When is a language considered dead?
Language death
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. Half of the spoken languages of the world are not being taught to new generations of children. Once a language is no longer a native language—that is, if no children are being socialized into it as their primary language—the process of transmission is ended and the language itself will not survive past the current generations.
Language revitalization
John McWhorter has argued that programs to revive indigenous languages will almost never be very effective because of the practical difficulties involved. He also argues that the death of a language does not necessarily mean the death of a culture. Indigenous expression is still possible even when the original language has disappeared, as with Native American groups and as evidenced by the vitality of black American culture in the United States, among people who speak not Yoruba but English. He argues that language death is, ironically, a sign of hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space: “To maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation—such as that of the Amish—or brutal segregation”.
Cultural diversity
Cultural diversity is difficult to quantify, but a good indication is thought to be a count of the number of languages spoken in a region or in the world as a whole. By this measure we may be going through a period of precipitous decline in the world's cultural diversity. Research carried out in the 1990s by David Crystal (Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor) suggested that at that time, on average, one language was falling into disuse every two weeks. He calculated that if that rate of the language death were to continue, then by the year 2100 more than 90% of the languages currently spoken in the world will have gone extinct.
Fereydoon Motamed
Prior to his sudden death from heart attack he completed his 41 years of research on aesthetics of temporal time in relation to the Indo-European languages, and among his new findings he found a universal formula (what he used to call the "absolute zero" of linguistics) that is applicable to quantitative poetic meters of all the Indo-European languages. He claimed that this was root cause for why certain languages will become extinct (language death) in near future; however, he did not have the chance to finalize the editing of the fourth edition of his book in that subject, but his unpublished manuscripts are available for sharing upon request.
Romance languages
To some scholars, this suggests the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of the Roman Empire (from the end of the first century BC), and was spoken alongside the written Classical Latin which was reserved for official and formal occasions. Other scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language. Both were mutually intelligible as one and the same language, which was true until very approximately the second half of the 7th century. However, within two hundred years Latin became a dead language since "the Romanized people of Europe could no longer understand texts that were read aloud or recited to them," i.e. Latin had ceased to be a first language and became a foreign language that had to be learned, if the label Latin is constrained to refer to a state of the language frozen in past time and restricted to linguistic features for the most part typical of higher registers.
List of endangered languages in Russia
An endangered language is a language that 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. A language may be endangered in one area but show signs of revitalisation in another, as with the Irish language.
Wiyot language
With the death of Della Prince in 1962, Wiyot became an extinct language. However, in recent years, the federally recognized Wiyot tribe has been attempting to revitalize the language. The tribe advertises language courses on its website and publishes Wiyot texts for distribution, such as a calendar. As of 2014, Wiyot does not appear to have any fluent speakers.
Māori language
Despite being officially regarded as extinct, many government and educational agencies in Otago and Southland encourage the use of the dialect in signage and official documentation.
Language preservation
Language preservation is the effort to prevent languages from becoming unknown. A language is at risk of being lost when it no longer is taught to younger generations, while fluent speakers of the language (usually the elderly) die.
List of unclassified languages according to the Ethnologue
The following languages are listed as unclassified by the "Ethnologue" (17th edition), though in their descriptions some are identified with an established family, or have been retired as spurious. Since the 15th edition, several other unclassified languages were found to be related to known languages once better data was collected, and some, such as "Amikoana" and "Miarrã", were found to be spurious and their ISO codes were retired. (See spurious languages.) Languages which became extinct before 1950 are the purview of Linguist List and are being gradually removed from "Ethnologue"; they are listed as an addendum to this page.
Extinct language
Institutions such as the education system, as well as (often global) forms of media such as the Internet, television, and print media play a significant role in the process of language loss. For example, when people migrate to a new country, their children attend school in the country, and the schools are likely to teach them in the majority language of the country rather than their parents' native language.
List of endangered languages in Central America
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. UNESCO defines four levels of language endangerment between "safe" (not endangered) and "extinct":
Lost work
A lost work is a document, literary work, or piece of multimedia produced some time in the past, of which no surviving copies are known to exist. The term most commonly applies to works from the classical world, although it is increasingly used in relation to more modern works. A work may be lost to history through the destruction of an original manuscript and all later copies. In contrast to lost or "extinct" works, surviving copies of old or ancient works may be referred to as "extant".
Tuone Udaina
When Udaina was killed at 74 in an explosion during road work on June 10, 1898, the Dalmatian language is generally assumed to have become extinct.
Cone (formal languages)
Altogether, this means that a family of languages is a cone if it is closed under finite state transductions. This is a very powerful set of operations. For instance one easily writes a (nondeterministic) finite state transducer with alphabet formula_29 that removes every second formula_30 in words of even length (and does not change words otherwise). Since the context-free languages form a cone, they are closed under this exotic operation.
List of language families
Language isolates are languages which are not part of any known family and they can be alternatively described as being its sole representants.
Languages are considered unclassified either because, for one reason or another, little effort has been made to compare them with other languages or more commonly, because they are too poorly documented to permit reliable classification: most such languages are extinct and, most likely, will never be known well enough to classify.
This section lists extinct languages and families which have no known living relatives; while a minority of these is well known but is still classified as genetically independent (like the ancient Sumerian language), the lack of attestation makes many of these hard to put into larger groups.
Endangered language
The total number of contemporary languages in the world is not known, and it is not well defined what constitutes a separate language as opposed to a dialect. Estimates vary depending on the extent and means of the research undertaken, and the definition of a distinct language and the current state of knowledge of remote and isolated language communities. The number of known languages varies over time as some of them become extinct and others are newly discovered. An accurate amount of languages in the world was not yet known until the use of universal, systematic surveys in the later half of the twentieth century. The majority of linguists in the early twentieth century refrained from making estimates. Before then, estimates were frequently the product of guesswork and very low.
Indigenous language
Many indigenous peoples worldwide have stopped passing on their ancestral languages to the next generation, and have instead adopted the majority language as part of their acculturation into the majority culture. Furthermore, many indigenous languages have been subject to linguicide (language killing). Recognizing their vulnerability, the United Nations proclaimed 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages, "to draw attention to the critical loss of indigenous languages and the urgent need to preserve, revitalize and promote indigenous languages."
Wichita language
According to the Ethnologue Languages of the World website, the status of the Wichita language is an 8b, meaning the language is nearly extinct. As of 2008, there was only one individual who is a native speaker of the Wichita language, Doris Jean Lamar McLemore. The reason for this is because the speakers of the Wichita language switched to speaking English. Thus, children were not being taught Wichita and only the elders knew the language. "Extensive efforts to document and preserve the language" are in effect through the Wichita Documentation Project.
List of endangered languages in Africa
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. UNESCO defines four levels of language endangerment between "safe" (not endangered) and "extinct":
Language death
Language death is a process in which the level of a speech community's linguistic competence in their language variety decreases, eventually resulting in no native or fluent speakers of the variety. Language death can affect any language form, including dialects. Language death should not be confused with language attrition (also called language loss), which describes the loss of proficiency in a first language of an individual.
Massachusett language
Knowledge of the spoken language and its diversity ceased with the death of the last speakers of SNEA languages. Most had ceased to be functional, everyday languages of the Indian communities by the end of the eighteenth century, if not sooner, and all were extinct by the dawning of the twentieth century. Most linguistic knowledge relies on word lists and passing mention in colonial sources, which can only provide very limited understanding. Written records do show some variation, but dialect leveling was brought about with the introduction of a "de facto" standard written language as used in Eliot's translation of the Bible and several primers and catechisms used to teach literacy, were produced with the aid of Indian translators, editors and interpreters from Natick, and was based on its speech.
List of endangered languages in Asia
An endangered language is a language that 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. A language may be endangered in one area but show signs of revitalisation in another, as with the Irish language.
List of endangered languages of the Pacific
An endangered language is a language that it is at risk of falling out of use because there is little transmission of the language to younger generations. If a language loses all of its native speakers, it becomes an extinct language.
Sheldon Pollock
Scholars have reacted to Pollock's claim that Sanskrit is dead. Jürgen Hanneder states that Pollock's argumentation is "often arbitrary". Hanneder states "Pollock has overinterpreted the evidence to support his theory, perhaps in his understandable anger over current nationalistic statements about Sanskrit and indeed new attempts at resanskritization – processes that should perhaps be analysed a few decades later from a distance." Hanneder says that Sanskrit is not "dead language in the most common usage of the term," since it is still "spoken, written and read," and has emphasized the continuous production of creative literature in Sanskrit up to the present day. Others, including Pollock himself, have emphasized the new creative and intellectual projects that Sanskrit was a part of in early modernity, such as Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara's commentary on the "Mahābhārata" and the development of sophisticated forms of logical analysis ("navyanyāya").
List of endangered languages in Europe
An endangered language is a language that 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. A language may be endangered in one area but show signs of revitalisation in another, as with the Irish language.
Vergonha
The deliberate process of eradicating non-French vernaculars in modern France and disparaging them as mere local and often strictly oral dialects was formalized with Henri Grégoire's "Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalise the use of the French language", which he presented on June 4, 1794 to the National Convention; thereafter, all languages other than French were officially banned in the administration and schools for the sake of linguistically uniting post-Bastille Day France. At the time, only one tenth of the population were fluent in French. In reference to "patois", Jean Jaurès famously claimed that "one names "patois" the language of a defeated nation". According to the "Chambers Dictionary", the origin of the term is disputed but could be a "corruption of "patrois", from LL "patriensis", a local inhabitant".
Modern language
A modern language is any human language that is currently in use. The term is used in language education to distinguish between languages which are used for day-to-day communication (such as French and German) and dead classical languages such as Latin and Classical Chinese, which are studied for their cultural or linguistic value. SIL Ethnologue defines a living language as "one that has at least one speaker for whom it is their first language" (see also Language § Linguistic diversity).
Luren language
Lu, or Luren (卢人), is an extinct Sino-Tibetan language of Guizhou, China. The Luren language may have been extinct since the 1960s.
Extinct language
In the modern period, languages have typically become extinct as a result of the process of cultural assimilation leading to language shift, and the gradual abandonment of a native language in favour of a foreign "lingua franca", largely those of European countries.
Sámi languages
At present there are nine living Sámi languages. The largest six of the languages have independent literary languages; the three others have no written standard, and of them, there are only a few, mainly elderly, speakers left. The ISO 639-2 code for all Sámi languages without its proper code is "smi". The seven written languages are:The other Sámi languages are critically endangered or moribund and have very few speakers left. Pite Sámi has about 30–50 speakers, and a dictionary and an official orthography is under way. A descriptive grammar (Wilbur 2014) has been published. Ume Sámi likely has under 20 speakers left, and ten speakers of Ter Sámi were known to be alive in 2004. The last speaker of Akkala Sámi is known to have died in December 2003, and the eleventh attested variety, Kemi Sámi, became extinct in the 19th century. An additional Sámi language, Kainuu Sámi, became extinct in the 18th century, and probably belonged to the Eastern group like Kemi Sámi, although the evidence for the language is limited.
Extinct language
In their study of contact-induced language change, American linguists Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman (1991) stated that in situations of cultural pressure (where populations are forced to speak a dominant language), three linguistic outcomes may occur: first - and most commonly - a subordinate population may shift abruptly to the dominant language, leaving the native language to a sudden linguistic death. Second, the more gradual process of language death may occur over several generations. The third and most rare outcome is for the pressured group to maintain as much of its native language as possible, while borrowing elements of the dominant language's grammar (replacing all, or portions of, the grammar of the original language).
Turkic languages
An endangered language, or moribund language, is a language that is at risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead language".
Ancient language
An ancient language is any language originating in times that may be referred to as ancient. There is no formal criterion for deeming a language ancient, but a traditional convention is to demarcate as "ancient" those languages that existed prior to the 5th century. Linguist Roger Woodward has said that "[p]erhaps, then, what makes an ancient language different is our awareness that it has outlived those for whom it was an intimate element of the psyche".
Lists of endangered languages
SIL Ethnologue (2005) lists 473 out of 6,909 living languages inventorized (6.8%) as "nearly extinct", indicating cases where "only a few elderly speakers are still living"; this figure dropped to 6.1% as of 2013.
Extinct language
Normally the transition from a spoken to an extinct language occurs when a language undergoes language death by being directly replaced by a different one. For example, many Native American languages were replaced by English, French, Portuguese, Spanish or Dutch as a result of colonization.
Endangered language
The first step towards language death is "potential endangerment". This is when a language faces strong external pressure, but there are still communities of speakers who pass the language to their children. The second stage is "endangerment". Once a language has reached the endangerment stage, there are only a few speakers left and children are, for the most part, not learning the language. The third stage of language extinction is "seriously endangered". During this stage, a language is unlikely to survive another generation and will soon be extinct. The fourth stage is "moribund", followed by the fifth stage "extinction".
List of unclassified languages according to the Ethnologue
All cants:These languages became extinct before 1950 and their ISO codes are not, or are no longer, maintained by SIL. Maintenance of additional languages extinct before 1950 is being gradually shifted from SIL to Linguist List.
Endangered language
Using an alternative scheme of classification, linguist Michael E. Krauss defines languages as "safe" if it is considered that children will probably be speaking them in 100 years; "endangered" if children will probably not be speaking them in 100 years (approximately 60–80% of languages fall into this category) and "moribund" if children are not speaking them now.
Hebrew language
The Qumran scrolls indicate that Hebrew texts were readily understandable to the average Israelite, and that the language had evolved since Biblical times as spoken languages do. Recent scholarship recognizes that reports of Jews speaking in Aramaic indicates a multilingual society, not necessarily the primary language spoken. Alongside Aramaic, Hebrew co-existed within Israel as a spoken language. Most scholars now date the demise of Hebrew as a spoken language to the end of the Roman Period, or about 200 CE. It continued on as a literary language down through the Byzantine Period from the 4th century CE.
Language preservation
When a language dies, the knowledge of and ability to understand the culture who spoke it is threatened because the teachings, customs, oral traditions and other inherited knowledge are no longer transmitted among native speakers. As each language dies, science in linguistics, anthropology, prehistory and psychology lose some diversity in data sources.
Language death
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 Romance languages, and to Prakrit, which developed into the New Indo-Aryan 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. Thus with regard to Latin, for example, there is no point at which Latin "died"; it evolved in different ways in different geographic areas, and its modern forms are now identified by a plethora of different names such as French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Galician, Venetian, etc.
Lithuanian language
Lithuanian is one of two living Baltic languages, along with Latvian. An earlier Baltic language, Old Prussian, was extinct by the 18th century; the other Western Baltic languages, Curonian and Sudovian, became extinct earlier. Some theories, such as that of Jānis Endzelīns, considered that the Baltic languages form their own distinct branch of the family of Indo-European languages, but the most widely accepted opinion is the one that suggests the union of Baltic and Slavic languages into a distinct sub-family of Balto-Slavic languages amongst the Indo-European family of languages. Such an opinion was first represented by the likes of August Schleicher, and to a certain extent, Antoine Meillet. Endzelīns thought that the similarity between Baltic and Slavic was explicable through language contact while Schleicher, Meillet and others argued for a genetic kinship between the two families.
Extinct language
Some degree of misunderstanding can result from designating languages such as Old English and Old High German as extinct, or Latin dead, while ignoring their evolution as a language. This is expressed in the apparent paradox "Latin is a dead language, but Latin never died." A language such as Etruscan, for example, can be said to be both extinct and dead: inscriptions are ill understood even by the most knowledgeable scholars, and the language ceased to be used in any form long ago, so that there have been no speakers, native or non-native, for many centuries. In contrast, Old English, Old High German and Latin never ceased evolving as living languages, nor did they become totally extinct as Etruscan did. Through time Latin underwent both common and divergent changes in phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon and continues today as the native language of hundreds of millions of people, renamed as different Romance languages and dialects (French, Italian, Spanish, Corsican, Asturian, Ladin, etc.). Similarly, Old English and Old High German never died, but developed into various forms of modern English and German. With regard to the written language, skills in reading or writing Etruscan are all but non-existent, but trained people can understand and write Old English, Old High German and Latin. Latin differs from the Germanic counterparts in that an approximation of its ancient form is still employed to some extent liturgically. This last observation illustrates that for Latin, Old English, or Old High German to be described accurately as dead or extinct, the language in question must be conceptualized as frozen in time at a particular state of its history. This is accomplished by periodizing English and German as Old; for Latin, the most apt clarifying adjective is Classical, which also normally includes designation of high or formal register.
Loxian
Ryan, however, has said that while creating this ‘new language’ she was also very much aware of the fact that many of the languages of our world were dying. She said “Loxian is purely artistic and, although I have given it a history and culture, its primary function is still artistic. We are losing so many world languages. Language is more than everyday communication, it holds history, customs and information about its people and their way of life. As the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered languages tells us – roughly every two weeks a language dies”.
Unclassified language
If a language's genetic relationship has not been established after significant documentation of the language and comparison with other languages and families, as in the case of Basque in Europe, it is considered a language isolate – that is, it is classified as a language family of its own. An 'unclassified' language therefore is one which may still turn out to belong to an established family once better data is available or more thorough comparative research is done. Extinct unclassified languages for which little evidence has been preserved are likely to remain in limbo indefinitely, unless lost documents or a surviving speaking population are discovered.
Squamish culture
The Squamish language, or Sḵwxwú7mesh language, is the ancestral language of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh people. It is considered an important part of cultural revitalization. Although nearing language extinction, it's still used in ceremonies, events, and basic conversation among some. With the language dead (no children are learning it as a first language and all language speakers are over the age of 65), much work is being done to preserve and revitalize it. The language is part the Coast Salish linguistic group, and is most closely related to Sháshíshálh (Sechelt), and Sḵ'emin'em (Halkomelem) and Xwsa7km (Lhéchalosem). Many anthropologists and linguists have worked with Sḵwxwú7mesh people and their language, including Franz Boas, Charles Hill-Tout, Homer Barnett, and Aert J. Kuipers.
Language
"SIL Ethnologue" defines a "living language" as "one that has at least one speaker for whom it is their first language". The exact number of known living languages varies from 6,000 to 7,000, depending on the precision of one's definition of "language", and in particular, on how one defines the distinction between languages and dialects. As of 2016, "Ethnologue" cataloged 7,097 living human languages. The "Ethnologue" establishes linguistic groups based on studies of mutual intelligibility, and therefore often includes more categories than more conservative classifications. For example, the Danish language that most scholars consider a single language with several dialects is classified as two distinct languages (Danish and Jutish) by the "Ethnologue".
List of endangered languages in Canada
An endangered language is a language that 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. UNESCO defines four levels of language endangerment between "safe" (not endangered) and "extinct": There are primarily eight languages that were spoken in Canada around 2010.There is a "phonological process," or patterns used to simplify speech in the Oneida language that has been passed down for generations, this process is described as the loss of voicing in the vowel of the last syllable of a word. This process is vital to the preservation of the language, and has been changing among the speakers, such that some speakers have introduced a degree of voiced vowels in these final forms, which poises additional stress on the small population of speakers. The introduction in voicing the last syllable in words that typically are unvoiced is that it changes the traditional morphology of the language, pushing the original dialect towards language death, especially since the majority of speakers are older in age.
Language death
As a response to English linguistic dominance, de-anglicisation became a matter of national pride in some places and especially in regions that were once under colonial rule, where vestiges of colonial domination are a sensitive subject. Following centuries of English rule in Ireland and English imposition of the English language, an argument for de-anglicization was delivered before the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin, 25 November 1892; "When we speak of 'The Necessity for De-Anglicising the Irish Nation', we mean it, not as a protest against imitating what is best in the English people, for that would be absurd, but rather to show the folly of neglecting what is Irish, and hastening to adopt, pell-mell, and indiscriminately, everything that is English, simply because it is English." Language was one of the features of Anglicisation in Ireland: although it never died out and became an official language after independence, Irish had lost its status as the island's principal vernacular to become a minority language during the period of English rule; similarly, in North America indigenous languages have been replaced by those of the colonists.
Terry Crowley (linguist)
At the time of his death Crowley was working on writing grammars and dictionaries of 18 languages. In a book published posthumously, Crowley wrote of the urgency of doing "dirty-boots" linguistic fieldwork, with the ethical imperative of enabling thousands of cultures at risk of extinction to have their linguistic patrimony recorded, so that their descendants might thereby avoid the tragic consequences of the loss of Tasmanian languages. Almost nothing of structural value was transmitted in written archives by the time of Truganini's death, a fact which deprives all Palawa of Aboriginal descent of both their cultural identity and the land claims which can only be pursued if continuity can be proven. Crowley perceived his salvage campaign among far-flung languages in this light, as securing for future generations a heritage that would otherwise be lost, to their detriment.
List of revived languages
The most frequent reason for extinction is the marginalisation of local languages within a wider dominant nation state, which might at times amount to outright political oppression. This process normally works alongside economic and cultural pressures for greater centralisation and assimilation. Once a language has become marginalised in this way, it is often perceived as being "useless" by its remaining speakers, who associate it with low social status and poverty, and consequently fail to pass it on to the next generation.
People's Linguistic Survey of India
PLSI also highlights the phenomenon of dying languages. "On 26 January 2010, a lady who belonged to a community called Bo died in the Andaman Islands and she was the last speaker of her language that was also called Bo. Sadly, along with her, the continuous line of wisdom of 65,000 years was also gone." said Ganesh Devy, the Chairperson of Bhasha Research and Publication Centre. Observing a link between changing economic realities and the survival of languages, Devy contends that "a language disappears when the livelihood options of the speech community disappear."
The Story of India
In an interview to The Hindu Michael Wood said, "One that's 2,000 years old like ancient Greece or Rome, Tamil is the last living classical Indian language.The first surviving work in Tamil, a 300 BC book on linguistics, refers to an already existing culture. Tamil is older than any modern European language. I wanted to remind Western-centric audiences, who implicitly assume the superiority of Western modes of thought, that Tamil is one of 23 official Indian languages, with a literature comparable to any in the West. It makes viewers sit up and question their assumptions".
Documenting Endangered Languages
The Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) program is a joint effort between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to help fund fieldwork, research, and community activities that are involved in recording, documenting, and archiving endangered human languages. Linguists estimate that more than 3,000 of the 6,000-7,000 languages currently spoken will soon be extinct due to the diminishing number of speakers who pass along knowledge of their first languages to their children, and fewer daily activities that occur in these home languages. To address this issue, the NSF and NEH—in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) serving as a research host, but in a non-funding role—announced the first DEL awards in 2005, in an attempt to preserve records of endangered languages in use.
List of endangered languages in Nepal
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. UNESCO defines four levels of language endangerment between "safe" (not endangered) and "extinct":
Language death
Language revitalization is an attempt to slow or reverse language death. Revitalization programs are ongoing in many languages, and have had varying degrees of success.
Endangered language
During language loss—sometimes referred to as "obsolescence" in the linguistic literature—the language that is being lost generally undergoes changes as speakers make their language more similar to the language that they are shifting to. For example, gradually losing grammatical or phonological complexities that are not found in the dominant language.
Massachusett grammar
Algonquian languages mark those objects that were, i.e., people or living things that are deceased and objects that are lost, stolen or destroyed, or 'absent,' as opposed to those that currently exist. For people and animate objects, it generally refers to something alive that has passed away. Items that are destroyed, beyond repair or lost forever tend to be inanimate objects. All nouns, whether animate or inanimate, are marked with the suffixes -i or -y (-ay) in the singular and -uk or -ug (-uk) in the plural. With the same forms, a noun's animacy must be known or determined from context. Truncated noun stems are also restored before absentative endings, so woskétomp (waskeetôp) is restored before becoming woskétompáay (waskeetôpâay) , 'man' (that is passed away).
List of endangered languages in Colombia
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. UNESCO defines four levels of language endangerment between "safe" (not endangered) and "extinct":
Ura language (Vanuatu)
Oral tradition and documented evidence suggests that Novulamleg and Uravat were linguistic varieties of Ura. However, Novulamleg was reported extinct in the 1870s and Uravat has never been referred to in written literature. Because no linguistic information on their speech forms exists, it’s hard to tell if these were two dialects of Ura or two distinct languages (Crowley, 1999). However, according to Ethnologue, Ura has two sister languages which are Sye and Ifo. Ifo became extinct when the last speaker died in 1954, but Sye is very much in use today. In fact, many cross-linguistic transfers of features can be found between Sye and Ura, which have similar lexicon, phonology, and structure (Crowley, 1999).
List of endangered languages in the United States
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. UNESCO defines four levels of language endangerment between "safe" (not endangered) and "extinct":
Prestige (sociolinguistics)
In addition to forming of a new language, known as a creole, language contact can result in changes to the languages in contact, such as language convergence, language shift or language death. Language convergence is when two languages have been exposed for a long period of time and they begin to have more properties in common. Language shift is when a speaker shifts from speaking a lower prestige dialect to a higher prestige dialect. Language death is when speakers of a language die off, and there are no new generations learning to speak this language. The intensity of the contact between the two languages and their relative prestige levels influence the degree to which a language experiences lexical borrowing and changes to the morphology, phonology, syntax, and overall structure of the language.
List of endangered languages in Indonesia
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. UNESCO defines four levels of language endangerment between "safe" (not endangered) and "extinct":
Salishan languages
Another example of language change in the Salishan language family is word taboo, which is a cultural expression of the belief in the power of words. Among the Coast languages, a person’s name becomes a taboo word immediately following their death. This taboo is lifted when the name of the deceased is given to a new member of his/her lineage. In the meantime, the deceased person’s name and words that are phonetically similar to the name are considered taboo and can only be expressed via descriptive phrases. In some cases these taboo words are permanently replaced by their chosen descriptive phrases, resulting in language change.
List of extinct languages of Africa
This is a list of extinct languages of Africa, languages which have undergone language death, have no native speakers and no spoken descendant. There are 52 Languages listed.
Long Now Foundation
The "Rosetta Project" is an effort to preserve all languages that have a high likelihood of extinction over the period from 2000 to 2100. These include many languages whose native speakers number in the thousands or fewer. Other languages with many more speakers are considered by the project to be endangered because of the increasing importance of English as an international language of commerce and culture. Samples of such languages are to be inscribed onto a disc of nickel alloy three inches (7.62 cm) across. A Version 1.0 of the disc was completed on November 3, 2008.
Language preservation
There are different factors that can put a language in danger of becoming extinct. One is when a language is no longer being taught to the children of the community, or at least to a large number of the children. In these cases, the remaining fluent speakers of the language are generally the older members of the community, and when they pass on, the language dies out with them.
Rama language
The Rama language is severely endangered. Their language was described as "dying quickly for lack of use" as early as the 1860s . By 1980, the Rama were noted as having "all but lost their original ethnic language", and had become speakers of a form of English creole instead . In 1992, only approximately 36 fluent speakers could be found among an ethnic population of 649 individuals in 1992 . The number of speakers on Rama Cay island was only 4 in 1992. There have been several language revitalization efforts. The fieldwork for the first dictionary of Rama was done during this time by Robin Schneider, a graduate student from the University of Berlin .It is spoken in Honduras and Nicaragua
Yola people
The Yola people eventually merged into Irish culture. Many lands were confiscated during the plantations and modern English was introduced at this time. The Yola language eventually succumbed to the same factors that killed off the Irish language in the county, which was the stigmatization of the language and the introduction of English in schools. The language was officially declared extinct in the 1850s. Their inhabitants still populate the majority of the baronies and many customs and words survive in the locality.
List of endangered languages in South America
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. UNESCO defines four levels of language endangerment between "safe" (not endangered) and "extinct":
List of extinct languages of North America
This is a list of extinct languages of North America, languages which have undergone language death, have no native speakers and no spoken descendant, most of them being languages of former Native American tribes. There are 109 languages listed
Unclassified language
There are hundreds of unclassified languages, most of them extinct, although there are some, albeit relatively few, that are still spoken; in the following list, the extinct languages are labeled with a dagger (†).
List of extinct languages in Central America and the Caribbean
This is a list of extinct languages of Central America and the Caribbean, languages which have undergone language death, have no native speakers, and no spoken descendants. There are 10 languages listed
Iroquoian languages
(†) — language extinct
Cornish language revival
The Cornish language revival () is an ongoing process to revive the use of the Cornish language of Cornwall, United Kingdom. The Cornish language's disappearance began to hasten during the 13th century, but its decline began with the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the 4th and 5th centuries. The last reported person to have full knowledge of a traditional form of Cornish, John Davey, died in 1891. The revival movement started in the late 19th century as a result of antiquarian and academic interest in the language, which was already extinct, and also as a result of the Celtic revival movement. In 2009, UNESCO changed its classification of Cornish from "extinct" to "critically endangered", seen as a milestone for the revival of the language.
Indigenous language
Many indigenous languages are disappearing as there are no longer any young people left to speak those languages, so their remaining speakers are dying out.
In North America, since 1600 at least 52 Native American languages have disappeared. Globally, there may be more than 7,000 languages that exist in the world today, though many of them have not been recorded because they belong to tribes in rural areas of the world or are not easily accessible. It is estimated that 6,809 "living" languages exist in the world today, with 90% having fewer than 100,000 speakers. This means that roughly 6,100 languages are facing a risk of eventual extinction. Some languages are very close to disappearing.
Sanskrit
Scholars are divided on whether or when Sanskrit died. Western authors such as John Snelling state that Sanskrit and Pali are both dead Indian languages. Indian authors such as M Ramakrishnan Nair state that Sanskrit was a dead language by the 1st millennium BCE. Sheldon Pollock states that in some crucial way, "Sanskrit is dead". After the 12th-century, the Sanskrit literary works were reduced to "reinscription and restatements" of ideas already explored, and any creativity was restricted to hymns and verses. This contrasted with the previous 1,500 years when "great experiments in moral and aesthetic imagination" marked the Indian scholarship using Classical Sanskrit, states Pollock.
Southern Alta language
Today, Southern Alta risks becoming extinct in the near future. With only 1,000 speakers, or less, the language is categorized as critically endangered. Due to Southern Alta not being a common spoken language in the Philippines, it is likely that the language will soon be lost and will not continue to be passed down, eventually becoming a "dead language".
Endangered language
UNESCO operates with four levels of language endangerment between "safe" (not endangered) and "extinct" (no living speakers), based on intergenerational transfer: "vulnerable" (not spoken by children outside the home), "definitely endangered" (children not speaking), "severely endangered" (only spoken by the oldest generations), and "critically endangered" (spoken by few members of the oldest generation, often semi-speakers).
UNESCO's "Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger" categorises 2,473 languages by level of endangerment. More than 200 languages have become extinct around the world over the last three generations.
Language death
Languages with a small, geographically isolated population of speakers can die when their speakers are wiped out by genocide, disease, or natural disaster.
Celtic languages
The other two, Cornish (a Brittonic language) and Manx (a Goidelic language), died in modern times with their presumed last native speakers in 1777 and 1974 respectively. For both these languages, however, revitalisation movements have led to the adoption of these languages by adults and children and produced some native speakers.
Gauls
The exact time of the final extinction of Gaulish is unknown, but it is estimated to have been around or shortly after the middle of the 1st millennium. Gaulish may have survived in some regions as the mid to late 6th century in France. Despite considerable Romanization of the local material culture, the Gaulish language is held to have survived and had coexisted with spoken Latin during the centuries of Roman rule of Gaul. Coexisting with Latin, Gaulish played a role in shaping the Vulgar Latin dialects that developed into French, with effects including loanwords and calques, sound changes shaped by Gaulish influence, and well as in conjugation and word order. Recent work in computational simulation suggests that Gaulish played a role in gender shifts of words in Early French, where by the gender would shift to match the gender of the corresponding Gaulish word with the same meaning.
Language death
In the modern period (c. 1500 CE–present; following the rise of colonialism), language death has typically resulted from the process of cultural assimilation leading to language shift and the gradual abandonment of a native language in favour of a foreign "lingua franca", largely those of European countries.
Extinct language
This is a list of languages reported as having become extinct after the year 2000.
For a more complete list, see List of extinct languages.
Endangered language
Language shift most commonly occurs when speakers switch to a language associated with social or economic power or spoken more widely, the ultimate result being language death. The general consensus is that there are between 6,000 and 7,000 languages currently spoken and that between 50% and 90% of them will have become extinct by the year 2100. The 20 most common languages, each with more than 50 million speakers, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, but most languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people.
Mobilian Jargon
The extinct language has not made its way into the present day as a functional language. Europeans did not feel much of a need to document the language. There is documentary evidence in numerous historical records such as journals, diaries, reports and scholarly treatments. What Europeans did decide to document though was very little and safe to assume that they did not have a full understanding of Mobilian Jargon. Europeans believed that Mobilian Jargon was the "mother" language of all other Indian languages, due to their lack of observation that Mobilian Jargon was actually a hybrid of the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribe’s language. Since it was mainly used as a spoken trade language, its use as a language became unnecessary; the language was lost and eventually became extinct. Though Mobilian was first written about in the 1700s and was spoken until the 1950s, in the 1980s elders in the region of Louisiana could still recall a few select words and phrases. In 2012, the Mezcal Jazz Unit of Montpellier, France, collaborated by Internet with Grayhawk Perkins, a historian of the Muskogean nation, to make a recording titled "Thirteen Moons" which features "the soulful chants of ancient folk tales and more modern stories told in Mobilian."
Chickasaw language
Emily Johnson Dickerson, the last monolingual speaker of Chickasaw, died on December 30, 2013. Ethnologue estimated in its seventeenth edition that Chickasaw retained up to 600 speakers, but noted that this figure was rapidly declining because most speakers are 50 and older. Children are no longer acquiring the language, indicating Chickasaw has a notably low vitality. As of 2014, there were "four to five confident conversational speakers who are under the age of 35." The Chickasaw language is not much used outside of the home. In terms of conservation and language vitality, Ethnologue evaluates the current language situation as moribund, and UNESCO lists Chickasaw as a "severely endangered" language, also noting that most of roughly 600 speakers are over fifty and almost all are bilingual in English.
Historical language
Historical languages (also known as historic languages) are languages that were spoken in a historical period, but that are distinct from their modern form; that is, they are forms of languages historically attested to from the past which have evolved into more modern forms. Thus, historical languages contrast with dead languages (languages which have become extinct, or undergone language death). Also, historical languages contrast with reconstructed languages (that is, the proto-languages) of theoretical linguistics. One of the approaches to defining and using the concept of historical languages is implemented in the ISO 639 standards.
List of endangered languages in North America
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. UNESCO defines four levels of language endangerment between "safe" (not endangered) and "extinct":
Language preservation
Language is an important part of any society, because it enables people to communicate and express themselves. When a language dies out, future generations lose a vital part of the culture that is necessary to completely understand it. This makes language a vulnerable aspect of cultural heritage, and it becomes especially important to preserve it. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), from facts published in their "Atlas of Languages in Danger of Disappearing," there are an estimated 6,000 languages spoken worldwide today, and half of the world’s population speaks the eight most common. More than 3,000 languages are reportedly spoken by fewer than 10,000 people each. "Ethnologue," a reference work published by SIL International, has cataloged the world’s known living languages, and it estimates that 417 languages are on the verge of extinction.
Classical language
Classical languages are typically dead languages, or show a high degree of diglossia, as the spoken varieties of the language diverge further away from the classical written language over time.
List of extinct languages of Europe
This is a list of extinct languages of Europe, languages which have undergone language death, have no native speakers and no spoken descendant. As the vast majority of Europeans speak Indo-European languages, a result of the westward portion of the prehistoric Indo-European migrations, the bulk of the indigenous languages of Europe became extinct thousands of years ago without leaving any record of their existence as they were superseded by Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Hellenic, and Iranian Indo-European languages. A small minority of these extinct languages, however, survived long enough to be attested.
Lycian language
Lycian became extinct around the beginning of the first century BC, replaced by the Ancient Greek language.
List of endangered languages in China
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. UNESCO defines four levels of language endangerment between "safe" (not endangered) and "extinct":
Residuated lattice
The residuated lattice of all binary relations on "X" is finite just when "X" is finite, and commutative just when "X" has at most one element. When "X" is empty the algebra is the degenerate Boolean algebra in which 0 = 1 = I. The residuated lattice of all languages on Σ is commutative just when Σ has at most one letter. It is finite just when Σ is empty, consisting of the two languages 0 (the empty language {}) and the monoid unit I = {ε} = 1.
Berbice Creole Dutch
In February 2010, the language was declared officially extinct, according to an article in the upcoming March issue of the Dutch edition of "National Geographic" magazine. In the 80's there was still a small number of Berbice speakers in Guyana but, since was discovered that the last speaker died in 2005, the authoritative international language database "Ethnologue" had declared it extinct.
Lists of endangered languages
In order to judge if a language is endangered, the number of speakers is less important than their age distribution. There are languages in Indonesia reported with as many as two million native speakers alive now, but all of advancing age, with little or no transmission to the young. On the other hand, while there are only 30,000 Ladin speakers left, almost all children still learn it as their mother tongue, thus Ladin is not currently endangered. Similarly, the Hawaiian language has only about 1,000 speakers but it has stabilized at this number, and there is now school instruction in the language, from preschool through the 12th grade. Thus the language is classified as merely vulnerable.
Ethnologue
In 2014, with the 17th edition, "Ethnologue" introduced a numerical code for language status using a framework called EGIDS (Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale), an elaboration of Fishman's GIDS (Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale). It ranks a language from 0 for an international language to 10 for an extinct language, i.e. a language with which no-one retains a sense of ethnic identity.
Serrano language
The Endangered Languages Project lists Serrano as in the "Awakening" stage, meaning that the language has lost its native and fluent speakers and can be considered "extinct" but has revitalization projects underway to preserve knowledge of the language and the Serrano people.
Endangered language
While there is no definite threshold for identifying a language as endangered, UNESCO's 2003 document entitled "Language vitality and endangerment" outlines nine factors for determining language vitality:
Many languages, for example some in Indonesia, have tens of thousands of speakers but are endangered because children are no longer learning them, and speakers are shifting to using the national language (e.g. Indonesian) in place of local languages. In contrast, a language with only 500 speakers might be considered very much alive if it is the primary language of a community, and is the first (or only) spoken language of all children in that community.