My mother tongue is called "Ehugbo" but it is an Igbo dialect, it's origin is the Southeastern part of Nigeria.
But I was born in the South south side of Nigeria where the language is "Efik", and the lingua franca is English (Since England colonized Nigeria), I speak a little Efik, and an average Ehugbo and an average General Igbo, and very good English 😀😀
These really are staggering data you've dropped here, it seems the world is slowly coming to the stage where only one language would be spoken by everyone, because I don't see any sign of stopping with the trend of mother tongues being lost.
Do you think this would rather be a good thing, @sathyasankar? Wouldn't it be nice if everyone is speaking the same language all over the world? No language barrier and stuff? You can go anywhere and talk to anyone and they'll get everything you say? It might not be so bad to lose these languages though 😀
@nevies, the son of Aphrodite
Wow..!! These languages you have mentioned here are entirely new names to me. I had few friends from Africa who spoke Kiswahili, Which belongs to Kenya I guess. Someone in the history knew almost 50 languages. Learning about languages itself is a different stream of science!
It is quite interesting to talk about a single world language, English has that potential and will be in that position within 50 or 100 years! But our mother tongues and cultures have to be preserved at any cost!
You're right, Kiswahili is spoken in Kenya and some other African countries.
I'll like to hear your reasons why you think our mother tongues should be preserved at any cost 😎
No language have such a property. It is said that each and every language which grows in size will collapse and perhaps divide into other languages. It is suspected that this happened to many extinct languages. This is some information theory related bound. I am not an expert. And I have no citations right now. English is in immense pressure to be honest because of the surge of words and usages from many languages. There is a possibility that the language collapses. But I don't know how and why even!