Language Extinction

Introduction.

Language extinction is a well-known subject among linguists. It has happened since the beginning of human language and, no doubt, it will continue till the end of the time. But in contemporary world this phenomenon has acquired a distinctive feature as it runs beside globalization. Nowadays we are spectators facing the death of languages which have been able to survive throughout centuries but cannot deal with the new challenges brought by the global village.

The variety of Catalan spoken in the Italian city of Alghero, in the west coast of the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, known as Algherese, could be considered an endangered language and, consequently, facing extinction within the coming decades. The reasons for this situation are strongly tied to the social and economic situation of the local Catalan-speaking community.

Algherese from a linguistic perspective.

Algherese is considered, in the main, a dialect of Catalan. Obviously, as it happens quite frequently when a linguistic variety is spoken in a geographical area distant from the heart of the language, there are some scholars who defend a different position, arguing that it has enough differences to be considered as a full language. But our position is very clear in this matter: Algherese is a dialectal variation of Catalan, although with bigger differences if compared with other varieties which make it an isolated, idiosyncratic and consecutius dialect.

Algherese is part of the Eastern Catalan division, with seven centuries´ history, and due to its own historical details, it deserves the honour to constitute a unique group . At first, its origins are quite important in order to understand the heterogeneous and distinctive features of Algherese, as ...

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