Although we don’t often think of them this way, languages are living things that change, evolve, and mutate into new and different forms. Of course, just like the dinosaur and the dodo, languages also have the capacity to die out once they fall out of use. Ethnologue, a catalogue of all the earth’s living languages, has estimated that right now there are 6,912 languages spoken across the world and that 50 percent of those are in danger of becoming extinct.
How Do Languages Die?
Historically, the most common reason for languages to become extinct is that their speakers gradually assimilate to a new culture and start using a different primary language. For instance, before the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans lived in the area of Los Angeles and spoke a language called Tongva. After the influx of Spanish missionaries and American settlers, the natives were killed or converted to Catholicism and eventually began speaking Spanish or English. By 1970, the last speaker of Tongva died. All that remains of the language are a few words compiled by explorers from the 1800s and a few California place names—Topanga Canyon, Cahuenga Pass, and Rancho Cucamonga.
In modern times, globalization and technology have been a huge influence on language death. As people become more urbanized, they start learning the language that dominates their culture, causing the old language to fall out of use. Children, especially, are vulnerable, as they’re usually required to learn the dominant language for school, and then it becomes their primary language. As the population of native speakers gets older, with fewer of them passing the language tradition onto younger generations, the language begins to fade. Once the last generation of speakers dies out, the language dies too. Sometimes, languages die when an entire ethnic group dies because of famine, war, or genocide.
Extinct but Not Dead
An extinct language is not the same as a dead language. Dead languages are those that are no longer learned as a primary tongue, but remain in limited use. Old English, Coptic, and Ancient Greek are all dead languages, but there are people who can still speak and understand them, and we have writings and evidence of their existence. Scholars still use Coptic, the language spoken in Ancient Egypt, Aramaic, and Sanskrit widely. Some dead languages like Latin or Old Church Slavonian are used as liturgical languages, which keeps them in modern use for religious rites, although they’re not spoken in everyday life.
Extinct languages, on the other hand, are those that have passed out of use and can’t be reconstructed. Some extinct languages, like Aquitanian, simply die out, and some evolve into modern versions. The Anglo-Saxon language may be extinct, but its linguistic descendants, including Modern English, remain.
Lost Languages Around the World
The United States was once home to hundreds, if not thousands, of languages spoken by its native tribes, but as those tribes were killed, resettled, or acclimated to American culture, they became primary speakers of English and many of their ancestral languages gradually died out. The Nez Perce Indians living in present-day Idaho and Washington once had their own language, but currently there are only about twenty speakers left. Some Indians living in Florida and Georgia spoke a language called Apalachee, but that language died out in the 17th century, when its speakers turned to English or Spanish. Louisiana had many native languages, including Chitimacha, which went extinct in 1940 when its last speaker died. Eyak, an indigenous Alaskan language, only became extinct as recently as January 2008.
England is usually thought of as a monolinguistic country, but it has hosted dozens of languages in its history, most of them completely unrelated to English. Most of those have already become extinct, such as Norn, spoken on the Shetland and Orkney islands, and Manx, formerly spoken on the Isle of Man. Cornish is an endangered language, spoken only by 500 people in the county of Cornwall.
