakthrough application.

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