How and Why does a Language Die?

A language resembles an organism, a species. It comes to the world as a baby, it lives for a certain time and it dies, it may even go extinct. Humans are who bring a language to life, they modify it according to their needs. When a nation or a culture divides, so does their language. When a nation rules over another, some languages might not be needed. If there isn’t any written or audio record, the language can be forgotten forever. This is a repeating occurrence.

There are around seven thousand living languages on this planet, including sign languages. However one third of them have less than a thousand native speakers, which is a terribly small number. Linguists assume that ninety percent of these languages could disappear in a century.

These languages do not become dead, they become extinct…

There is a difference between dead and extinct languages. A dead language is still “sort of alive.” We say it died through a bottom to top language death. This means it is not used by people in daily life, but still present in political, scientific or religious domains. Latin is a good example of a dead language. There are people who speak Latin, but it isn’t passed onto the younger generation as a mother tongue anymore. Latin is present in scientific terminology and other domains, such as law and administration.

However, an extinct language is not spoken by anyone, and it isn’t used in any domains either.

What follows next are some of the cases of real language extinction…

Words like tobacco, barbecue and hammock come from a language that is now completely extinct. It’s a South American language called Taino.

During the Spanish colonization of America, tens of millions of native Americans were murdered and slaughtered by the Europeans, including the Taino population. Most of those who hadn’t been killed, died due to infections, such as smallpox, brought by the Europeans. The Taino people who managed to survive the epidemics assimilated with the colonizadores. The Taino language had eventually become extinct in the nineteenth century.

If we were to categorize the type of language death that the Taino population suffered, we would probably call it a mix of sudden and gradual language death. Sudden language death happens when a community of people or the majority of it suddenly die due to an epidemic, natural disaster or violence. The Taino language went through a gradual language death as well. This type of language death occurs when a community shifts to speaking a different, more dominant language.

Another example of gradual language death is the case of Mozarabic. Mozarabic or Andalusian Romance was spoken on the Iberian peninsula during the Spanish reconquista, which took place between the early
8th century CE until the year 1492 CE.

The Christians that inhabited Muslim dominated territories, spoke Mozarabic. Which was a mix of Arabic and early Hispano - Romance.

If you understand some Spanish, you would be able to read and understand a great part of the Mozarabic jarchas.

Las jarchas were found as lyrical compositions written in Mozarabic that enclosed the Arabic poems called Moaxajas — muwashshahat. The language wasn’t of a high prestige, therefore it didn’t possess its own script. Mozarabic texts were mostly written in Arabic, less commonly in Latin or Hebrew.

Mozarabic eventually disappeared under the influence of Arabic in the
12th century CE. It might have survived until the 15th century CE and be then dominated by other northern Romance Languages, such as Castilian, Galician, Portuguese, Aragonese, Asturleonese and Catalan. What we know for sure is that Mozarabic is now extinct but at least we have some pieces of their culture in our hands.

The third type of language death is a radical language death. Similarly, as sudden language death, radical language death happens very quickly, but not as a result of death of speakers of the language, but the abandonment of the language by its speakers, due to fear of persecution.

An example of this happened during the Indian uprising in El Salvador in the 1930’s. Most of the Indians were killed in an act of genocide. Those who survived abandoned their language to protect their lives. Since speakers of Cacaopera and Lancia stopped using their language, both of them are now extinct.

I hope this article wasn’t too depressing. Remember, that new languages still arise and a number of world organizations protect languages near extinction! :).

If you are interested and want to help out, these are some of the organizations:

1. Wikitongues
2. Endangered Languages Project
3. Glossika Viva
4. Our Mother Tongues