A 16 year old kid started replying to me yesterday about the Hawaiian language and how it is dying out. The way he wrote it he wrote with so much conviction too, and I had to laugh. I checked out his profile, seemed to be more Filipino than anything but claimed oiwi ancestry.In any case, we've had a few emails going back and forth. Basically he states that after living on the mainland for the past 5 years and not encountering anyone that speaks Hawaiian is enough to signify that the language is dying. Now he intially stated it was mostly old people who are dying, but he said that in my response to my video where I talked about witnessing the growth of the number of speakers of Hawaiian.I go on explaining how judging based on the area he is now, which is outside of the Hawaiian islands certainly isn't a good basis to measure if the language is dying out or not and I already gave him facts as to the growth. He continued on saying how Hawaiian is not spreading around the world, so I told him the same with French or Romanian or some other European language or any other language other than English whose importance in globalization made a huge difference.Now what I didn't explain is how perhaps that same globalization and domination of that one language has probably forced the minor languages to near extinction as well as bring them back to life and increase the number of speakers by making them aware of the threat of a death of a language. That'll have to be the next response as I know he will have something ignorant to say.I'm sure he'll look back on this day in a decade and realize what an idiot he really was. I've heard the arguments before since the 80s and esp. in the 90s of Hawaiian dying out. I've never backed down from that argument and never will. Good luck to those who want to argue that point.
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