Do you speak an endangered language?

[Peter Korsten]

Have a look:

http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?pg=00206

Apparently, I don't - yet. But it's marked as 'unsafe'.

This list is a good example, really. We all speak English here, but all 
this global communication leads to a marginalisation of local 
communication, or so it seems.

Strange that Limburgian-Ripuarian (I can easily understand the dialect 
from Cologne) with 2.6m speakers is marked as unsafe, whereas Maltese 
with less than 400,000 speakers is not. It really depends on what the 
lingua franca or the official language is in a certain area.

This weekend, we're having a small party. There will be my wife 
(Maltese), me (Dutch), a Maltese (used to be married to a Spanish 
woman), his girlfriend (Dutch of Jewish-Polish descent), another Maltese 
(of British-Italian descent) and her boyfriend (English, used to live in 
Ireland).

Lots of influences here. :)

- Peter