We all know what a living language is- those are the ones we use. But languages eventually die out when people don't use them. The death of a language is a gradual process that goes from a lack of native speakers to no speakers to eventually an untranslatable mystery. We think of Latin as the epitome of a "dead" language because no one raises their children to speak Latin as their first language. Yet a lot of people can speak and understand it, and it is used in certain ways in religion and science, unlike, say, Sanskrit.
Linguist Dr. Erica Brozovski (previously at Neatorama) takes us through the process of language death. Languages can be classified as dormant, dead, or extinct depending on where they are in the death process. However, these terms are not mutually exclusive, nor do they signal that a language is doomed. Well, except maybe the extinct label does. What can really blow your mind is realizing that we don't have that many examples of an extinct language because they are extinct, but you can bet your bottom dollar that there are a bunch of them we'll never know about. -via Laughing Squid
Comments (0)