Language death

Dolly Pentreath, last native speaker of the Cornish language, in an engraved portrait published in 1781.

The last three speakers of Magati Ke.

In linguistics, language death (also language extinction, linguistic extinction or linguicide, and rarely also glottophagy) occurs when a language loses its last native speaker. Language death is a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language variety is decreased, eventually resulting in no native or fluent speakers of the variety. Language death may affect any language idiom, including dialects and languages. Language death should not be confused with language attrition (also called language loss), which describes the loss of proficiency in a language at the individual level.

Types of language death

Language shift can be the result of linguicide, in which ethnic group members no longer learn their heritage language as their first language.

Language death may manifest itself in one of the following ways:

• Gradual language death
• Bottom-to-top language death: when language change begins in a low-level environment such as the home.
• Top-to-bottom language death: when language change begins in a high-level environment such as the government.
• Radical language death
• Linguicide (also known as sudden death, language genocide, physical language death, biological language death)

The most common process leading to language death is one in which a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual in another language, and gradually shifts allegiance to the second language until they cease to use their original, heritage language. This is a process of assimilation which may be voluntary or may be forced upon a population. Speakers of some languages, particularly regional or minority languages, may decide to abandon them based on economic or utilitarian grounds, in favour of languages regarded as having greater utility or prestige. This process is gradual and can occur from either bottom-to-top or top-to-bottom.

Languages with a small, geographically isolated population of speakers can also die when their speakers are wiped out by genocide, disease, or natural disaster.

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. Once a language is no longer a native language—that is, if no children are being socialised into it as their primary language—the process of transmission is ended and the language itself will not survive past the current generation. This is rarely a sudden event, but a slow process of each generation learning less and less of the language, until its use is relegated to the domain of traditional use, such as in poetry and song. Typically the transmission of the language from adults to children becomes more and more restricted, to the final setting that adults speaking the language will raise children who never acquire fluency. One example of this process reaching its conclusion is that of the Dalmatian language.

Language death can be fast, when the children are taught to avoid their parents' language for reasons such as work opportunities and social status. At other times, minority languages survive much better, for example when the speakers try to isolate themselves against a majority population. Often, especially historically, governments have tried to promote language death, not wishing to have minority languages.

Consequences on grammar

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. This process of change has been described by Appel (1983) in two categories, though they are not mutually exclusive. Often speakers replace elements of their own language with something from the language they are shifting toward. Also, if their heritage language has an element that the new language does not, speakers may drop it.

• overgeneralization;
• undergeneralization;
• loss of phonological contrasts;
• variability;
• changes in word order;
• morphological loss, such as was seen in Scottish Gaelic in East Sutherland, Scotland (Dorian: 1978) as fluent speakers still used the correct plural formation, whereas semi-speakers used simple suffixation or did not include any plural formation at all;
• synthetic morphosyntax may become increasingly analytic;
• syntactic loss (i.e. lexical categories, complex constructions);
• relexification;
• loss of word-formation productivity;
• style loss, such as the loss of ritual speech;
• morphological leveling;
• analogical leveling.

Language revitalization

Main article: Language revitalization

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.

The revival of the Hebrew language in Israel is the only example of a language which has become a language with new first language speakers after it became extinct in everyday use for an extended period, being used only as a liturgical language. Even in the case of Hebrew, there is a theory that argues that "the Hebrew revivalists who wished to speak pure Hebrew failed. The result is a fascinating and multifaceted Israeli language, which is not only multi-layered but also multi-sourced. The revival of a clinically dead language is unlikely without cross-fertilization from the revivalists' mother tongue(s)."

Other cases of language revitalization which have seen some degree of success are Irish, Welsh, Hawaiian, Cherokee and to a lesser extent Navajo.

As a response to English linguistic imperialism, 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, as is the case in North America where their indigenous languages have been replaced by that of the colonists.

According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, "language reclamation will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve wellbeing. There are various ethical, aesthetic and utilitarian benefits of language revival - for example, historical justice, diversity and employability, respectively."

Dead languages and normal language change

Linguists distinguish between language "death" and the process where a language becomes a "dead language" through normal language change, a linguistic phenomenon analogous to pseudoextinction. This happens when a language in the course of its normal development gradually morphs into something that is then recognized as a separate, different language, leaving the old form with no native speakers. Thus, for example, Old English may be regarded as a "dead language", with no native speakers, although it has never "died" but instead simply changed and developed into Middle English, Early Modern English and Modern English. 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 Prakrit which developed into the Hindustani language and its dialects. 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.

Measuring language vitality

Except in case of linguicide, languages do not suddenly become extinct; they become moribund as the community of speakers gradually shifts to using other languages. As speakers shift, there are discernible, if subtle, changes in language behavior. These changes in behavior lead to a change of linguistic vitality in the community. There are a variety of systems that have been proposed for measuring the vitality of a language in a community. One of the earliest is GIDS (Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale) proposed by Joshua Fishman in 1991. A noteworthy publishing milestone in measuring language vitality is an entire issue of Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development devoted to the study of ethnolinguistic vitality, Vol. 32.2, 2011, with several authors presenting their own tools for measuring language vitality. A number of other published works on measuring language vitality have been published, prepared by authors with varying situations and applications in mind. These include works by Arienne Dwyer, Martin Ehala, M. Lynne Landweer, Mark Karan, András Kornai, and Paul Lewis and Gary Simons.

See also

• Classical language
• Cultural genocide
• Cultural hegemony
• Endangered language
  • Lists of endangered languages
• Ethnocide
• Extinct language
  • List of extinct languages
• International language
• Language contact
• Language policy
• Language revitalization
• Language shift
• Last speaker of language
• Linguistic discrimination
• Linguistic imperialism
• Linguistic purism
• Linguistic rights
• The Linguists (documentary film)
• Minority language
• Prestige language
• Regional language
• Rosetta Project
• Semi-speaker
• Terminal speaker
• Bengali Language Movement
• Anti-Hindi agitations of Tamil Nadu

Further reading

• Abley, Mark. (2003). Spoken here: Travels among threatened languages. London: Heinemann.
• Aitchinson, Jean. (1991). Language change: progress or decay? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bastardas-Boada, Albert (2007). "Linguistic sustainability for a multilingual humanity", Glossa. An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 2, num. 2.
• Batibo, Herman M. (2005). Language decline and death in Africa: Causes, consequences, and challenges. Multilingual Matters.
• Brenzinger, Matthias (Ed.). (1992). Language death: Factual and theoretical explorations with special reference to East Africa. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Brenzinger, Matthais (Ed.). (1998). Endangered languages in Africa. Cologne: Rüdiger Köper Verlag.
• Broderick, George. (1999). Language Death in the Isle of Man. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ISBN 3-484-30395-6.
• Calvet, Louis-Jean. (1998). Language wars and linguistic politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Campbell, Lyle. (1994). Language death. In R. E. Asher (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (pp. 1960–1968). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
• Campbell, Lyle; & Muntzel, M. (1989). The structural consequences of language death. In N. C. Dorian (Ed.).
• Cantoni-Harvey, Gina (Ed.). (1997). Stabilizing indigenous languages. Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University, Center for Excellence in Education.
• Crystal, David. (2000). Language death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-65321-5.
• Crystal, David. (2004). Language revolution. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Cyr, Christine. (2008). "How Do You Learn a Dead Language?". Slate.
• Dalby, Andrew. (2003). Language in danger: The loss of linguistic diversity and the threat to our future. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-12900-9.
• Dixon, R. M. W. (1997). The rise and fall of languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Dorian, Nancy C. (1973). Grammatical change in a dying dialect. Language, 49, 413-438.
• Dorian, Nancy C. (1978). Fate of morphological complexity in language death: Evidence from East Sutherland Gaelic. Language, 54 (3), 590-609.
• Dorian, Nancy C. (1981). Language death: The life cycle of a Scottish Gaelic dialect. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Dorian, Nancy C. (Ed.). (1989). Investigating obsolescence: Studies in language contraction and death. Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language (No. 7). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-32405-X.
• Dressler, Wolfgand & Wodak-Leodolter, Ruth (eds.) (1977) Language death (International Journal of the Sociology of Language vol. 12). The Hague: Mouton.
• Fishman, Joshua A. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
• Grenoble, Lenore A.; & Whaley, Lindsay J. (Eds.). (1998). Endangered languages: Current issues and future prospects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hagège, Claude. (1992). Le souffle de la langue. Paris: Odile Jacob.
• Hagège, Claude. (2000). Halte à la mort des langues. Paris: Editions Odille Jacob.
• Hale, Ken; Krauss, Michael; Watahomigie, Lucille J.; Yamamoto, Akira Y.; Craig, Colette; Jeanne, LaVerne M. et al. (1992). Endangered languages. Language, 68 (1), 1-42.
• Harmon, David. (2002). In light of our differences: How diversity in nature and culture makes us human. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
• Harrison, K. David. (2007) When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. New York and London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-518192-1.
• Hazaël-Massieux, Marie-Christine. (1999). Les créoles: L'indispensable survie. Paris: Editions Entente.
• Hill, Jane. (1983). Language death in Uto-Aztecan. International Journal of American Linguistics, 49, 258-27.
• Janse, Mark; & Tol, Sijmen (Eds.). (2003). Language death and language maintenance: Theoretical, practical and descriptive approaches. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. ISBN 90-272-4752-8; ISBN 1-58811-382-5.
• Joseph, Brian D. (Ed.). (2003). When languages collide: Perspectives on language conflict, language competition, and language coexistence. Columbus: Ohio State University.
• Maffi, Lusia (Ed.). (2001). On biocultural diversity: Linking language, knowledge, and the environment. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
• Maurais, Jacques; & Morris, Michael A. (Eds.). (2003). Languages in a globalizing world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Mohan, Peggy; & Zador, Paul. (1986). Discontinuity in a life cycle: The death of Trinidad Bhojpuri. Language, 62 (2), 291-319.
• Motamed, Fereydoon; (1974). La métrique diatemporelle: ou des accords de temps revolutifs dans les langues à flexions quantitatives. "[1]" Open Library OL25631615M.
• Mufwene, Salikoko S. (2001). The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Mühlhäusler, Peter. (1996). Linguistic ecology: Language change and linguistic imperialism in the Pacific region. London: Routledge.
• Nettle, Daniel; & Romaine, Suzanne. (2000). Vanishing voices: The extinction of the world's languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-513624-1.
• Phillipson, Robert. (2003). English only?: Challenging language policy. London: Routledge.
• Reyhner, Jon (Ed.). (1999). Revitalizing indigenous languages. Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University, Center for Excellence in Education. ISBN 0-9670554-0-7.
• Robins, R. H.; & Uhlenbeck, E. M. (1991). Endangered languages. Oxford: Berg.
• Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. (1990). Theory of language death, and, language decay and contact-induced change: Similarities and differences. Arbeitspapier (No. 12). Köln: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität zu Köln.
• Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. (1992). Theory of language death. In M. Brenzinger (Ed.) (pp. 7–30).
• Schilling-Estes, Natalie; & Wolfram, Walt. (1999). Alternative models of dialect death: Dissipation vs. concentration. Language, 75 (3), 486-521.
• Skutnab-Kangas, Tove. (2000). Linguistic genocide in education—or world-wide diversity and human rights? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Slater, Julia. (2010). "Time Takes Its Toll on Old Swiss Language" SwissInfo.ch.
• de Swaan, Abram. (2001). Words of the world: The global language system. Cambeidge, UK: Polity Press.
• Thomason, Sarah G. (2001). Language contact: An introduction. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
• Zuckermann, Ghil'ad and Michael Walsh. (2011). 'Stop, Revive, Survive: Lessons from the Hebrew Revival Applicable to the Reclamation, Maintenance and Empowerment of Aboriginal Languages and Cultures', Australian Journal of Linguistics Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 111–127.

External links

• Lost Tongues and the Politics of Language Endangerment
• Languages don't kill languages; speakers do
• Language endangerment: What have pride & prestige got to do with It? (pdf)
• Language birth & death (pdf)
• Globalization & the Myth of Killer Languages: What’s Really Going on? (pdf)
• Wall Street Journal on language death
• International Symposium on "Linguistic Rights in the World: The current situation", United Nations, Geneva, 24 April 2008