Talk:Language death

Nice Bibliography but No Citations

The article has an extensive Bibliography but no citations to it within the article text.

Getting rid of the inaccuracy tag

From reading the talk page, it looks like the {accuracy} tag is mostly around these questions:

• Is there a difference between the terms "dead language" and "extinct language"?
• Can a language be called dead/extinct if it disappeared by gradual evolution into one or more child languages?
• Is Latin a dead language?

Wikipedia is not a place for original research. So, the solution to these questions is not to debate analogies to biology, but to do some academic research and see how the terms "dead language", "extinct language", and "language death" are actually used by linguists. If there's a big difference between how they're used by linguists and how they're used colloquially (as evidenced by cited examples), that could be mentioned in the article as well.

Given the huge bibliography on the end of this article, I'm surprised the question has remained unsettled for so long. Unfortunately, none of those bibliographical citations are footnoted to sentences in the text, so there's no way to tell which statements are supported by the works in the bibliography, and which aren't.

My quick search of scholar.google.com for documents publicly available online suggests that "dead language" and "extinct language" are used synonymously by linguists, and I also see references to Latin and other "ancestor" languages as dead/extinct 1 2 3 4. However, my findings are extremely limited, based on what I can find online. I'm sure that someone with access to a university library could get a much more definitive result by checking out some linguistics texts and journals. --66.81.67.25 20:26, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

Since there doesn't seem to have been a lot of activity on this page in the past couple of months, I'm going to be bold and bring it in line with my (limited) findings, in regard to whether Latin is a living language or not. I won't remove the accuracy tag, though, because the article still needs more substantial research than the handful of journals that were accessible through scholar.google.com. --66.81.67.25 20:39, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

Irish again

I'm going to remove the reference to Irish from the section about language revival in this article. While "language revival" seems to refer to both extinct languages and endangered languages (assuming that the language revival article is correct), this is an article about extinct languages. The Irish language article says that Irish never went fully extinct, and this assertion doesn't seem to be contested. --66.81.67.25 19:44, 5 November 2005 (UTC) hi

merge with Linguicide?

can this be merged with the Linguicide article? — ishwar  (SPEAK) 17:38, 2005 Jun 2 (UTC)

Yeah maybe — I presume you mean moving the stuff from there into here (i.e., keeping it all at Language death). Language death seems the most common term to me; linguicide covers just a subset of cases where a certain intention is ascribed to a certain actor. — mark ✎ 22:23, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Irish goverment & Irish death

"Successive Irish governments since 1922 are thought to have done more harm than good to the Irish language." - this needs substantiating. Secretlondon 19:35, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There is extensive discussion of the counterproductive policies on the Irish language page. But Irisih isn't dead quite yet: it's moribund. I'm more bothered by the assertion that "Latin never really died" and that we can't assign at least a rough date for the death of native colloquial Latin. (The dramatic collapse of the case system and the neuter gender in most daughter languages is a good place to start). --Jpbrenna 21:51, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

From personal experience I agree that with the critique of govt policies. The main problems are A: The syllabus concentrates almost exclusively on written rather than spoken Irish. Special Irish-medium schools called Gaelscoileanna are supposed to be much more successful at attaining fluency but people can lose it afterwards. B: The State has not facilitated interaction in Irish between citizens and the organs of the State. Personally, I found the problem in A so irritating I managed to get an exemption from Leaving Cert exams years ago (final second-level). We need more Gaelscoileanna and for the syllabus to be radically changed. It's so frustrating when you spend the class concentrating on poems and grammar instead of oral communication. - Peter

hi.

I dont know about Irish, so I wont comment on the government's participation. However, when discussing language death, the different factors leading to death and the previous states of endangerment (e.g. moribund, obsolescence) should be considered. This is probably the reason for the mention of Irish. But, I am not saying that the article doesnt need expansion — I think it does.

re Latin: Latin is not dead in the same sense as many other languages. The reason is this: All languages change over time. The thing we call Latin did indeed change as well. However, there was no point in the history of its development where Latin speakers stopped speaking. Rather, in different geographic and cultural areas, the speakers in these respective areas slowly started to sound different. Eventually, at one point, two given groups of speakers from different areas no longer found it easy to communicate with one another. There was not a cessation of language use.

It may be useful to use a (another) biological metaphor. Related languages are said to be a part of genetic family trees. So, we could call Latin a baby that grew up and "became" a child. This baby did not die first and then "become" a child.

Other languages, in contrast, do not have the opportunity to change naturally. You see a different situation where the native speakers actually cease to exist. It is not the case where there is both a baby and a child. Languages that have died have no children.

Perhaps the only sense in which Latin may be called a dead language in a similar sense as the dead Tasmanian languages, is concerning the use of Latin as an international written language of education & scholarship. Here written Latin did not change — it was simply no longer used by European scholars and clergy (although there are still some remnants of this). But even so, this is different from the Tasmanian languages in that there were no native speakers of written Latin whereas there were native speakers of the Tasmanian languages.

Hopefully, this makes sense. peace – ishwar  (speak) 22:59, 2005 Jun 21 (UTC)

No, it does not. I majored in Latin, (though I'm getting rusty), so maybe I could go back in time and shoot the breeze with Cicero for a little bit, whereas your average Frenchman or Italian who hasn't made extensive study of Latin could not. Latin is dead as a doornail, and no one speaks it natively. There is significant discontinuity between the Romance languages and Latin.

The modern Romance languages differ from Classical Latin in a number of fundamental respects:

• No declensions (except Romanian)
• Only two grammatical genders, rather than the three of Classical Latin (except Romanian and Italian to a small extent, and except several gender-neutral pronouns in Spanish, Italian, Catalan etc.)
• Introduction of grammatical articles, based on Latin demonstratives
• Latin future tense scrapped, and new future and conditional tenses introduced, based on infinitive + present or imperfect tense of habere (to have), fused to form new inflections.
• Latin synthetic perfect tenses replaced by new compound forms with be or have + past participle (except Portuguese and French, where the Latin plusquamperfect tense has been retained and Romanian, which has 2 perfect tenses - one synthetic and one compound - that have the same meaning and also has a synthetic plusquamperfect tense in the indicative mood that is formed using the suffix "-se", derived from the suffix used in Latin to form the subjunctive plusquamperfect, "-isse").

(From the Romance languages page).

It is wrong to say that Latin "grew up" and become Italian or French or Romanian. Rather, it grew up into Late Latin, and died a gradual death, but its children survived it. Sometimes its children visit its grave and fondly remember the good old days (Ecclesiastical Latin, Humanist Latin), but sadly, there was nothing they can really do to bring it back. All they could do is create a sad caricature of a living language by proppping their dead ancestor up at the table and pretending to have dinner with it, like the Inca used to do with their dead royalty. (No offense to the Inca, but all offense possible to modern "Living Latin" proponents). You can try to resurrect Latin, but if you do, and it becomes a living language again, and gradually change, and cease to be the fossilized creature we know as "Latin." That's exactly what happend with Greek in the 19th & 20th centuries. Modern higher-register Greek is a compromise between the naturally developed language and deliberate re-adoption of obsolete forms.

Sure, there is a strong family resemblance, but the children are their own people, as Latin was its own distinct person, different from its Old Latin ancestor and the Proto-Italic subgroup of the Celtic-Germanic-Italic branch of Indo-European that it descended from. There are strong family resemblances between Ancient and Modern Greek, Old, Middle and Modern Persian, Old, Middle & New English, etc., but they are separate languages. --Jpbrenna 22:03, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

So revert the article? Your facts seem very assured (you obviously know what you're talking about). Latin is dead. --JDnCoke 00:22, August 18, 2005 (UTC)

hi. Rather than a revert, a rewrite is needed.

regarding the "deadness" of Latin, we are not disputing whether Latin is dead, but the distinction between the meanings of the term dead as it refers to languages and the question of how this applies to an article called Language death (although this is not made clear above). I dont think that it is wrong to say that Latin "grew up" and became French, etc. But, perhaps we can leave this metaphor behind. So, I will rephrase my point above: speakers of Latin gradually turned into speakers of French, etc. through a process called language change. Latin did not die and then there were Romance languages. Romance languages stand in a lineal relationship to Latin. Although there are no speakers today with Latin grammars, there are speakers today with grammars that stand in a lineal relationship to Latin. People call Latin dead because there are no native speakers today. We can call this type of deadness: dead-through-change where we compare different grammars of different time periods that stand in a lineal relationship.

The other type of deadness is when there are no speakers today of a given language grammar and no speakers today of any language that stands in a lineal relationship to that given language grammar. This language no longer participates in the language change process because of the absence of lineal relationships to present-day speakers (note that before this break in the relationship the said language did participate in language change). We can call this type of deadness: dead-through-social-practices.

Making the distinction between two types of deadness is useful since they occur in different contexts. Dead-through-change will always occur with any language because all languages change. (maybe everything in the universe changes.) The eead-through-social-practices state only occurs when there exist certain socio-political environments that cause this.

So, I think that it is clear from the above that the term dead is used in two different senses. Now our issue is what does language death mean? Although dead is used ambiguously to refer 2 different things in linguistics and in popular writing, language death is more often used to refer the dead-through-social-practices state. Books and articles that refer to the dead-through-change state use terms such as, language change, diachronic linguistics, historical linguistics, etc. In fact, I would find it misleading to title a book "Language death in Europe" that discussed the language change.

Anyway, it is all not so transparent in the terminology usage, unfortunately. – ishwar  (speak) 09:02, 2005 August 18 (UTC)

• Of course Latin evolved to Italian, French, Portuguese and Spanish, and it did not died out and people start using another language. That's not correct, people continued using Latin. It is splited, not dead. People often see grammatical differences from Vulgar Latin and Classical Latin, that is due that classical latin was an artificial standard, the Romans spoke the usual vulgar latin, that evolved into today's languages. The article is correct! How can you make a clear distinction from Old and Modern English? and the other died? I was reading the article, and I was shocked why it had a POV tag. POV is the tag itself. Even knowing this, I think it is very strange that the grammar of Italian is so similar to Portuguese or with Spanish. In fact, you just need to learn the terminations and the pronunciation, and few more (the hardest is writing, mostly because of different spelling rules). -Pedro 14:48, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

hi. the tag was added to article because of the statement about the Irish government. User Jpbrenna responded to that and also his conception of language death. I responded to her/his comments about death. peace – ishwar  (speak) 15:08, 2005 August 19 (UTC)

Hi, thought I would join the cocktail party. One thing that I've noticed this whole discussion suffers from is a lack of clear understanding as to what the spatial and temporal borders of "a" language are. To speak of Latin as never having died out (but gradually changing form into the Romance languages of today) is and emic interpretation of language change. This interpretation makes a number of assumptions: 1) that linguistic features are understood in the same way by speakers of Romance languages and Latin speakers 2) that we can at all know how Latin speakers concieved of their semiotic universe 3) that the first assumption is due to gradual linguistic (not necessarilly Darwinian) "evolution." On the other hand, recognizing the phonological and morphosyntactic differences between Latin and the Romance languages as a reason to call these two categories "different languages" is an etic interpretation of language change. The morphosyntax and--assuming that an archaeology of phonology is possible--phonology of both Latin and the Romance languages are measurable. Differences can be statistically demonstrated. These differences, as discussed in other posts, are dramatic and point to a divergence. Personally, I would not call, for instance, French a modern form of Latin. I feel that I am qualified to make that claim because I have studied both languages and I know that French, apart from the morphosyntactic qualities discussed in other posts, is full of non-Latin influences. Indeed, are they at all influences? Could I not just as easily argue that French was "influenced" by Latin, but is in fact a continuation of the Gallic dialects spoken by a particular tribe that came to be known by the Romans as the Parisorum? Where in Latin do we find forms such as "jamais" ("never," Latin: "numquam") or "aller" ("to go," Latin: "ire")? Look at the French word for Germany: "Alemagne." Now look at the Latin word for the same: "Germania." There is no etymological continuity between the two. "Germania" was a name given to a particular region inhabited by all sorts of barbarians. "Alemagne" is a Germanic word that most likely comes to us from the combination of "alle" (all) and "mannir*" (men), since the region was not ethnically discrete but became known as "all men," or a federation of germanic tribes. So what is French? Is it a modern form of Latin? or is it a modern form of Gaulois? Is it useful to be asking these questions? Isn't it most practical to recognize French's independent status as a language? There is significant discontinuity between the French language as it is spoken today and the linguistic influences that gave rise to it.

"People call Latin dead because there are no native speakers today.". That's really circular. Is Shakespeare's English dead? Yes because there are no native speakers today. We are in a need of a distinction between "Variety A evolved into variety B" and "Variety A influenced variety B and died". If language A evolved into language B then language A and B are instances of the same language: the language varieties are intelligible. The parallels between dachronic and synchronic linguistics are apparant. This is of course not without problems:

"For example, on both sides of the border between the Netherlands and Germany, the people living in the immediate neighbourhood of the border speak an identical language. They can understand each other without difficulty, and would even have trouble telling just by the language whether a person from the region was from the Netherlands or from Germany. However, the Germans here call their language German, and the Dutch call their language Dutch, so in terms of sociolinguistics they are speaking different languages."

[[1]]

Thus this language is intelligible by Germans and by the Dutch. But is it German or is Dutch? It seems it's both.

If this area of overlap is not too large it can be regarded as a border line case. Turning to diachronic language this means: sudden changes are less problematic than gradual changes because the smaller overlap in intelligibility makes it easier to seperate the dead language from the living one.

Old English evolved into Middle English after 1066. The conquest by William the Conqueror lead to a great amount of change in the English language. This change happened in a short period so it was a sudden change. Middle English is intelligible by modern day speakers. Old English is not. This means Old English is a seperate language and a dead one too. This is what was called dead-through-change above

If there is not even a gradual change it is language shift. All speakers of variety A change to variety B and they consider B a different language than A. Language A is not changed; rather there are two distinct languages in the speakers' heads: language A and language B. If they don't teach language A to others (e.g. their children) the language will die with them. This is what was called dead-through-social-practise above.

kees --83.161.2.179 13:31, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

POV-ness of the death metaphor

The metaphor of death is used in many ways to describe what happens when people stop speaking a language. Death-related terms include:

• Language death
• Linguicide
• Language murder
• Linguistic genocide
• Killer language
• Dead language
• Moribund language

I realize that many of these, especially "dead language" are standard terms for talking about this subject. The problem is, they also suppose a specific perspective on the process. Would a note about these terms help? Is there some way we can describe a full shift away from a language in terms where we don't anthropomorphize it into something which can die (and hence, whose passing should be mourned)? -- Jeff 04:32, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

First, of the terms you list, 'language death', 'dead language' and 'moribund language' are the most common and hence they sound somewhat less shrill (to me, at least) than the others. I feel less comfortable about the marginal terms 'killer language' and 'linguicide' and the like. My take on the most common terms would be that we don't need to 'de-anthropomorphize' them, because the metaphor conveys useful information about the subject at hand. Do you have a suggestion for an alternate term? — mark ✎ 07:16, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Recent reverts

I haven't yet looked closely into this article, but I concur with Ish ishwar that the Latin-becoming-a-dead-language case should not be treated under the heading of "language death". It's "dead" now, but it hasn't "died" in the sense of this article. Whatever it was that happened to Latin wasn't an instance of "language death" in the way this term is commonly used. That said, the text proposed by Ish ishwar seems a bit misleading to me too; I'll try and come up with another formulation later. Lukas ^(T.|@) 17:29, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Consequences on grammar - Nonsense or Vandalism

"changes caused by language death result from convergence, interference, and independent autogenetic processes"

Autogenetic processes?? Huh?

"overgeneralization" "undergeneralization"

Over and under eh?

Assuming the section isn't a joke, it's needs to be rewritten to actually make sense. Otherwise it needs to be removed and soon. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.27.210.84 (talk • contribs) 19 May 2006, 18:40 (UTC)

Well, it's actually correct in the sense of a shopping list of what might be covered in that section. But of course the technical jargon won't make much sense to the lay reader in this condensed form. I'm earmarking it and will try to work on it when I find the time. There's lots of interesting research on these questions, that much is for certain. Lukas ^(T.|@) 19:26, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

please also take a look at the section, "Language loss & language acquisition" it's very opaquely written and difficult to decode. in particular, what does a "temporal identity" refer to?

Sociolinguistics is not a cause

I was shocked to read: "Sociolinguistics may play a role in language death if the constructions of society fail to support linguistic diversity." Sociolinguistics is a science that studies the relation of social attitudes and social behaviors to language. I know of no way in which sociolinguistics "may play a role in language death" unless simply having more knowledge about how languages die actually contributes to their death. To the contrary, sociolinguistic understanding is one of the sources of support for the kind of "awareness" that the article goes on to say is important to language maintenance, and sociolinguists are often involved in developing language policies expressly aimed at language maintenance. Perhaps what the author meant to say was something like: "Language attitudes may play a role in laguage death if social institutions fail to support linguistic diversity". I know of no sociolinguist who does not support linguistic diversity. Lemccbr 13:14, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Merge proposal

I added a merge suggestion tag to add material from Killer language for several reasons:

• The term in not in popular use among academics. See these google results: linguistics "killer language" (about 600 hits)
  • Compare that to: linguistics "language death" (about 57,000 hits)
• The essence of this definition of a killer language is 'a majority language that causes language death for a minority language'. The material in the article adds little to language death and possibly the sources can be merged and a mention of the term
• (Some academic speak ahead) The definition of a 'killer language' is unclear. It is defined as a language that 'kills' a mother tongue--which is a person's first language. In fact, language death is most common on the societal and not individual level: the process is typically that an immigrant or person in a colonized country speaks a native tongue and later generations choose to learn the new language instead. Converting mothertongue to something like 'the historical language of a group of people' and clarifying what is meant by 'at a cost' would fix this...though I think this would be best explained in the language death article.
• AfD might be a better mechanism for this though I think the results would be about the same--adding a few cites or ideas from there to this article. Antonrojo 15:49, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

I think you can merge it without going to AfD. I don't see a problem with the merge. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 01:19, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

External Links

almost a third of the external links are no longer opperational. unless anyone wants to replace them with updated links, i'll delete.