Extinction of Europe?

The always-fascinating Spengler predicts the extinction of languages and peoples over the next two centuries:

“Half of the world’s languages will disappear by the end of the 21st century, and up to 90% by the end of the 22nd. The majority of these are spoken by a few hundred people each in the New Guinea highlands, and the rest scattered around the pockets of humanity left behind by the global economy. A small army of ethnologists is trying to record and analyze the thousands of languages that will fall silent forever during the next two or three generations . . . .

“It is not only the languages of primitive peoples that are endangered. Countries in which communism extirpated religion face catastrophic rates of population decline. A century from now, a geriatric remnant may be the only speakers of Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Georgian and other secondary but significant Western languages. Several countries that once formed part of the Soviet Union are projected to lose almost half of their total population by the middle of the present century, including Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and the Baltic states – and Russia itself is not far behind. For that matter, half of Japan’s population will be older than 60 by mid-century.”

Then the kicker: “Europe is at peace for the first time in its history, such that the bestselling book on current European history is James Sheehan’s, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? A better question is: ‘Where have all the Europeans gone?’ Europe is at peace but not secure, for most European nations have birthrates so low that they will lose economic viability within the next 50 to 100 years.

“Wealthy Europe stands on the same side of a global divide with the endangered peoples of the New Guinea highlands and the disappearing languages of the Siberian taiga. Europe is ill at ease over the attenuation of its culture in the face of mass immigration from the Middle East and Africa, an immigration that the Old World requires to replace its own declining ranks, but that threatens to destroy its identity. Radical Islam would be a minor footnote if not for the possibility that Europe may be ruled by a Muslim majority a century hence, and that the Islamicization of Europe may give new impulse to a religion that elsewhere is immured in economic backwardness.”