A. Language Extinction

An extinct language is a language which no longer has any speakers, whereas a dead language is a language which is no longer spoken by anyone as their main language. Normally this conversion to an extinct language occurs when a language undergoes language death while being directly replaced by a different one. For example: Coptic, which was replaced by Arabic, and many Native American languages, which were replaced by English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese.

Language extinction also occurs when a language undergoes rapid evolution or assimilation until it eventually gives birth to an offspring, i.e., a dissimilar language or family of language. Such is the case with Old English which is the parent of Modern English.

In some cases, an extinct language remains in use for scientific, legal, or ecclesiastical functions. Old Church Slavonic, Avestan, Coptic, Old Tibetan and Ge’ez are among the many extinct languages used as sacred languages.

Hebrew is an example of a nearly extinct spoken language that became a lingua franca and a liturgical language that has been revived to become a living spoken language.

The following are the list of extinct languages(last speakers and date of extinction included)

with last known speaker and/or date of death.

  1. Adai: (late 19th century)

  2. Akkala Sami: Marja Sergina (2003)

  3. entire Alsean family

    1. Alsea: John Albert (1942)

    2. Yaquina: (1884)

  4. Apalachee: (early 18th century)

  5. Atakapa: (early 20th century)

  6. Atsugewi: (1988)

  7. Beothuk: Shanawdithit (a.k.a. “Nancy April”) (1829)

  8. entire Catawban family:

    1. Catawba: before 1960

    2. Woccon

  9. Cayuse: (ca. 1930s)

  10. Chemakum: (ca. 1940s)

  11. Chicomuceltec: (late 20th century)

  12. Chimariko: (ca. 1930s)

  13. Chitimacha: Benjamin Paul (1934) & Delphine Ducloux (1940)

B. Language Death

In linguistics, language death (also language extinction, linguistic extinction, and sometimes pejoratively as linguicide) is a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language idiom is decreased.

Total language death occurs when there are no speakers of a given language idiom remaining in a population where the idiom was previously used (i.e. when all native speakers die). Language death may affect any language idiom, including dialects and languages.

The study of language loss at the individual level focuses on what is lost - a first language (L1) or a second language (L2) - and where it is lost - in an L1 or L2 environment.

B.1.Manifestations of Language Death

Language death may manifest itself in one of the following ways:

  • gradual language death

  • bottom-to-top language death

  • radical language death

  • linguicide (a.k.a. sudden language death, language death by genocide, physical language death, biological language death)

The most common process leading to language death is one in which a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual in another language, and gradually shifts allegiance to the second language until they cease to use their original (or heritage) language. This is a process of assimilation which may be voluntary or may be forced upon a population. Speakers of some languages, particularly regional or minority languages, may decide to abandon them based on economic or utilitarian grounds, in favour of languages regarded as having greater utility or prestige. Languages can also die when their speakers are wiped out by genocide, disease, or the rare event of devastating natural catastrophe.

A language is often declared to be dead even before the last native speaker of the language has died. If there are only a few elderly speakers of a language remaining, and they no longer use that language for communication, then the language is effectively dead. A language that has reached such a reduced stage of use is generally considered moribund.The process of attrition occurs when intergenerational transmission of a “heritage language”, mother tongue or native language has effectively stopped. This is rarely a sudden event, but a slow process of each generation learning less and less of the language, until its use is relegated to the domain of traditional use, such as in poetry and song. For example, a family’s adults may speak in an older native language, but when they have children, they may not pass on this language, and therefore the language dies in that family. One example of this process reaching its conclusion is that of the Dalmatian language.

B.2. Dead Languages and Normal Language Change

Linguists distinguish between language “death” and the process where a language becomes a “dead language” through normal language change, a linguistic phenomenon similar to pseudoextinction. This happens when a language in the course of its normal development gradually morphs into something that is then recognized as a separate, different language, leaving the old form with no native speakers. Thus, for example, Old English may be regarded as a “dead language”, with no native speakers, although it has never “died” but instead simply changed and developed into Modern English. The process of language change may also involve the splitting up of a language into a family of several daughter languages, leaving the common parent language “dead”. This has happened to Latin, which (through Vulgar Latin) eventually developed into the family of Romance languages. Such a process is normally not described as “language death”, because it involves an unbroken chain of normal transmission of the language from one generation to the next, with only minute changes at every single point in the chain. There is thus no one point where “Latin died”.

      1. Endangered Language

An endangered language is a language that it is at risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its native speakers, it becomes an extinct language.

While there is no definite threshold for identifying a language as endangered, three main criteria are used as guidelines:

  1. The number of speakers currently living.

  2. The mean age of native and/or fluent speakers.

  3. The percentage of the youngest generation acquiring fluency with the language in question.

Some languages, such as those in Indonesia, may have tens of thousands of speakers but be endangered because children are no longer learning them, and speakers are in the process of shifting to using the national language Indonesian (or a local Malay variety) in place of local languages.

In contrast, a language with only 100 speakers might be considered very much alive if it is the primary language of a community, and is the first (or only) language of all children in that community (most of Andaman languages, actually spoken).

Some linguists (among them, Michael Krauss and Stephen Wurm) argue that at least 3,000 of the world’s 6,000-7,000 languages are liable to be lost before the year 2100.

One view holds that this is a problem and the extinction of languages should be prevented, even at significant cost. A number of reasons are cited, including:

  • an enormous number of languages represents a vast, largely unmapped terrain on which linguists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers can chart the full capabilities and limits of the mind;

  • languages embody unique local knowledge of cultures and natural systems in the regions in which they are spoken and such diversity is essential for promoting scientific and technological progress since it is the interaction of ideas that is one of the major generators of human invention; and

  • languages serve as evidence for understanding human history

The following are examples of endagered languages:

Ainu

In addition, nearly all of the spoken Native American languages in the U.S. and Canada are endangered. These include: