.. and that's OK, as long they get integrated in the surviving wave. I've a Serbian friend who thinks equally about his native language. Don't get me wrong, native languages are still important in our lifetime, but I'd rather learn one for good then move on to better things than keep chasing my tail competing for "better" ones.
Yes, I share that opinion, too, and I think tongues are disappearing. According to a recent Global Linguistic Survey published in the New York Times, almost fifty percent of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world today are at risk of extinction. To demonstrate the magnitude of the problem, the authors presented the fact that the Australian population speaks 231 Aboriginal languages, all of which are currently at risk of extinction. The researchers are working hard to record them, but all their efforts are a race against the time, especially since only three people who speak Magati Ke (the language spoken in the Northern Territory region) and the same number of people who speak Yawuru (Western Australia) are known today. Researchers often face unexpected difficulties when trying to record disappearing languages. For example, linguists trying to compile a dictionary of Ayapaneco, one of Mexico's indigenous languages, found that the last two native speakers refused to speak to each other, like lol wtf. Which language will dominate the world of business, entertainment and travel? A lot of people suggested that English would be the last, the last "world language". They believes that new technologies will make language learning a thing of the past. The American military, for example, has been developing portable translation devices for quite some time. The system works by selecting words in one language, turning those spoken words into text, and then translating them into English so that they can be spoken with a speech synthesizer.
Does a Yawuru understand Magati Ke language? Part of the reason I started this thread is that as a population of 20 millions, we're barely a town in China. Well OK, rather close to Shanghai. Is it acceptable for a city to also be a state? The old Greeks would have said so about Shanghai or the same population on 40x the territory. But we're not the old Greeks but an increasingly integrated culture.