12 most surprising European languages at risk of extinction – I didn’t realise there are so many people living in České Švýcarsko 😀 Hopefully they’ll help the trains run a little better…
12 most surprising European languages at risk of extinction – I didn’t realise there are so many people living in České Švýcarsko 😀 Hopefully they’ll help the trains run a little better…
4 comments
Since when does 5 million speakers qualify for endangered
This map is definitely wrong. Irish has much more speakers and they can’t even point place correctly on map
I know what’s going on as I have some relatives in Switzerland so here’s explanation.
The number is right, about 4 900 000 of Swiss speak Swiss German. I don’t know why the map place this to Czech republic, but it’s likely due to Bohemian Switzerland.
Anyway, Swiss German is basically a German with strong accent. Very strong. For example, a Czech speaker can understand someone who speaks Brno’s Hantec or Slovak. But, someone who speaks standard German will not understand Swiss German. The closer equivalent in Czech language would probably be Po Našimu.
And I still don’t understand why is it endangered. Swiss German is not going anywhere anytime soon…
What is surprising is that it doesn’t show basque or sorbian or something, ik that it’s supposed to be like “you wouldn’t guess these languages are going extinct” but then they put a random french dialect that’s only spoken on some island…