![]() Sadly, this happens more often over time than we’d like to think. Kill off an ethnic group of people, and their language goes with them. Genocide : Some languages die because of genocide. Some languages like Latin didn’t die because all of its speakers died it just gradually evolved into another set of languages we call the Romance Languages : Italian, Spanish and French, among a few others. Transformation : Ancient Greek went through a series of changes that make modern Greek look and sound significantly different. The English of the 1500s would be barely recognisable to us today and, in fact, sounds much more like modern German. To give you a feel for the breadth of reasons, here are a few of the most common:Įvolution : Languages are always evolving, along with the culture and lifestyles of the people who speak them. Languages have faded out of memory for many reasons, far too many to discuss in one article. The native language of the Isle of Man – Manx – was once dead and close to being extinct, but thanks to members of the community supporting its revival, Manx is no longer a dead language. However, not all hope is lost for dead languages. We covered how it died and how it continues to be used in another post, if you fancy learning more.īut Latin isn’t the only dead language, some of the other known dead languages are Sanskrit, Biblical Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Gothic, all of which are still studied both academically and religiously. There are currently 570 known extinct languages, with some notable examples being Eyak, Yana, Tunica and Tillamook – which are all mostly from Native American tribes.Īs we discussed above, one of the most well known dead languages is Latin. This was the case for Native-American language Klallam which became extinct in 2014 after its last speaker, Hazel Sampson, passed away. Įxtinct languages do tend to be those that are niche to a community or smaller population, rather than those that are considered the native language of an entire country.Īs we mentioned above, some languages become extinct when the last living speaker dies. Plus, it teaches us a lot about other commonly spoken languages that are still in use, like the romance languages. No one speaks it as their everyday language anymore, but it’s still studied for academic purposes. ![]() Latin is probably the most widely known dead language. In linguistics, a dead language is (usually) defined as a language that some people still use, even if there are no native speakers left. The rest is lost forever.įortunately, an extinct language is worse than a dead one. In those cases, all we have are a few surviving fragments. This can be the case for small, locally-spoken languages that die out but it’s also true of many ancient languages that we just don’t have the information we need to learn. It’s a language no one bothers to study at all. We want to know what the difference is, and whether there is actually any coming back from being considered extinct or dead.Īn extinct language is a language that no longer exists due to there being no speakers or users, in linguistics or otherwise. Well, here at Global Language Services we’re going to find out. So, that leads us to ask the question “what is the difference between an extinct language and a dead language?” More widely, hundreds of the world’s 7,000 languages are on the Endangered Language List right now, which means they’re scraping by on the support of a handful of ageing native speakers. And when they die, the language will too. Today, dozens of languages only have one or two remaining speakers. If people stop favouring a language for some reason or lose their culture (or their lives) to foreign invaders, their language often dies along with the last person who actually speaks it. According to some estimates, one language dies every two weeks.Īs strange as it seems, popularity is the lifeblood of a language.
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