Languages lacking economic support are slowly disappearing

Evidence

It is true that the leveling effect of Anglo-Arnerican is a persistent threat for everyone and that this language, in turn, risks being transformed into a technical salesman’s Esperanto, a perfunctory containerization of expression (neither Faulkner’s nor Hopkins’s language but not the language of London pubs or Bronx warehouses either). It is also true that the actual situation is that languages lacking the support of economic power and the competitive poli tics that convey this are slowly di sappearing. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 578

Categorization

• XREF: Material-conditioned disappearance of idioms — empirical grounding relevant to whether collective identity can be held strategically when its substrate language erodes. — connects to: Contemporary languages are newly conscious of their own possible disappearance — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 349; Most North American Indigenous languages will be extinct by 2050 — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 679