"As the legend goes, when the Turkish sultan first heard of Ubykh, the bizarre-sounding language spoken by Muslims who had emigrated from the northwestern Caucasus in the mid-19th century, he dispatched a servant to learn more.
When the servant returned, he described what a language with 83 consonants and one vowel sounded like by taking out a bag of pebbles and pouring them on the sultan's marble floor. ''Listen to these sounds,'' he said. ''Foreigners can gain no greater understanding of Ubykh speech.''
Today, if people are curious about Ubykh, they can listen to a recording instead of a handful of tumbling stones, but they can't hear it spoken in person. The last Ubykh speaker, Tevfik Esenc, died in Turkey at the age of 88 in 1992." - http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~vaux/ubykh.htm
83 consonants and one vowel!!!!! Now wouldn't that have been something to keep?
Languages; history, ways to view the world, dye. Isn't it a pity?
"Roughly half the world speaks one of 10 mega-languages as a primary, or mother, tongue. Mandarin Chinese is spoken by 16 percent of the world's population, followed by English and Spanish at 5 percent each; varieties of Arabic, 4 percent; Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali and Russian, 3 percent each, and French and Japanese, 2 percent each, Ethnologue reports.
Meanwhile, 60 percent of existing languages have 10,000 speakers or fewer, said David Harmon, who analyzed the 'Ethnologue survey and is a member of Terralingua, a society dedicated to language preservation. Languages with so few speakers are highly vulnerable to disruption. "
If your language is small, be proud of it! Don't see it as an obstacle.
Anyway, besides trying to make you aware of the situation, I can ask you this; do you think that it's good or bad that there are fewer and fewer languages spoken throughout the world?
