i suspect that complexity of grammar and difficulty of pronunciation are essentially irrelevant to this question (as are any characteristics of the language itself) - contrary data would be quite welcome

a language becomes extinct when (1) every native speaker dies, AND (2) there is insufficient recorded material (written or otherwise) to interest people in preserving that knowledge

(1) is all too common these days (but latin certainly satisfies this condition, and just as clearly not the other)

(2) languages with no written or other recordings are particularly vulnerable to condition (1)

this transforms the question from the purely linguistic one to the (much harder to my mind) anthropological / sociological / historical question of what makes cultures die

i applaud all (and support some) efforts to preserve languages

Prestige and issues of diaglossia. I would also mention self-hatred. For example, there is a town in Colombia, made up of Afro-Colombian people where many Kids now don't want to talk their grandparent's language. They have adopted Spanish.

If I were them, I wouldn';t want to see the demise of my grandma's language. I would talk in Spanish and in my ancestor';s tongue.

Christopher Landauer,

Thank you for your comments. I believe that complexity of grammar and difficulty in pronunciation could be obstacles to non-native speakers being able to learn a language. It would not affect native speakers.

Would you say that a language has gone extinct even when fluent, non-native speakers are alive? This is certainly more difficult to define than the extinction of a species.

Having no written form of the language certainly is a problem in preserving a language.

Latin is no longer spoken as a native language per se, but it remains active in biological taxonomy and in the Catholic Church. It is one of the most widely known extinct languages. It is studied in many schools because it is the basis for so many modern languages.

You are right about the cultural aspect of the question. The effects of language on culture and culture on language are not easily separated.

Jose Lobo,

Thank you for your comments. You have offered yet another reason for a language to decline in usage, a trend that could lead to extinction.

1. The desire to "fit in" with a new culture could lead to the decline in native language usage.

2. Parents sometimes use their native language as a "secret" language that they do not teach the children so the parents can communicate without the children understanding them. This is unfortunate, as the home is an especially good environment for children to learn a language in their most formative years.

Thank you Marion.

Demographic collapse.

Marion Ceruti,

Ah, I had not exactly thought of that particular issue, but I was thinking of Latin - many people can read and write latin, but i don't think many people actually speak it (rites and rituals aside) - for this latter reason, I consider latin to be extinct, although it also seems clear to me that more people can read and write latin now than ever could during the roman empire

I do not consider a language extinct if there are fluent speakers, native or not (so perhaps i should have written ``fluent'' speakers instead of ``native'' speakers in my earlier comment) - For example, if Spain were to disappear, Spanish would not be extinct, since it is spoken fluently in a large part of the world - i do realize that it is not exactly the same Spanish everywhere (so something would most definitely be lost), and that the variations are wider than the those between american english and british english

This does give rise to another question - what about Klingon, which seems to be the most widely known invented language - it has dozens of speakers, none of whom are native, i think 8-) (and even that much is more than most of the remaining indigenous american languages)

Hello Christopher,

You bring up an interesting point, that perhaps more people can speak Latin now than during ancient Roman times. But, alas, they are not native speakers. A fluent speaker is not the same as a native speaker. I would like your idea to be reflected in the correct definition (but it's not). After all, fluent speakers keep a language "alive" in a sense, but it's defined differently.

By the definition that is commonly accepted, since we have no living native speakers (for whom Latin is the primary language,) it is "extinct" in the strictest sense. Yet, we still sing in Latin and various "experts" have opinions on how the words should be pronounced. I consider Latin to be far from a "lost" language even though it may be "extinct in the wild" to borrow a phrase from biology. It has a well documented grammar and a vocabulary that continues to grow with each newly discovered plant and animal species. It is probably one of the most active "extinct" languages in the world. BTW, having many surviving poems as well as songs, written in a language (e.g. Latin) also can act as an incentive to preserve it, long after it is extinct.

In contrast, many extinct languages that had far fewer native speakers, do not have nearly as much documentation as Latin, probably because they have not influenced the development of so many other modern, commonly used languages.

Hypothetically, even if Spanish disappeared in Spain, for example, many native speakers would continue to learn Spanish in the remaining Spanish-speaking countries, so Spanish would still live on. (I hope Spanish does not disappear now that I have invested a fair amount of time studying it ;-).

I suspect that Klingon would be easier to learn as a second language than Tlingit, Eyak, or Navajo. If I were inventing a language, I would not make it any more complicated than it needed to be, but I would provide ways in which it could be very expressive. Not easy criteria to satisfy simultaneously. At least I would make the pronunciation fit the spelling and vice versa.

Here's a question that relates to invented languages. Perhaps I ought to ask this formally as a separate question, but what do you think are the pros and cons of using many diacritics to specify pronunciation with a more limited alphabet, vs. inventing a whole new writing system, such as a syllabary, with more characters but without diacritics in which each symbol means something very specific? What about using the symbols from the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association as a method to write a new language? Has anyone done something like this?

i like your distinction between extinct and lost, and agree that even if latin is extinct, it is not lost (i hope that i have not offended you about spanish; that was partly a guess, but also illustrative because so many people outside spain are native speakers of some recognizable version)

the issue of invented languages reminds me that it was clear to me when i first encountered esperanto that it was likely to be wonderful for people who already spoke a romance language, and might perhaps be difficult for others

i have not tried to learn Tlingit, Eyak, or Navajo (or even klingon), but i do suspect that the real languages are harder to learn because they refer to aspects of the complexity of real phenomena - nothing is as complex for language definition as a real social culture

if you mean diacritics as letter annotations (e.g., umlauts; i have heard and read the term, but do not know what it means precisely), then i would prefer different symbols, since the routine use of language would gradually and eventually make the diacritics disappear as implicit, as in the vowel annotations to consonant word stems in arabic and hebrew (which makes it hard for those of us who do not already know them to read them, even with a good dictionary)

i do not think any language pronunciation has been defined using the IPA symbols, though most (i suspect) of them have been described using the IPA symbols

an aside question - how well do the IPA symbols describe the different kinds of ``clicks'' in the various african click languages (i know that there are several different ones; those are the only language sounds that i know of that i have difficulty repeating, since i have not heard any of them often enough)

very interesting discussion

Hello Christopher

Good contribution. Food for thought. I well understood the hypothetical nature regarding Spanish and it did not offend me. I just hope my reply did not offend anyone else, nor was it intended that way.

Invented languages without the culture to go with them will seem to most people somewhat contrived and, given the effort required to learn languages, not worth the time. The popularity of Klingon stems from the fact that Star Trek has a history long enough for it to approach being a subculture, and the fact that Klingon was invented by a linguist. This may be why some people have been interested to lean Klingon.

Natural languages evolve through usage and are not invented by linguists. The structure of languages, pronunciation, and vocabulary are not always selected on logical reasoning. Otherwise why would we drive on a parkway and park in a driveway? Why would many English words be so hard to spell, even for native speakers? When the spelling of a word contains features that do not contribute to its pronunciation, we have to ask why are those features there? The answer is that this came about through prolonged usage. Endings to indicate plural in English are not consistent. For example, "they go, she goes" Since "they" is the plural word and adding "s" indicates plural for nouns, why don't we say "they goes, she go?"

English has no diacritics, which makes them seem odd to native speakers unless we have studied other languages, many of which have them. Diacritics are explicit in Romance languages. In the Romance languages, for example, diacritics indicate how to pronounce the words and the spelling is incorrect if the diacritics are omitted. This is because the diacritics are part and parcel of the alphabet and the language. Diacritics in the Romance languages are not going away any time soon.

Similarly, in the Semitic languages, such as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, diacritics specify pronunciation. Most Semitic languages are written with abjads, not the same kind of alphabet that we have in Indo-European languages. An abjad is an alphabet that consists of all consonants. Here, the diacritics mostly fill in the vowels, but some diacritics also aid in consonant pronunciation. In the strictest sense, the diacritics are not "necessary" for anyone fluent in these languages because the Semitic languages evolved writing systems where the consonants and vowels are not on an equal footing like they are in English, for example. In contrast to the Romance languages, words are not spelled wrong if the diacritics are omitted. It is quite normal to omit them with no loss of grammatical accuracy. Diacritics are implicit in languages written in abjads.

Word recognition is achieved through the consonants. Some consonants can be used as though they were vowels in some cases. Often, pronunciation will depend on context and familiarity. Grammar also helps with word recognition. The use of explicit diacritics in Semitic languages will not go away any time soon because people continue to learn these languages as second languages.

The notable exception is Maltese, a Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet.

Without having specific first-hand experience, I would think that IPA symbols would have some way to characterize the different kinds of ``clicks'' in some African languages.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Farsi uses the Arabic alphabet but has more characters because Farsi has sounds not present in Arabic. It would not take long for a linguist familiar with IPA symbols to come up with some new ones to help specify a newly discovered (and possibly endangered) language that has sounds not already in the IPA inventory.

i agree about invented languages - they are all too thin to be really interesting, since they lack the detailed historical connections and cultural roots of all natural languages

elvish was also popular for a while when i was growing up, but it seems to have largely disappeared (it was also invented by a linguist, but never quite intended to be spoken outside the books, i suspect, and it never had as large a vocabulary)

i like to think that english has borrowed words from pretty much all major languages and many others as well (like tomato and chocolate from aztec through spanish, for example, is my favorite set) - i wonder how many people know (i understand that fewer people actually care 8-() that adobe, kaput, khaki, and safari are all taken from elsewhere (spanish from arabic, german, hindi from persian, swahili from arabic), and that there are many other words that are borrowed - that does account for some of the strange spellings

thank you for the ``IPA / diacritical'' clarifications - i am an informal student of linguistics, so i don't know all the terms

by the way, spelling in english was not always as fixed as we try to make it now - i blame that change (partly facetiously) on samuel johnson's dictionary - it also reminds me of a quote (i have found various attributions of this and similar phrases to andrew jackson and mark twain) -

``i pity the poor imagination of a man who can only think of one way to spell a word''

are we getting somewhat far afield about language disappearance? sort of, i guess, but i think language appearance and change is also part of the story

Hello Christopher,

"Tomato" is interesting. Seems to have made it into a Northern Italian language the name of which escapes me. It was possibly Lombard. This explains the plural "tomat i" whereas the Italian word is "pomodoro - pomodori" (pl). I had to put the space between "tomat" and "i" because of autocorrection but it really should not be there.

English seems to absorb foreign words like a sponge.

Shebang is Celtic in origin

traffic, algorithm and algebra are from Arabic, as are our numbers;

the technical terms vulcanologists use to describe lava are from Hawaiian: 'a'a and pahoehoe

I am still learning about linguistics and there are many things I don't know.

Our concept of spelling evidently did not exist 500 years ago. Now we usually have one possibly two accepted spellings for a word. In the 16th century, the main idea was to spell it anyway you wanted just as long as it would elicit the correct pronunciation. Hence the spellings, "kynge" for king in English. Sometimes the word was spelled two different ways in the same paragraph! The same concepts were prevalent in Italy at that time also.

Back on track regarding language preservation, etc:

From:

http://www.ethnologue.com/endangered-languages

(My comments are in parentheses)

A language may become dormant or extinct (like a volcano? What is a dormant language? A dormant language appears to be a language widely spoken as a second language [L2] in some regions but with no known L1 (native) speakers.)

Extinction is loss of all individuals who continue to identify the language as being related to their ethnic identity (not the same as the loss of the last native speaker. Which definition is right?)

Since language is closely linked to culture, loss of language almost always is accompanied by social and cultural disruptions. (These disruptions could be either the cause of the language loss or as a result of it.)

Sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists seek to identify trends in language use…(that can lead to extinction) … use of the language in certain domains or functions. (If the strong domain of an endangered language is a domain that does not affect very many people or is one that has become obsolete, the use of that language may decline. For example, suppose hypothetically, an aboriginal language had many names for tools and techniques used in the production of stone knives, spears and axes. Since not many people use these and since better hunting tools are available, no one apart from researchers will miss the strong-domain terminology that this language contributes to technology if the language becomes extinct.

One of the most important factors that leads to language endangerment I think is the community members disinterest. If there is a desire in the members of the community to maintain their language and culture it is going to help a lot in revitalization. They need to feel a sense of pride and belonging to the community, also it is the younger members of the community who should be active.

Hello Meenakshi,

You have raised an important point that relates to one of the main reasons for language endangerment and extinction. It was also on the ethnologue website, which indicated that when parents do not teach their children their language, the language will decline, i.e. this means fewer L1 speakers, by definition. Almost all threatened and endangered languages have this characteristic in common. If the community is not interested in preserving the language, one of the most obvious ways to measure the interest or disinterest would be to measure the percentage of parents speaking the language in the home, as opposed to some other language.

Hi Marion

You said that one of the most obvious ways to measure the interest or disinterest would be to measure the percentage of parents speaking the language in the home, as opposed to some other language. That would be easy or possible at all only if the language under consideration was not a minority one and did not have dialectal variations. but in the case of my mother tongue which is a minority language spoken by few speakers geographically scattered there is a strong influence of the majority state languages. As a result in most states the majority state language has replaced my language. I can see how rapidly the language is getting endangered. I really find it distressing.

Hello Meenakshi,

I was thinking of the specific case of the Alaskan languages, where some languages are dying because parents are not teaching it to their children. Minority languages can survive if parents teach it to their children. If there is strong motivation not to do so, it is only a matter of time before many minority languages become extinct.

Also, your reference to speakers scattered geographically agrees with my reason of diaspora for language extinction. If you are the only speaker of a minority language in your neighborhood, you will tend not to use that language.

Moreover, people have only so much time to devote to language learning and study. It is especially difficult to preserve minority languages when multiple languages (more than two) typically are spoken and taught. In some regions of the world, there is the local language, the national language, a language that people use for religious purposes, and yet another language used in international trade, such as English. In areas where these four cases represent different languages, I can see how difficult it is for minority languages to survive. Then we have the additional problem of deciding what is a dialect vs. a separate language. I also find it distressing that so many languages are being lost (i.e. 5 per year worldwide) but so far, I can't see a universal solution, just ad hoc partial solutions that have been applied with various degrees of success.

Social pressures. Hegemonic asymmetries in languages can lead to linguistic inferiority complexes. When a subordinate language not only has less prestige than a superordinate language in all social spheres of life, but also when children are punished in the schools and when people are ridiculed and shunned for using or representing a minority language, oftentimes the parents stop teaching it to the children. One reason is to avoid ridicule and another is to give their children the possibility of social mobility. So we see that: 1) Loss of function in greater society; 2) Lack of acceptance in greater society; 3) Feelings of linguisitic inferiority; and 4) Lack of transmission the next generation, can also lead to language loss.

Another way a language can be lost is to kill all of the speakers. This is what happened in the vast majority of Native American languages in the Americas.

But, to Jose's point about the Palenquero people, it's a lot more complicated than just pulling yourself by your bootstraps and saying "you know what, I'm going to preserve my grandmother's language". These feelings are deeply embedded in society and individuals and hard to overturn. When I go to Colombia, I still hear people ridiculing the Palenqueros. "Hablan espanol maluco o mal hablado ('they speak bad or broken Spanish', they say." This leads to the another issue in language preservation: educating the public and eradicating ignorance.

But the good news is, that there is a robust language revitalization program that has been taking place in San Basilio de Palenque. They're teaching Palenquero to the children in the schools there and trying to raise consciousness and linguistic pride in the community. :)

I would include the degree of geographical concentration of speakers, their degree of contact/integration with the dominant language group, economic viability of the indigenous community (e.g., if they have lost much of their land base and must migrate to urban centers to make a living, that doesn't bode well for their language). Really i would say almost ALL the relevant factors are social/political -- language loss is a symptom of societal disruption & political marginalization.

Issues of prestige as Labov would put it.

i'd like to add that if young native speakers of a given minority language feel ashamed" of using their own mother-tongue and say it openly, this means that they participate its disappearance. This is the case for some Zenete people here in the south of Algeria, even the parents refuse to teach and talk in the mother-tongue arguing that the use of the majority's language, Arabic, gives their kids more social opportunities such as getting a job, since Zenete is used for informal situations only, and it is not codified.

Yes, Bachir, that's a very typical case of diglossia. That is the natural outcropping of one culture being assigned a subordinate status by virtue of it being dominated by another. However, to insinuate that these 'feelings of shame' should or could somehow be suppressed is to not understand the social situation--it also a classic case of blaming the victim. "She was wearing a mini-skirt, and that's why she got raped"; "She should stop going out at late at night." Although it may be true that by speaking Arabic there may be (perceived) upward mobility, and it may be true that the parents may say that to the children, such a situation could only exist if there wasn't the real fear that by speaking one's own language that they will be outcasts or won't have certain advantages that Arabic speakers will. That's not the fault of the victims, that is the fault of the society they live in.

We know that oppressed groups are made up of oppressed individuals. The fact that 1/2 of the world's 7,000 languages will disappear within the next 50 years is staggering. What is needed (including speaking the language at home, as you mention) are massive and radical social movements, a rapid equalization and reversal of language status, support from the government, and education. The issue of bigotry also needs to be addressed, because we know that the only reason that languages are stigmatized in the first place is because the speakers are devalued and despised by some other group. So, I feel that the wolf is in no moral position to ask the sheep--"why are you behaving this way? Why do you hate me? You need to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Why won't you take responsibility and teach your kids?" I contend that the converse is true: the wolf (or members in the wolf class) should feel a tremendous guilt complex for continuing to perpetuate historical wrongs, and he should be in the vanguard of those who are for change. Why? Because it takes power to effect those changes. No group is ever willing to give up power voluntarily. And the powerless are certainly unable to effect those changes themselves, without powerful allies. Having a prestige language is one way to assert that power. It is also important that scholars use their platform to the widest degree possible to help promote change, and not to continue in the villianizing or casting aspersions upon groups who make choices based on their desire to survive--although those choices may mean the eradication of their own cultures. They're just trying to survive.

Yes Hiram, I agree with all what you said, but don't think that i am not doing anything to help change the situation. When I came here in 1997, i started teaching sociolinguistics and encouraging my students to write final projects about their mother-tongues, among which Zenete. so the first "memoirs" in English about Zenete were under my supervision. More than that, I contacted the Haut Commissariat à l'Amazighité and told them about the situation of Zenete as an endangered language variety in the south of Algeria. They were interested to the point that we held an international conference about the Tamazight dialects of southern Algeria last December.

Now I would like to add that an insufficient governmental support is there to promote and encourage the use and spread of Zenete, which is a pity. No schools to teach it since the only codified Tamazight variety is Kabylian-Berber taught in the north of the country. One can hear Zenete and Tamachek on the radio, once a day only. Sometimes they broadcast programs or the news in Zenete or in Tamachek. The other important fact is that even if the government imposes the teaching of Zenete, the local society is not ready to accept it. This is a fact, unfortunately.

so what do you think?

Well, with regard to the local society not being able to accept it, that happened in the United States after slavery--no one wanted to free their slaves and a Civil War had to be fought. I also happened in the 20th Century during the Civil Rights Movement, when the schools were forcibly integrated by the US government, when the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 was passed, which allowed blacks the right to vote. Many people did not want to integrate with blacks, drink from the same water fountains, share public pools and public schools, but they were forced to. And some violence erupted. The government had to send in the military just so little black girls could go to school. So, an unjust law is not a law that has to be obeyed. Sometimes it require civil disobedience. It's fallacious reasoning to assume that the majority of people are in the right, just because they're in the majority. Sometimes you have to make things happen, for the good of all and to help those who can't help themselves.

Bravo for your valiant efforts inside and outside of the classroom.

Here is something that I hope you will find of great interest. It is a letter that Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote while he was in a jail in Birmingham. It is of relevance to our discussion, although it not about linguistics or language. http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/kingweb/liberation_curriculum/pdfs/letterfrombirmingham_wwcw.pdf

you're welcome.But still a lot got to be done. i also contacted the people incharge of ElCat (Endangered languages Catalogue) to put Zenete in the list of languages in danger of death through shift.

got the letter. Many thanks.

I agree with Hiram, below. There is a lot of ignorance and linguistic discrimination among most cultures. Many French speaking Canadians came here to Maine to find work around the turn of the 20th century. They were immediately at a major disadvantage because of their language. Although they put in a decided effort to keep their French heritage, the surrounding communities made it almost impossible. In fact, the Ku Klux Klan became involved and burned crosses and churches to intimidate the French community. Children were hit on the hands with a ruler in school if they were caught using French. Parents started using only English because they wanted a better life for their children. Eventually, the French language has died out among French-Canadian Americans here in Maine. Thankfully, though, just like in Hiram's example in San Basilio, there is a huge language revitalization program taking place here in Maine. You can learn more at www.wakingupfrench.com.

In the case of Zenete (Taznatit), it is a matter of a major language variety (Arabic) and a minor one (Zenete). the former has all imaginable governmental support, while the latter is broadcasted on the local radio for a few hours, only. Even the zenete natives try to use their mother-tongue for domestic topics, only. As arabic is the standard means of communication, administration and teaching, the zenetes find themselves obliged to shift towards that variety to find job opportunities and social equalities

How do we explain what happened to Latin?

Latin is considered "extinct" because no one learns it as the native language. "Extinct" does not mean "dead" in the sense that no one studies or learns it as a second language. Latin is a good example of the distinction between "extinct" and "lost" where I use the term "lost" to mean that no one speaks, studies, or understands a language. Latin is a good example of an "extinct" language that is far from being "lost" or "dead." It has at least two active areas of usage, as the language of biological taxonomy and the official liturgical language of the Roman Catholic Church. These two active areas of usage are not enough to promote Latin to the level of a "living" language. If a new country were to be created whose national language were declared to be Latin, perhaps native speakers would emerge in a generation or two. This does not seem to be in the works anywhere, so Latin will probably retain its status an "extinct" language that scholars use and understand.

Derek,

Your question about Latin can be conceptualized another way. Latin gave rise to hundreds of Romance languages, the development of which can be traced back to the geographic distribution of cultural groups under the control of the Roman Empire.

One can surmise that even though a language goes extinct in the strictest sense of the word, parts of the language, e.g. root words, conjugations, structures, parts of speech, "live on" in more modern languages that were derived from a prototype language.

Linguicide, language planning and policies, linguistic imperialism, subtractive bilingualism, language death,

and total eradication of aboriginees who speak a language , that is , killing them collectively or isolating them or forcing them to live in uninhabitable ares like freezing mountains in Scotland or  Siberia .

Hello Rahimi,

You have brought up a good point regarding language death. Even without forced eradication, some areas are so isolated (by islands or mountains) that few people live there and their language is easy to become extinct if there is a natural disaster in the area. With few speakers to sustain the population, a language in an area like this can become endangered.

All the best,

Marion

sure enough Marion , linguicide or , as you mentioned, isolation by isalnds and mountain could lead language death, 

BTW, was also curious to know  what your main projects are in naval systems,

Hello Rahimi,

I am retired now and working on military projects. Now I am interested in other areas of science and technology, including but not limited to comparative linguistics, protein chemistry, essential-oil chemistry, and electronics.

Best,

Marion

Not counting political and legal factors, what are the most significant factors that contribute to the extinction of a language?

Besides the factors shared in question & by other factors, think following 3 factors might contribute to the extinction of a language: