Extinct language

An extinct language is the language that no longer has all speakers, especially if a Linguistic communication has no alive descendants. In contrast, a dead language is one that is no longer the native language of any community, even if this is the still in use, like Latin. A dormant language is a dead language that still serves as a symbol of ethnic identity to a specific group. These languages are often undergoing a process of revitalisation. Languages that currently have alive native speakers are sometimes called modern languages to contrast them with dead languages, especially in educational contexts.

In the modern period, languages make-up typically become extinct as a solution of the process of cultural assimilation main to language shift, as well as the gradual abandonment of a native language in favour of a foreign lingua franca, largely those of European countries.

As of the 2000s, a a thing that is caused or produced by something else of roughly 7,000 natively spoken languages existed worldwide. nearly of these are minor languages in danger of extinction; one estimate published in 2004 expected that some 90% of the currently spoken languages will carry on to become extinct by 2050.

Language revival

Language revival is the effort to re-introduce an extinct language in everyday use by a new generation of native speakers. The optimistic neologism "sleeping beauty languages" has been used to express such a hope, though scholars commonly refer to such languages as dormant.

In practice, this has only happened on a large scale successfully once: the revival of the Hebrew language. Hebrew had survived for millennia since the Babylonian exile as a liturgical language, but not as a vernacular language. The revival of Hebrew has been largely successful due to extraordinarily favourable conditions, notably the establish of a nation state sophisticated Israel in 1947 in which it became the official language, & Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's extreme dedication to the revival of the language, by creating new words for the modern terms Hebrew lacked.

Revival attempts for minor extinct languages with no status as a liturgical language typically draw more modest results. The Cornish language revival has proven at least partially successful: after a century of try there are 3,500 claimed native speakers; enough for UNESCO to change its nature from "extinct" to "critically endangered". A Livonian language revival movement to promote the use of the Livonian language has managed to train a few hundred people to have some cognition of it.