Page 221 - Manj razširjeni evropski jeziki in jezikovne politike

Summary

‘safe,’ Sln. varen, ‘vulnerable,’ Sln. ranljiv, ‘definitely endangered,’ Sln. de-
jansko ogrožen, ‘severely endangered,’ Sln. resno ogrožen, ‘critically endan-
gered,’ Sln. skrajno ogrožen and ‘extinct,’ Sln. izumrl.
It is not the genealogical dimension which has been the main crite-
rion for selecting the less commonly spoken languages including in our re-
search, the priority having been given to the idioms whose sociolinguistic
positions had drawn more attention. Nevertheless, we wished to balance
as much as possible the number of idioms belonging to the Slavic, Romance
and Germanic language groups, and at the same time to highlight that it is
necessary to broaden people’s, especially linguists’ horizons in the field of
other, so-called lesser-known or even to a certain extent neglected fami-
lies of languages which evolve across the European continent alongside the
main three groups, i.e. those about which most citizens of Europe are mod-
estly informed. By lesser-known or neglected languages we mean those of
the Celtic, Baltic, Finno-Ugric, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Altaic, Italic, Semitic
and unknown origin. We refer to the unknown origin particularly with ref-
erence to Basque/Euskara, which holds on tenaciously in the area between
the Gallo-Romance and Ibero-Romance languages and dialects. In fact,
all the linguistic hypotheses based on deep research method studies con-
cerning the genealogical classification of this idiom have so far been dis-
carded. Furthermore, our research tackles the question of defining the sta-
tus of the Romani languages, representing the Indo-Iranian branch within
the Indo-European family of languages, some specific elements connected
with granting Maltese the status of the unique eu official language of
Semitic origin, i.e. originating from the Afro-Asiatic language tree, it out-
lines music festivals as an efficient tool in the struggle for augmenting the
prestige of Estonian, a representative of the Finno-Ugric language family
which in 1991 acquired the status of the only official language of the Repub-
lic of Estonia. The research also deals with the inadequacy of the Slovenian
term laponščina denoting Sami, i.e. the group of languages belonging to
the Finno-Ugric tree spoken in the extreme north of Scandinavia, Finland
and the westernmost Russian border area. A topic apart represent both
Mordvin/Mordvinic language varieties, Erzya and Moksha, autochtonous
Finno-Ugric descendants used by the Mordvins/Mordvinians/Mordovians
in the Republic of Mordovia, on the European side of the Urals, with the
Cyrillic script as an official alphabet. It is true that Hebrew, another lan-
guage of Semitic origin, is outside the European sphere, however, in the
author’s opinion, it deserves to be examined to a lesser extent as it demon-
strates a rare case of an already extinct language in its colloquial form but

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