Language death

• 1. Introduction

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  Language death, in linguistics, happens the moment a language loses its last native speaker. The United Nations estimates that a language is lost every two weeks. As of the 2000s, roughly 7,000 natively spoken languages existed worldwide, and most of them are minor languages already in danger. One estimate published in 2004 expected that some 90% of currently spoken languages will have become extinct by 2050. How does a living tongue, carried in the mouths of a whole community, slide into silence? What does it take to lose one, and in a handful of cases, what does it take to bring one back?

• 2. The Slow Vanishing

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  A language is often declared dead even before its last native speaker has died. If only a few elderly people still know it, and they no longer use it to communicate, the language is effectively gone. Linguists call a language at this reduced stage moribund.

  Half of the spoken languages of the world are not being taught to new generations of children. Once no children are socialized into a language as their primary language, the chain of transmission ends, and the language will not survive past the current generations. This rarely arrives as a sudden event. Each generation learns less and less, until use is relegated to traditional domains like poetry and song.

  The transmission from adults to children grows more and more restricted. In the final setting, adults who speak the language raise children who never acquire fluency. One example of this process reaching its conclusion is the Dalmatian language, which followed exactly this path to its end.

• 3. Many Ways To Die

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  Gradual language death is the most common way languages die. It generally begins when speakers interact with speakers of a language of higher prestige. The group first becomes bilingual, then proficiency drops with each new generation, until no native speakers remain. This has sometimes been termed language murder.

  Radical language death takes a far quicker route. All speakers cease to use the language at once, driven by threats, pressure, persecution, or colonisation. Because the death is so sudden, the speech community skips over the semi-speaker phase, and the language simply disappears. Set against this is language suicide, where structures are steadily borrowed from a similar language of higher prestige until the original is no longer distinct, as in decreolization.

  Bottom-to-top death leaves a language alive only for religious, literary, or ceremonial use, as with Latin or Avestan, but never in casual conversation. Top-to-bottom death works the opposite way: the shift starts in high-level settings such as government, while ordinary speakers keep using the language at home. Beyond these patterns, linguicide, also called language genocide, is the forced death of a language, often bound up with the destruction of a group's identity.

• 4. Land, Contact, And Choice

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  In the modern period, dated from around 1500 CE following the rise of colonialism, language death has typically come from cultural assimilation. Communities shift toward a foreign lingua franca, largely those of European countries, and gradually abandon their native tongue. The most common path runs through bilingualism: a community becomes bilingual, then shifts allegiance to the second language, until the heritage language falls out of use. This assimilation may be voluntary or forced.

  Speakers of regional or minority languages may abandon them for economic or utilitarian reasons, favoring tongues seen as more useful or prestigious. Movement off traditional land carries its own danger. In a small isolated community in New Guinea, young men leave for towns and better economic opportunities, more children grow up bilingual, and the native language becomes harder to pass down.

  Cultural, economic, and political contact with other-language communities shapes how people feel about their own speech. Such contact and clash can alter a community's attitude toward its native language. Languages with small, geographically isolated populations can also die when their speakers are wiped out by genocide, disease, or natural disaster.

• 5. How A Dying Language Changes

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  During language loss, sometimes called obsolescence in the linguistic literature, the dying language itself changes shape. Speakers make it more like the language they are shifting toward. Appel described this in 1983 in two categories: speakers replace parts of their own language with elements from the new one, and they drop features the new language lacks.

  Morphological loss offers a vivid case. In East Sutherland, Scotland, fluent speakers of Scottish Gaelic still used the historic plural formation, while semi-speakers used simple suffixation or no plural marking at all, as Dorian documented in 1978. The grammar erodes unevenly, generation by generation.

  Other shifts pile up across the structure of a language: overgeneralization and undergeneralization, loss of phonological contrasts, changes in word order, and syntactic loss of complex constructions. Synthetic morphosyntax may become increasingly analytic. There is relexification, loss of word-formation productivity, and even style loss, such as the disappearance of ritual speech.

• 6. The Cost To Communities

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  Within Indigenous communities, the death of language reaches into health and well-being. Researchers have linked both physical and mental health to the survival of traditional language, treating language as an essential part of identity.

  One study of aboriginal youth suicide rates in Canada found a stark divide. Communities where a majority of members speak the traditional language showed low suicide rates, while rates were six times higher in groups where fewer than half communicate in their ancestral language. Language, here, is not an ornament but a measure of survival.

  Another study, conducted among aboriginal peoples in Alberta, Canada, examined diabetes. The greater a community's knowledge of its traditional language, the lower the prevalence of diabetes within it. These findings tie linguistic vitality directly to the body.

• 7. Bringing Languages Back

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  Language revitalization is the attempt to slow or reverse language death, and its programs run across many languages with varying success. The revival of the Hebrew language in Israel stands alone. It is the only example of a language acquiring new first-language speakers after it had become extinct in everyday use, surviving only as a liturgical language and a lingua franca among Jews from different linguistic communities.

  Even Hebrew carries a complication. One theory holds that revivalists who wished to speak pure Hebrew failed, producing instead a multi-layered, multi-sourced Israeli language, and argues that reviving a clinically dead language is unlikely without cross-fertilization from the revivalists' mother tongues. Other efforts with some success include Welsh, Basque, Hawaiian, and Navajo.

  The reasons people fight for revival vary: physical danger, economic danger such as the exploitation of natural resources, political danger such as genocide, or cultural danger such as assimilation. During the past century, more than 2,000 languages are estimated to have already become extinct. According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, language reclamation will grow more relevant as people seek to recover cultural autonomy and improve wellbeing, with benefits he describes as historical justice, diversity, and employability.

• 8. Measuring And Mistaking Death

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  Akira Yamamoto, an anthropologist, identified nine factors he believes help prevent language death. They begin with a dominant culture that favors linguistic diversity and a community with an ethnic identity strong enough to encourage preservation. The list runs through bilingual and bicultural school programs, teacher training for native speakers, full involvement of the speech community, easy-to-use materials, written content both new and traditional, and using the language in new environments. Google launched the Endangered Languages Project to compile information about endangered languages and share the latest research.

  Not every dead language died the way the others did. Linguists separate language death from the process by which a language becomes a dead language through normal change, analogous to pseudoextinction. Old English may be called a dead language, yet it did not vanish; it developed into Middle English, Early Modern English, and Modern English. Latin likewise evolved through Vulgar Latin into the Romance languages, and Sanskrit through Prakrit into the New Indo-Aryan languages. There is no point at which Latin died; it became French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and more.

  Measuring vitality has its own tools. Joshua Fishman proposed the Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale, the GIDS, in 1991. The Ainu language shows what slow death looks like in numbers: the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger lists Hokkaido Ainu as critically endangered with 15 speakers, and both Sakhalin and Kuril Ainu as extinct, a decline driven since the end of the nineteenth century by forced assimilation into Japanese-language education.