Language death
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In linguistics, language death occurs when communication in a language stops. The most common process leading to language death is one whereby a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual in another language, and gradually shift allegiance to the second language until they cease to use their original language. This is a process of assimilation which may be voluntary or may be forced upon a population. Languages can also die when their speakers are wiped out by genocide or disease.
A language is often declared to be dead even before the last native speaker of the language has died; if there are only a few elderly speakers of a language remaining, and they no longer use that language for communication, then the language is effectively dead. This occurs when a language stops being transmitted as a mother tongue. This is not usually a sudden event, but a slow process of each generation learning less and less of the subtleties of the language, until it remains only in poetry and song. For example, a family's adults may speak in an older native language, but when they have children, they may not pass on this language, and therefore the language dies in that family. This situation occured with the Manx language, but Manx, in addition to other languages, is slowly but surely being reintroduced at schools and in bi-lingual publications.
Sometimes language death can be reversed, as has happened with the Hebrew language in Israel. However, this is the only large-scale language revival process that has ever succeeded. Successive Irish governments since 1922 are thought to have done more harm than good to the Irish language. Making the language compulsory in schools and for government jobs has done nothing for its popularity and the language is slowly but surely declining (except in Northern Ireland).
Contrary to popular belief, the Latin language has never died, at least not in this linguistic sense. Instead, it continues to be passed on as mother tongue even today. Throughout the millenia, the effects of language evolution have vastly changed the language; also, separation has given rise to dialects and eventually mutually unintelligible languages. This family of languages that is directly descendent from Latin is now known as the Romance languages (after Rome). There is no single point in time where anyone could say that "Latin died" and "French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese were born".
Language attrition, occassionally called language suicide, is a process of language obsolescence whereby the speakers of the less prestigious language of two closely related languages, over generations, borrow so much lexis, pronunciation and syntax from the more prestigious language so that the less prestigious language becomes virtually indistinguishable from the prestigious one and can be considered to have become the same language.
Bibliography
- Aitchinson, Jean (1991) Language Change: Progress or Decay? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Brenzinger, Matthias (ed.) (1992) Language Death: Factual and Theoretical Explorations with Special Reference to East Africa. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Dorian, Nancy C. (1978). Fate of morphological complexity in language death: Evidence from East Sutherland Gaelic. Language, 54 (3), 590-609.
- Dorian, Nancy C. (1981). Language death: The life cycle of a Scottish Gaelic dialect. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Dorian, Nancy C. (Ed.). (1989). Investigating obsolescence: Studies in language contraction and death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Dressler, Wolfgand & Wodak-Leodolter, Ruth (eds.) (1977) Language death (International Journal of the Sociology of Language vol. 12). The Hague: Mouton.
- Mohan, Peggy; & Zador, Paul. (1986). Discontinuity in a life cycle: The death of Trinidad Bhojpuri. Language, 62 (2), 291-319.
- Sasse, Hans-Jürgen (1992) 'Theory of language death', in Brenzinger (ed.) Language Death, pp. 7–30.
- Schilling-Estes, Natalie; & Wolfram, Walt. (1999). Alternative models of dialect death: Dissipation vs. concentration. Language, 75 (3), 486-521.