system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Given its once immense popularity, how did Latin become a 'dead language'?
gpt
Latin evolved into the other romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc).  So in that respect it had the same the fate of almost all human languages, which is that they evolve over time into new languages.  

But second, Latin was also *kept alive* in its original form.  This is a lot more rare, and only happens to languages that are especially prominent for some reason (in Latin's case, as the language of learning and religion for much of Western Europe).

So you get this weird dichotomy where the language still exists (classical Latin), but nobody speaks it - instead they speak its children and derivatives.