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Concept
Minority language
Summary
A minority language is a language spoken by a minority of the population of a territory. Such people are termed linguistic minorities or language minorities. With a total number of 196 sovereign states recognized internationally (as of 2019) and an estimated number of roughly 5,000 to 7,000 languages spoken worldwide, the vast majority of languages are minority languages in every country in which they are spoken. Some minority languages are simultaneously also official languages, such as Irish in Ireland or the numerous indigenous languages of Bolivia. Likewise, some national languages are often considered minority languages, insofar as they are the national language of a stateless nation.
There is no scholarly consensus on what a "minority language" is, because various different standards have been applied in order to classify languages as "minority language" or not. According to Owens (2013), attempts to define minority languages generally fall into several categories:
Demographic definitions: 'Minority languages are those whose speakers are fewer than those of another group(s), within a defined area.' In highly linguistically diverse areas, this can mean that even the largest language community is smaller than 50% of the total population of that area (a "plurality language" rather than a "majority language"). As an example, de Vries (1990) pointed out that at the time, the country of Cameroon's largest linguistic group, Fang, constituted only 19% of the total Cameroonian population, and was thus a minority in the country.
Socio-political definitions: 'Minority languages are those which a given population perceives to be minority ones', or even 'those languages whose speakers, the linguistic minority, feel their language as threatened.' Such definitions have several issues in that they tend to be subjective, used for political campaigning to urge political and legal institutions to officially recognise them, and to suffer from Eurocentrism.
Official source
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Ontological neighbourhood