Semicolon Obsolete?

When I first saw this article on clipmarks, clipped by righthand, I thought is was a bit of April Foolery. I was so intrigued, I went to the full article to read about the obsolete semicolon.
The semicolon turns out to be the tip of an iceberg. The larger issue being "For many believers, the defence of the point-virgule is, of course, a logical extension of France's ongoing battle against the inexorable decline of its language." "French is becoming increasingly anglicised."
I do not think there is any foolishness in the decline of a language.

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk The end of the line? An unlikely row has erupted in France over suggestions that the semicolon's days are numbered; worse, the growing influence of English is apparently to blame. Jon Henley reports on the uncertain fate of this most subtle and misused of punctuation marks. Aida Edemariam discovers which writers love it - and which would be glad to see it disappear For Sylvie Prioul, a subeditor at the Nouvel Obs and author of La Ponctuation ou l'art d'accommoder les textes, the gradual disappearance of the ; is, above all, a natural consequence of France's regrettable recent tendency, under the nefarious influence of ever-encroaching English, to reduce the length of its sentences. "The short sentence has signed the death warrant of the semicolon," Prioul says. "People don't like it, writers are afraid of it, journalists certainly rarely use it. It's on the way out, and that's a shame."