Language is a living thing. It is not uncommon for languages to die out: while it is common to report that a language has died when the last native speaker of the language dies, it may be more accurate to say that a language dies when the second to the last native speaker dies. Language is about communication and for a language to be alive there must be more than one native speaker.
Language death is not a new phenomenon. Linguist John McWhorter, in his book The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, writes:
“Like biological extinctions, language death has been a regular and unsung occurrence throughout human history.”
Nearly 7,000 languages were being spoken at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and linguists estimate that 90% of these languages will be dead by 2100. In an essay in Smithsonian, Ariel Sabar writes:
“In a highly connected global age, languages are in die-off. Fifty to 90 percent of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today are expected to go silent by century’s end. We live under an oligarchy of English and Mandarin and Spanish, in which 94 percent of the world’s population speaks 6 percent of its languages.”
In his book Languages: A Very Short Introduction, Stephen Anderson writes:
“Linguistic diversity all over the world is in imminent danger of major decline, and at least part of the reason for that is competition between ‘local’ languages and the major languages of wealth and power.”
As with animal species, languages are classified as endangered or extinct. Geographers Mona Domosh, Roderick Neumann, Patricia Price, and Terry Jordon-Bychkov, in their textbook The Human Mosaic: A Cultural Approach to Human Geography, write:
“Endangered languages are those that are not being taught to children by their parents and are not being used actively in everyday matters.”
A language is said to be moribund when there are fewer speakers under the age of twenty-five. Languages which are nearly extinct have only a few elderly speakers. Almost 40% of the languages which are almost extinct are found in the Americas.
For many minority languages such as those spoken by American Indians, which are facing possible language death, the process involves language shift and language loss. Language shift for American Indian languages occurred during the reservation era as the people became bilingual in English as well as their tribal language. The tribal language continued to be the language of enculturation and socialization. Language loss begins when the children acquire English as their first language and the process of enculturation and socialization is accomplished primarily through English. During this phase, people will indicate that they can understand the Native language, but they do not speak it well or are unable to express themselves fluently in it.
A study conducted on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation by media anthropologist E. B. Eiselein found that:
“Among Northern Cheyenne Tribal members, 42% understand the Cheyenne language well; 42% understand it a little; and 16% don’t understand it at all.”
Among people over 55 years of age, 69% understand the language well. Among teenagers, on the other hand, only 4% understand the language well and 67% understand it a little.
Remnant languages are languages which survive in small linguistic islands surrounded by more dominant languages. One example of remnant languages can be found in Khoisan, known for its unusual clicks, which is surrounded by Bantu speakers.
One of the common causes of language death is linguistic imperialism. According to John McWhorter:
“the language of the dominant power—written, spoken by the wealthy, and broadcast constantly on radio and television—quite often comes to be associated with legitimacy, the cosmopolitan, and success. Almost inevitably, the home language is recast as, basically, not that—and thus antithetical to survival under the best possible conditions.”
Schools commit linguistic genocide by forcibly removing children from one group into another group through linguistic and cultural forced assimilation.
In describing the change in Scotland from the Celtic Scots Gaelic to English, Alistair Moffat, in his book Before Scotland: The Story of Scotland Before History, writes:
“Language changed slowly. Many of the Northumbrian warriors spoke English and, as they moved northward and settled, it became the language of power, no doubt demanding understanding at the point of a spear on occasion.”
In writing about language change among the Navajo in the American Southwest, Deborah House, in her book Language Shift Among the Navajos: Identity Politics and Cultural Continuity, writes:
“In many cases, the use of one language in addition to or in place of another is ideologically inspired—having everything to do with the political motivations and consequences of bringing two or more language-using peoples together.”
The Celtic languages were once widely spoken in Europe. In a report on Celtic languages in The Celtic World, Glanville Price writes:
“Six Celtic languages survived into post-medieval times.”
Of these, Cornish died out toward the end of the eighteenth century and the last native speaker of Manx died at the age of 97 in 1974. At the present only Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton are still spoken as native languages. Glanville Price writes:
“The situation of all four remaining Celtic languages is precarious, leaving few grounds for optimism as to their long-term future.”
The educational systems in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales continue to teach the Celtic languages, usually as second languages. Glanville Price writes:
“…significant numbers of non-native speakers have achieved considerable competence in them, but the decline in the number of native speakers goes on.”
In Ireland, there has actually been an increase in the percentage who speak Gaelic since Irish independence. Glanville Price writes:
“The overwhelming majority (i.e. some 95 per cent at least) of those recorded as Irish speakers have acquired a degree (in some cases a high degree) of competence in Irish as a second language through the educational system, and informed sources by no means hostile to the Irish language now put the number of native speakers as low as 50,000 (some estimates would put it substantially lower).”
The situation of the Celtic languages raises an interesting question: can languages survive with no native speakers? Can a language still be considered a living language if all of the speakers speak it as a second language?
With regard to the possible death of the Celtic languages, Peter Ellis, in his book The Druids, writes:
“The decline of Celtic languages has been the result of a carefully established policy of brutal persecution and suppression. If these Celtic languages and cultures die then it will be no natural phenomenon. It will be as the result of centuries of a careful policy of ethnocide. Once the languages disappear then Celtic civilization will cease to exist and the cultural continuum of three thousand years will come to an end. The world will be poorer for one more lost culture.”
Many American Indian languages are currently considered to be endangered as there are few young people who speak the language. Out of 165 American Indian languages surviving today, only 8 are spoken by 10,000 or more people and 75 are spoken by only a handful of older people. Over time, these languages die through atrophy—the death is not sudden, but more parts of the language are not used and not passed on to younger speakers. According to John McWhorter:
“The Oklahoma Cayuga had a word for leg but none for thigh, a word for foot but none for ankle or toe, words for face and eye but none for cheek or eyebrow. Where full Cayuga has a word specifically meaning enter, these old people substituted the more general word go, such that Come into the house was rendered as Go into the house.”
Many American Indian tribes are currently attempting to revitalize their native languages with special language schools. At the Mohawk community near Montreal, Canada, children start learning the language at the special school at age two and the lessons continue through the sixth grade. For the youngest students, the school emulates the natural language acquisition process by having the children in a family-type room with two adults who are speaking the language. According to Dale Dione-Dell:
“One of the ways we know our program is working is that when the little children take their naps, they speak in Mohawk—they are dreaming in Mohawk.”
The Cherokee have taken another approach to revitalizing their language and to increase the number of young speakers. Former tribal chief Chad Smith, in an essay in This Week from Indian Country Today, writes:
“We knew our Cherokee language was dying, and language is the vessel of our cultural intelligence. How could we revitalize our language?”
The Cherokee looked for one solution in music: they organized a choir which would sing in Cherokee. The choir also recorded songs which helped promote the learning of the language.
In linguistics the term heritage language refers to the ancestral or background languages of groups whose members are in the process of shifting to the language of the majority culture. Thus American Indian languages are considered heritage languages. Heritage language education focuses on the development of appropriate language teaching materials for those who have at least a passive knowledge of the language and culture.
In 2013, Archie Thompson, the last native speaker of Yurok, died at the age of 93. However, prior to his death, Thompson and about 20 other elderly Yurok speakers made a number of recordings for the Yurok Language Project. Today, the language is taught in public schools in Humboldt and Del Norte counties in northern California. As a result there are about 300 basic Yurok speakers.
With regard to the impact of language death, geneticist Spencer Wells, in his book The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, writes:
“When languages are lost, then, we lose a snapshot of one part of our history.”
Spencer Wells also writes:
“In every case of language death, we lose part of our cultural history. Particularly when the language in question has not been studied or recorded—which is the case for most of the world’s languages—we have lost an irretrievable snapshot of our past.”
In Bolivia, Kallawaya is the language of the traditional indigenous healers. It is a language which is used primarily for ritual purposes, but is also used as a conversational language among the healers. In his book Languages: A Very Short Introduction, Stephen Anderson reports:
“An immense portion of the local knowledge of healing practices and the resources (plant, animal, and others) that are essential to these is encoded in Kallawaya, and the loss of this language would entail the loss of that knowledge base.”
Some dead languages—that is, languages which are no longer actively spoken—continue to be used as liturgical languages. They are used in religious ceremonies even when many or most of the participants can’t understand them. Some examples of these would include the use of Latin in the Catholic Church, Sanskrit in Hinduism, Avestan in Zoroastrianism, and a number of American Indian languages in traditional native ceremonies.