Death of Language

In linguistics, language death (also language extinction or linguistic extinction, and rarely linguicide or glottophagy^[1]) 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 and/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.^[2]

Types of language death

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

• gradual language death
• bottom-to-top language death: when a language begins to change in a low level place such as the home.
• top-to-bottom language death: when a language begins to change in a high level place such as the government.
• radical language death
• linguicide (a.k.a. sudden language death, language death by 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 (or 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.^[2] 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.

[edit] Consequences on grammar

This section requires expansion.

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 > analytic;
• syntactic loss (i.e. lexical categories, complex constructions);
• relexification;
• loss of word-formation productivity;
• style loss, such as the loss of ritual speech;^[3]
• morphological leveling;^[4]
• analogical leveling.

[edit] 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.^[5] And 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-fertilisation from the revivalists' mother tongue(s)."^[6]
Other cases of language revitalization which have seen some degree of success are Irish, Welsh, Hawaiian and to a lesser extent Navajo, which was used for a WWII radio code never deciphered by the Japanese.^[7]
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.^[8][9] Following centuries of English rule in Ireland and English imposition of the English language, an argument for de-anglicisation 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."^[8] 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.

[edit] 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. 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. There is thus no one point where Latin "died".