What Is An Extinct Language?
Submitted by Andy_B on Thursday, 17 March 2022 Page Views: 325
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A dead language isn’t the same as one that’s extinct, however. Below, we talk more about an extinct language versus one that’s dead and how these relate to history and culture in general. Photo Left: Gilgamesh Epic - The Flood Tablet. Written in cuneiform script in the Akhadian language it describes how the gods sent a flood to destroy the world. Now in the British Museum
The Basics of An Extinct Language
A language dies every two weeks, according to some estimates. Popularity is one of the main reasons. If a group of people no longer favors a language or perhaps, they lose their culture, often to invaders, the language dies with the last person who speaks it. Right now, there are dozens of languages with less than a handful of remaining speakers. When those remaining people die, so will the languages.There are around 7,000 languages spoken throughout the world, and hundreds of those are on the Endangered Language List, only clinging on because there are a handful of native speakers left.
An extinct language isn’t studied at all. A dead language, on the other hand, has uses and applications, despite there being no native speakers left. We mentioned Latin as an example above. It’s the most well-known dead language. No one in the world speaks it as their common, everyday language, but it’s important in academia. We can learn a lot about history as well as currently spoken languages through the study of Latin.
While there are hundreds of extinct languages we know about, there are probably many more we don’t know about. There are likely many that developed and then died out before the invention of writing, so we have no way of knowing about their existence at all.
What is An Endangered Language?
Hundreds of languages, as mentioned, are considered endangered. Endangered languages are likely in the near future to become extinct. What will often happen is that a language stops being used as often as it once was. The language is replaced by another, such as English. Endangered languages may not be learned by children.An example are the languages of the tribes of Papua New Guinea. There are as many as 900 languages these tribes speak, and many of these are endangered. The same is true of Australia’s aboriginal people. More than 80% of their native languages will die with the present generation.
A recent survey found of the hundreds of languages that were at one point spoken in North America, less than 200 remain. Of these, only around 30 are spoken by both adults and children, meaning these may become extinct.
Usually, languages are classified in the following way, according to linguists:
• A language is characterized as vulnerable if children speak the language that their parents speak only when they’re with relatives or at home.
• The language becomes endangered when children don’t study it anymore, despite it being their mother tongue.
• Languages are critically endangered when the youngest people able to speak them are grandparents.
How Does a Language Go Extinct?
There are many reasons contributing to the extinction of languages, which can include:• Absorption—in some cases, a language will die because the people speaking them assimilate into a larger, geographically nearby group. Then, the language of the group they assimilate into becomes dominant rather than their own.
• Evolution—languages are like living things that are always evolving as the lifestyle and culture of the people who speak them evolve. For example, if you were to hear people speaking English in the 1500s, it would sound nearly unrecognizable to you more than likely.
• Transformation—Some languages evolved into a different type of language, rather than dying off. For example, with Latin, all the speakers didn’t die off, but rather the Romance languages emerged, which included Spanish, French, and Italian.
• Genocide—unfortunately, there are situations where a language dies because of genocide. If a group of people is killed because of their ethnicity, then their language goes away as well.• Invasion—when foreign invaders conquer a group of people or territory, they can force the inhabitants to stop using their native language.
Examples of Known Extinct Languages in the U.S.
Some of the languages that we know have gone extinct from the U.S. come mostly from Native American tribes and include:• Eyak was a language spoken actively in Alaska until 2008.
• Yana was spoken by the Yahi people in northern California until 1916.
• Eastern Abnoki was the language of the Penobscot tribe in Maine until the 1990s.
• Suislaw is a preserved language of the Oregon Pacific Coast area, but it hasn’t been spoken regularly since the 1970s.
What’s the Relevance of Language Extinction?
When there’s the extinction of a language, that means a loss of the cultural identity of a group. Languages are also critical to our understanding of cultures, history, traditions, and diversity. If a community wants to preserve its language or even revive it, there are some options available. Modern Hebrew is an example of this in action. It was brought back as a native language after centuries, where the language was only learned and studied in ancient written form.In California, younger adults are working on learning languages from older speakers in communities where only a few are still living. In New Zealand, the Maori communities are creating nursery schools where the elders staff them and conduct them entirely in the Maori language.
Linguists work to learn as much as they can about disappearing language. The goal is to have all the knowledge of whatever a language is so that it doesn’t actually disappear even if it’s no longer in use. Linguists work with communities throughout the world to preserve languages and put into practice their experiences of studying and teaching a variety of languages. David Harrison, a field linguist, estimates around 85% of languages haven’t been documented yet. If a language is going to be preserved, it has to be done through written records that include a dictionary.
