I second the sibling comment: not emigrating is no guarantee that your language is safe. For example, there's a long history of trying to suppress the Ukrainian language [1], and until very recently, the Irish language was dominant in Ireland, but is now nearly extinct [2].
Back of the envelope maths here, but there must be hundreds of millions of people in Asia who can't speak the same language their grandparents spoke.
Public schools seem to be a big factor in languages dying off. But you also can't ignore the prestige factor - "my native language is small/backwards/insular/unsophisticated, if I want to get ahead in life I better speak the prestige one and teach it to my kids".
I am one of them. I speak a language that is not widely prevalent in my multi-lingual country. I never grew up around people who spoke it (except family members). My command over that language is poor, but my English is excellent. I speak in that language with my grandmother because I don’t feel judged for not being fluent in it, and I genuinely want to learn the language. But I don’t speak it in front of other people who know this language.
Not necessarily: my mother mainly suppressed the languages she had grown up with as the country we were living in (and where I was born) had explicit racial laws that discouraged non-white immigration and she didn’t want us to suffer for either speaking a wog language or error English skills. We pretty much used only words for things that couldn’t really be expressed in English.
She was initially unhappy with my son not being raised primarily in English though she eventually came around.
I’m an immigrant parent! I moved from Canada to the US in the mid-90’s. I guess my version of this would be hoping my kids spell words like colour, neighbour, and flavour correctly. :)
