Dead language

An extinct language or dead language is one that has no speaker, particularly if the language has no descendants, even if it continues to be used in certain settings (liturgies, names scientists, etc.)

Cuneiform writing was used to represent various languages, such as sumerium, acadio, the Hittite or the Elamite that are currently dead languages.

Some dead languages continue in certain uses, as a second language, classical language or liturgical language, even though the language is no longer acquired by anyone as a mother tongue. Even in these cases, the language does not follow the normal path of evolution and development that occurs over time in living languages.

The term language extinction is generally reserved to describe the process of language substitution by which a language may lose all its speakers.

Causes of the disappearance of languages

There are many reasons why a language can disappear. There are three main processes by which a language dies:

• linguistic substitution or language change;
• linguistic evolution or linguistic change;
• the disappearance of speakers for violence, wars or epidemics, which have historically been given much less frequently than the previous ones.

Language substitution

Language change has historically responded to the following causes, causes that do not have to be exclusive:

• Violence. Wars, invasions and colonizations can physically make the speakers disappear from one language or change it to another, so the tongue disappears with them. It is the case of Tasmanian languages or some of the Native American languages, especially in North America. In this group, violent policies of uprooting followed by governments in several countries against Aboriginals and national minorities, such as cases of former British colonies such as Australia or Canada until the 1960s, or Turkey until the 1980s, can be considered. Sometimes we talk about "glotophagia" in these cases.
• Restrictive linguistic policies. When states or their governments establish rules for the compulsory (and even forced) assimilation of ethnic-cultural minorities to the majority or official culture of the state, especially as regards the official language, severely limiting the use of their own languages. The outstanding case of this practice is the linguistic policy of France, adopted since the time of the monarchy and reinforced after the French Revolution, which influenced several countries in the framework of national construction of them. In some cases it was combined with violent assimilation policies.
• Natural disasters and diseases. Natural disasters such as the tsunami recently lived in Indonesia can physically disappear a population or leave it in such a state that its speakers have to take refuge in another culture, adopting its language and customs. In the case of diseases, modern researchers must be very careful in their contacts with remote villages, since the transmission of a trivial disease can be fatal. This affects languages spoken by small groups, for example, it is well known that the Arabic language disappeared in 1877 because of a measles epidemic.
• Economic pressure. In this case the disappearance occurs because the speakers consider their children to have a better future if they learn a certain language. In two generations the original language will be in danger of disappearance. It is the case of the pressure of English on many languages, including some national languages such as Danish or Norwegian, which, in this particular case and at the moment, are not in danger. In the past some economic activities had a disastrous effect on indigenous peoples so the rubber fever (1879-1945) decimated numerous Amazonian peoples especially in northern Peru (Záparo, peba-yagua and bora-wito).
• Cultural witness. This mechanism is often related to the former, since cultural prestige often comes from material wealth. It is one of the most important mechanisms for the disappearance of small languages. As soon as a foreign language gains prestige and the cultural or economic elite begins to use it, it will spend little time until this learning shifts to the periphery both geographical and cultural and children stop learning their own language for the outside. Several of the languages displaced by romanization would have experienced a process of this type and also the ancient elamite replaced by the Iranian languages.
• Voluntary change. It is relatively rare, but there are documented cases in which a population has voluntarily decided and by assembly to change to another language. Sometime between the century xviii and xix the North-Peruvian ethnic group of the icahuates decided to migrate south and joined the muniches being absorbed by them.
• Mixed marriages. Historically, ethnic and linguistic minorities, who have engaged in mixed marriages with people from other languages more widely spread, have children with poor or poor knowledge of the minority language. In Brazil a lot of ethnic groups very decimated in the century xx They practiced mixed marriage leaving indigenous languages in favor of Portuguese. And also in localities where they migrated different minority groups, the most widespread national language or regional language often ends up moving to minority languages.
• Political motivation. Or linguistic immersion, carried out by exclusionary nationalist regimes on minorities, and even majority of a population, for purely political and ideological purposes, using the language to impose as a "national" characteristic or review, against the other language to annul.

Language evolution

Other times a language does not simply disappear, but undergoes a series of linguistic changes that affect both its phonology and its grammar in such a way that the language reflected in writing differs from the spoken language. Over time new speakers who have not received formal training in the older texts of the language are not able to understand it and so the language reflected in writing is said to be a dead language different from the spoken language upon which the speakers Natives have intuitions about their structures without needing to have formally studied them. This case has been very frequent in history and it is the way in which Latin, classical Chinese, Sanskrit, classical Egyptian became dead languages, all of them evolved giving rise to different languages.

The modern crisis

It is estimated that a human language dies every two weeks with its last speaker. Scientists estimate that there are about 6,000 languages alive in the world, of which about 90% are believed to disappear in the next two to three centuries. In North America alone, more than 50 native languages have disappeared in recent decades. In the Peruvian Amazon at the beginning of the xviii century, there were around 150 languages, of which only a third survive today.

Obviously, the sociological effects of economic processes that have reduced the isolation of remote communities and have forced millions of people to leave their small local communities to migrate to large cities have contributed powerfully to the abandonment or decline of locally-based languages in favor of others of greater diffusion, on a scale without precedents in the history of Humanity.

The survival of a language is considered to be threatened when children no longer learn it as their mother tongue. That is, when parents transmit to their children a language other than their own native language. In these cases, demographically, as the generations that know the language age and die, the number of speakers of the language is drastically reduced.

Recent movements tend to preserve this heritage, either trying to restore it or fixing the linguistic content. However, documentation of language variety by itself is unable to stop the socioeconomic processes that lead to the abandonment or decline of threatened languages.

Knowledge of dead languages

For languages with no living speakers left, analysis of ancient documents is the only chance for reconstruction linguists have. For endangered languages in the process of disappearing, those with very few speakers are usually called microlanguages, or with a lot of written documentation, the effort is focused on the creation of dictionaries, grammars and sound recordings to preserve as much information as possible. The biggest problem is represented by the lack of money and capable personnel, the task surpasses any attempt that has been made to date. In addition, the majority of new linguistic work is normally elaborated on the basis of living languages, so the scientific use value of materials on languages that have already disappeared is debatable for some time.

On the other hand it is doubtful, that a grammar can capture all the relevant details of a language, which on the other hand a native speaker does know intuitively. Thus, the scientific literature shows works on the grammaticality of sentences in widely used languages (English or Spanish) that had gone unnoticed by the standard grammars of the language. In this sense, Noam Chomsky went so far as to say that it is totally impossible to write a grammar that accounts for absolutely all the details of English, and that even if it were possible, that grammar would be so extensive and so long that it would not be interesting. For Chomsky and a large part of generativism, the object of study of linguistics are the i-languages or tacit mental knowledge that a speaker has of his language, not the texts or manifestations of it (e-languages), in which base grammars.

Threatened languages

A threatened language is a language for which factors have been identified that suggest the possibility of the language becoming a dead language in the medium term. Usually the main factor that is considered to consider a language threatened is that the children of native speakers are acquiring another more widely used language as their mother tongue or that after childhood they stop using their mother tongue in favor of other languages of more general use..

On the other hand, there is linguistic evidence that a language that is losing its number of speakers and sees its use increasingly restricted, until it is used only in a strictly family environment, loses some of its most complex linguistic structures. Both the loss of the least productive areas of grammar and the substitution of native structures by structures of the languages in favor of which the threatened language is being lost have been observed. At an advanced stage of extinction, threatened languages are spoken only by elders who speak the language with reasonable fluency, and younger generations who are only semi-speakers who have very limited fluency or only passive understanding of the language.

UNESCO maintains a UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World's Endangered Languages that provides information on the location and status of endangered languages. Also useful is the Red Book of Threatened Languages by Tapani Salminen and also published by UNESCO.

Reversion and survival of languages

There is at least one case, Hebrew, in which a dead language has been "revived" for everyday use. Hebrew had already been supplanted in antiquity by Aramaic, although it had been preserved as a liturgical language and was used in the 19th century by Zionist movements. The decision to give the state of Israel a "neutral" language as its official language is what has given the impetus to revive the language. Naturally the language has had to be modified and a large number of neologisms have been created to adapt it to modern use.

Other cases, such as Cornish, are not clear, since they do not receive the support of political establishments as official languages and the number of speakers is rather modest.

Regarding endangered languages, various attempts have been made to preserve minor languages, with varying degrees of success.

As successes, for example, Finnish in Finland, which was established and promoted as an official language by the government after independence. The language was threatened by the prestige of Swedish, which is now also the official language of the country. Lesser successes are Basque and Irish, which in 2004 had more speakers than in 1954, although their future is not assured. In both cases, the co-official status of the languages has been decreed (Irish is even official in the European Union) and non-university public schooling has been promoted.

Languages in which the measures do not seem to have been successful are Breton and Occitan. The French government has not officially recognized these languages. Their presence in the media is anecdotal, and the monolingual nursery schools (Calandretas for Occitan and Diwan for Breton) are private initiatives of a marginal nature (less than one 2% of students attend these schools). It is believed that languages will disappear in a generation.

The examples are taken from European languages, whose speakers have the material means to defend their mother tongues. In the case of languages in poor countries, or whose speakers are marginalized, conservation becomes very complicated. The necessary money is simply not available to offer the same possibilities that speakers of prestigious languages have: schooling, television, newspapers, books, the Internet, work, etc.

List of dead and dying languages

Some of the most important dead languages are listed below.

"Classic" Dead Languages

Latin, Classical Greek, and Sanskrit are languages that are commonly considered dead languages. However, there are also those who argue that they are not if one takes into account that certain sciences still use a large amount of their lexicon and that there are still many people who are capable of speaking them as a second language, although it is totally doubtful that there are speakers with the same intuition to judge the grammaticality of certain expressions.

Egyptian hieroglyphics of Karnak.

For example, Latin is the official language of the Catholic Church. According to an article by Pierre Georges in his chronicle of Le Monde, Latin has been enriched with some 60,000 new words and locutions in the last few centuries. As examples he names vis atomica for "nuclear power", res inexplicata volans for "UFO", etc. Latin continued to be used in scientific and philosophical texts long after his death, a practice that continued at least until the nineteenth century.

According to Paul Valéry, it was not until after World War I that knowledge of classical Greek ceased to be commonplace in France for educated people. In his youth it was not unusual to see a learned man read Thucydides from the original text.

This kind of "life" is possible for a small number of languages that are associated with a culture of sufficient prestige to allow the maintenance of the language for scientific, legal, or ecclesiastical use. Due to their liturgical uses, for example, Slavonic, Avestan, Coptic, Sanskrit, Ge'ez, etc. have been preserved.

Certain organizations use dead or rare languages to help create a certain atmosphere or give prestige. An example of this use is Wikipedia: there are versions in Sanskrit, Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Gothic.

Amerindian languages in danger of extinction

Many Native American languages have disappeared since the 16th century, but the trend has accelerated alarmingly in the 20th century. There is practically no country in the Americas in which there are not endangered indigenous languages.

Among the Amerindian languages and the American vernaculars, there are at least 170 that are severely threatened. Some of them are probably extinct in 2005, since the last records of contact with speakers sometimes go back 20 years.