It depends what you mean by proverb. In terms of the use of traditonal aphorisms in English ("You can't teach a dog new tricks: A stitch in time saves nine, etc", i observe a reduction in use, although when it comes to the knowledge-bearing technical use of proverbs (such as an old gardener watching me weed and saying "One year's seed, seven years' weeds") they are still out there..

Welsh is exhibiting the same phenomonen and I draw the tentative conclusion that in both languages it is an age-related phenomenon with  'old-fashioned' proverbs being uncool and therefore more used by older folk.

However...

I suspect it's more compliacted because there is a group of sayings that appear neologistically in young speech. Maybe they don't last as long as Maninka sayings but they are still there. A good example in English is "(to do) what it says on the tin", menaing that honesty and transparency is a good thing.

It depends what you mean by proverb. In terms of the use of traditonal aphorisms in English ("You can't teach a dog new tricks: A stitch in time saves nine, etc", i observe a reduction in use, although when it comes to the knowledge-bearing technical use of proverbs (such as an old gardener watching me weed and saying "One year's seed, seven years' weeds") they are still out there..

Welsh is exhibiting the same phenomonen and I draw the tentative conclusion that in both languages it is an age-related phenomenon with  'old-fashioned' proverbs being uncool and therefore more used by older folk.

However...

I suspect it's more compliacted because there is a group of sayings that appear neologistically in young speech. Maybe they don't last as long as Maninka sayings but they are still there. A good example in English is "(to do) what it says on the tin", menaing that honesty and transparency is a good thing.

Same phenomenon in Spain, although there is a clear difference between rural and urban areas, the former being more conservative.

Same in China. although people are more educated than before, but to say proverbs too often somehow somehow weird. It means that you are playing with so called literature that everybody knows. Instead of preserving proverbs, we created lots of new expressions on internet, which become more popular than proverbs, but less stable.

Very interesting question. Spain (my country of origin and residence) suffered a huge transition from a mainly rural economy to a mixed model in the lates sixties/seventies. Many workers moved from the post-war, empoverished farmlands to the industrial cities Madrid, Bilbao and Barcelona, to name a few.

Many of us still have either grown up or have relatives in the rural areas, and I can confidently say that my grandmother knows and actively uses far more proverbs than any one I have met in Madrid. So I guess I agree with your statement that "the use of proverbs to embellish speech is becoming a thing of the past". But I would say that, rather than something intrinsically of the past, it belongs to our rural past, and it does not belong in our urban pesent.

If I try to point at the causes of this, some ideas come to mind:

Spain has a very mountainous relief, with many areas isolated during winters, poorly communicated (especially in the first half of the 20th century) and, for most part of our history, poor. One implication of this, for me, is that collective knowledge could not be retrieved through contact with others, let alone in books or the internet, so it needed to be actively maintained during everyday speech.

Urban, specialized labor (industrial or services) forms a safe network where individuals can devote themselves to their field and can afford to lose common knowledge, because the network will provide. Land and farming activities are more exposed, more at risk, so that knowledge must be kept active. In Spain, many proverbs recollect knowledge about the weather, something like "by the second of february you should see storks, if you don't you'll be covered in snow" (with rhyme, of course). This kind of knowledge is absolutely useless in and industrial city, and even more so in the internet era.

Last, the pace of life in the rural areas is much slower, and speech economy is not as important as in fast-paced cities. Maybe cities encourage a standard, low-entropy communication style. Besides, knowledge can be recalled at the click of a button, so you can afford to individually forget proverbs, as much as you forget how to multiply, or your friends's phone numbers.

My two cents.

Best,

Fernando

My own reasoning about the dichotomy between rural/urban proverbs has left me wondering whether this applies to all categories of proverbs. I had mostly in mind proverbs about shared knowledge: weather, farming, etc. But what about those of a more moral nature? Don't they apply in cities? Are proverbs lost as a feature of the language exclusively or does their loss reflect a change in moral concerns?

In the Netherlands too, I notice diminished use of proverbs. More precisely: often old proverbs are not understood any more and are used in a wrong way; new proverbs do not emerge. Maybe influence of the way (young) people communic8 through their smartphones/tablets in writing?

I can share experiences of sailors' proverbs,which are neither urban nor rural. In this case there is still extensive use to convey, for example, weather and tidal knowledge.

A key point here, i think is whether the definition of proverb is hermetic, by which I mean having clean boundaries. It may well be that the loss of proverb use is merely one example of loss in a family of sociolinguistic structures which convey traditional knowledge, rather than using, sensu strictu, the proverb form. Many of the sailors' sayings are like that.

I don't myself think  that it's related to language use and text-speak in particular (not least because users of text-speak do not control language use in general, but only in their own linguistic territory), but is more likely to be an issue of micro-economics of language use, so that if using a proverb doesn't give benefit, proverbs won't be used.

Lastly, you should note neo-proverbs, which have appeared in high technology disciplines quite recently. For example, "To every complex and difficult engineering problem there is a simple and obvious solution... ..and it doesn't work." and "garbage in garbage out". These too are proverbs and they and their kin are used daily. I'm surprised to hear that in the (highly creative and clever) Netherlands new proverbs are not emerging.

As I started out with, "it all depends on what you mean by proverb,"

 In Nigeria, the younger generation hardly garnish their speeches with traditional proverbs anymore, irrespective of whether the speaker is in the city or in the rural setting. These are seen as old school. However, older generation, whether living in the rural or urban, still use proverbs when interacting with people of their generation.  The problem of lack of usage probably is due to the fact that most older generation do not use proverbs when interacting with younger generation. As a result, the younger generation speakers either do not know the meaning of most proverbs or have never heard of some proverbs.