Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: When is a language considered dead?
Language endangerment occurs when a language is at risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers, and becomes a "dead language". If eventually no one speaks the language at all, it becomes an "extinct language". While languages have always gone extinct throughout human history, they have been disappearing at an accelerated rate in the 20th and 21st centuries due to the processes of globalization and neo-colonialism, where the economically powerful languages dominate other languages.
It is not uncommon to encounter children who grew up with a regional variant of Mandarin as their parent tongue with little or no fluency in a Wu variety at all. However, this is primarily when parents are speakers of different languages and communicate in Mandarin and more rarely due to the parents' attitudes towards using language or dialect, which most associate with the warmth of home and family life. Many people have noticed this trend and thus call for the preservation and documentation of not only Wu but all Chinese varieties. The first major attempt was the "Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects", which surveyed 2,791 locations across the nation, including 121 Wu locations (a step up from the two locations in PKU's earlier surveys), and led to the formation of an elaborate database including digital recordings of all locations; however, this database is not available to the general public. The atlas's editor, Cao Zhiyun, considers many of these languages "endangered" and has introduced the term (Languages in danger) or "endangered dialects" into the Chinese language to raise people's attention to the issue, while others try to draw attention to how the dialects fall under the scope of UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage and as such deserve to be preserved and respected.
Native American languages predate European settlement of the New World. In a few parts of the U.S. (mostly on Indian reservations), they continue to be spoken fluently. Most of these languages are endangered, although there are efforts to revive them. Normally the fewer the speakers of a language the greater the degree of endangerment, but there are many small Native American language communities in the Southwest (Arizona and New Mexico) which continue to thrive despite their small size.
In 1929, speaking of indigenous Native American languages, linguist Edward Sapir observed:
There are about 225 indigenous languages in Europe – roughly 3% of the world's total. Most of the European languages are of Indo-European origin. Since the end of the 18th century, the most widespread language of Europe (both in terms of geography and the number of native speakers) has been Russian, which replaced French. Counting only native speakers, approximately 150 million Europeans speak Russian on a daily basis, followed by German (approx. 95 mil.), English and French (each by 65 mil.), Italian (60 mil.), Spanish and Polish (40 mil. each), Ukrainian (30 mil.) and Romanian (26 mil.). As far as foreign language studies are concerned, English is currently the most popular foreign language in Europe, followed by German, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish
Worldwide, English is used widely as a lingua franca and can be seen to be the dominant language at this time. The world's largest language by native speakers is Mandarin Chinese which is a first language of around 960 million people, or 12.44% of the population, predominantly in Greater China. Spanish is spoken by around 330 to 400 million people, predominantly in the Americas and Spain. Arabic is spoken by around 280 million people. Bengali is spoken by around 250 to 300 million people worldwide, predominantly in Bangladesh and India. Hindi is spoken by about 200 million speakers, mostly in India. Portuguese is spoken by about 230 million speakers in Portugal, Brazil, East Timor, and Southern Africa.
The UN identifies Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish as its six official languages. Delegates speaking in any of these languages will have their words simultaneously interpreted into all of the others, and attendees are provided with headphones through which they can hear the interpretations. A delegate is allowed to make a statement in a non-official language, but must provide either an interpreter or a written copy of his/her remarks translated into an official language. English and French are the working languages of the United Nations Secretariat, as most of the daily communication within the Secretariat and most of the signs in the UN headquarters building are in those languages.
A mixed language differs from pidgins, creoles and code-switching in very fundamental ways. In most cases, mixed language speakers are fluent, even native, speakers of both languages; however, speakers of Michif (a N-V mixed language) are unique in that many are not fluent in both of the sources languages. Pidgins, on the other hand, develop in a situation, usually in the context of trade, where speakers of two (or more) different languages come into contact and need to find some way to communicate with each other. Creoles develop when a pidgin language becomes a first language for young speakers. While creoles tend to have drastically simplified morphologies, mixed languages often retain the inflectional complexities of one, or both, of parent languages. For instance, Michif retains the complexities of its French nouns and its Cree verbs.
ǂʼAmkoe is moribund and severely endangered. There are only a few dozen native speakers, most born before 1960 (one Sasi speaker was born in 1971, one N!aqriaxe speaker in 1969), many of whom no longer speak the language fluently. The first language of the younger generations, and even of many older, native speakers who no longer speak ǂʼAmkoe well, is Gǀui, a Khoe language, in the case of N!aqriaxe; Kgalagadi, a Bantu language that is the local lingua franca, in the case of ǂHoan; and the Ngwato dialect of Tswana, in the case of Sasi.
The relative success of English-language films can also be explained by considering that the English language is widely considered to be a universal language—it is the first language of 400 million people, the second language of another 400 million, and a foreign language of an additional 700 million; English is thus understood by 1,500 million people, which is almost 20% of all the people in the world. The Chinese language, especially the standard variant, have over twice as many native speakers as English, but a lot fewer foreign-language speakers, thus making it a less globalized and potentially less commercially profitable language outside of China.
In the year 2000, Livonian was a moribund language spoken by some 35 people, of whom only 10 were fluent. In the first decade of the 21st century, it was estimated that Livonian was the native tongue of 4 people in Latvia, all of whom were older than 70.
Grizelda Kristiņa, the last native speaker of Livonian, died on June 2, 2013.
In the so-called "Dark Ages", which followed the end of the Roman Empire, major changes occurred in most of the part of Great Britain now called England. (Brythonic-speaking Cornwall was an exception, more akin to Welsh toponymy.) The language of this region became Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon, a Germanic language originating in north-west Germany and Denmark. Traditionally, this has been supposed to be due to a mass migration of Angles and Saxons into Britain, "pushing back the Celts into Wales and Scotland". Due to this linguistic replacement, most placenames in modern England are discernibly Anglo-Saxon. A large proportion of these contain personal names, suggesting that they were named after the first Anglo-Saxon to dwell there. Personal names are less common in Brythonic placenames.
King Dinis of Portugal, who also contributed (with 137 extant texts, more than any other author) to the secular poetic genres, made the language official in Portugal in 1290. Until then, Latin had been the official (written) language for royal documents; the spoken language did not have a name and was simply known as "lingua vulgar" ("ordinary language", that is Vulgar Latin) until it was named "Portuguese" in King Dinis' reign. "Galician-Portuguese" and "português arcaico" ("Old Portuguese") are modern terms for the common ancestor of modern Portuguese and modern Galician. Compared to the differences in Ancient Greek dialects, the alleged differences between 13th-century Portuguese and Galician are trivial.
"Latinitas" was spoken as well as written, and it was the language taught in schools. Prescriptive rules therefore applied to it, and where a special subject was concerned, such as poetry or rhetoric, additional rules applied. Now that the spoken "Latinitas" has become extinct (in favor of various other registers later in date) the rules of the, for the most part, polished ("politus") texts may give these the appearance of an artificial language, but "Latinitas" was a form of "sermo", or spoken language, and as such retains spontaneity. No texts by Classical Latin authors are noted for the type of rigidity evidenced by stylized art, except possibly the repetitious abbreviations and stock phrases of inscriptions.
The Proto-Norse language developed into Old Norse by the 8th century, and Old Norse began to develop into the modern North Germanic languages in the mid- to late 14th century, ending the language phase known as Old Norse. These dates, however, are not absolute, since written Old Norse is found well into the 15th century.
Those countries have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from an English-based creole to a more standard version of English. They have many more speakers of English who acquire English in the process of growing up through day by day use and listening to broadcasting, especially if they attend schools where English is the medium of instruction. Varieties of English learned by speakers who are not native speakers born to English-speaking parents may be influenced, especially in their grammar, by the other languages spoken by those learners. Most of those varieties of English include words little used by native speakers of English in the inner-circle countries, and they may have grammatical and phonological differences from inner-circle varieties as well. The standard English of the inner-circle countries is often taken as a norm for use of English in the outer-circle countries.
Beginning with Plautus's time (254–184 ), one can see phonological changes between Classical Latin and what is called Vulgar Latin, the common spoken language of the Western Roman Empire. Vulgar Latin differed from Classical Latin in phonology and morphology as well as exhibiting lexical differences. However they were mutually intelligible until the 7th century when Classical Latin 'died' as a daily spoken language, and had to be learned as a second language (though it was long thought of as the formal version of the spoken language). Vulgar Latin was the ancestor of the Romance languages, including Old French.
The precise number of creole languages is not known, particularly as many are poorly attested or documented. About one hundred creole languages have arisen since 1500. These are predominantly based on European languages such as English and French due to the European Age of Discovery and the Atlantic slave trade that arose at that time. With the improvements in ship-building and navigation, traders had to learn to communicate with people around the world, and the quickest way to do this was to develop a pidgin, or simplified language suited to the purpose; in turn, full creole languages developed from these pidgins. In addition to creoles that have European languages as their base, there are, for example, creoles based on Arabic, Chinese, and Malay. The creole with the largest number of speakers is Haitian Creole, with almost ten million native speakers, followed by Tok Pisin with about 4 million, most of whom are second-language speakers.
No official languages were recorded in the Constitution of 1992. Instead, Malagasy was named the national language; however, many sources still claimed that Malagasy and French were official languages, as they were "de facto". In April 2000, a citizen brought a legal case on the grounds that the publication of official documents in the French language only was unconstitutional. The High Constitutional Court observed in its decision that, in the absence of a language law, French still had the character of an official language.
British and African Romance—the forms of Vulgar Latin used in southeastern Britain and the Roman province of Africa, where it had been spoken by much of the urban population—disappeared in the Middle Ages (as did Pannonian Romance in what is now Hungary, and Moselle Romance in Germany). But the Germanic tribes that had penetrated Roman Italy, Gaul, and Hispania eventually adopted Latin/Romance and the remnants of the culture of ancient Rome alongside existing inhabitants of those regions, and so Latin remained the dominant language there. In part due to regional dialects of the Latin language and local environments, several languages evolved from it.
The use of English is frequent among young people under 25. English is the predominant second language and is in the school curriculum from the first grade. Roughly 90% of 15- to 21-year-olds speak English with other Danes at least once per week. Youth code switch from Danish to English with friends and classmates. English phrases or words are spoken in between Danish words. Codeswitching is a marker of youth identity and sign of opposition to adult culture. Youth use their language style to differ from adults.
Most Romani speak one of several dialects of the Romani language, an Indo-Aryan language, with roots in Sanskrit. They also often speak the languages of the countries they live in. Typically, they also incorporate loanwords and calques into Romani from the languages of those countries and especially words for terms that the Romani language does not have. Most of the "Ciganos" of Portugal, the Gitanos of Spain, the Romanichal of the UK, and Scandinavian Travellers have lost their knowledge of pure Romani, and respectively speak the mixed languages Caló, Angloromany, and Scandoromani. Most of the speaker communities in these regions consist of later immigrants from eastern or central Europe.
Some degree of misunderstanding can result from designating languages such as Old English and Old High German as extinct, or Latin dead, while ignoring their evolution as a language. This is expressed in the apparent paradox "Latin is a dead language, but Latin never died." A language such as Etruscan, for example, can be said to be both extinct and dead: inscriptions are ill understood even by the most knowledgeable scholars, and the language ceased to be used in any form long ago, so that there have been no speakers, native or non-native, for many centuries. In contrast, Old English, Old High German and Latin never ceased evolving as living languages, nor did they become totally extinct as Etruscan did. Through time Latin underwent both common and divergent changes in phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon and continues today as the native language of hundreds of millions of people, renamed as different Romance languages and dialects (French, Italian, Spanish, Corsican, Asturian, Ladin, etc.). Similarly, Old English and Old High German never died, but developed into various forms of modern English and German. With regard to the written language, skills in reading or writing Etruscan are all but non-existent, but trained people can understand and write Old English, Old High German and Latin. Latin differs from the Germanic counterparts in that an approximation of its ancient form is still employed to some extent liturgically. This last observation illustrates that for Latin, Old English, or Old High German to be described accurately as dead or extinct, the language in question must be conceptualized as frozen in time at a particular state of its history. This is accomplished by periodizing English and German as Old; for Latin, the most apt clarifying adjective is Classical, which also normally includes designation of high or formal register.
"When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," originally published in "College English" in the fall of 1972, is an essay by American feminist, poet, teacher, and writer Adrienne Rich (1929-2012). It discusses several concepts needed by women writers to enable them to overcome the conditioning of a patriarchal sense of literary aesthetics and history. The essay, originally a lecture delivered by Rich at a women’s writer convention, emphasizes the need for re-visioning of old texts, renaming of the various aspects of women which have been distorted by a male point of view, and developing a new form of writing that is free of the haunting male gaze, of convention and propriety and of the ‘male’ language and its implications.
Generally the accelerated pace of language endangerment is considered to be a problem by linguists and by the speakers. However, some linguists, such as the late phonetician Peter Ladefoged, have argued that language death is a natural part of the process of human cultural development, and that languages die because communities stop speaking them for their own reasons. Ladefoged argued that linguists should simply document and describe languages scientifically, but not seek to interfere with the processes of language loss. A similar view has been argued at length by linguist Salikoko Mufwene, who sees the cycles of language death and emergence of new languages through creolization as a continuous ongoing process.
A majority of linguists do consider that language loss is an ethical problem, as they consider that most communities would prefer to maintain their languages if given a real choice. They also consider it a scientific problem, because language loss on the scale currently taking place will mean that future linguists will only have access to a fraction of the world's linguistic diversity, therefore their picture of what human language is—and can be—will be limited.
Dead Language is the fourth studio album by Canadian punk band The Flatliners. It was released in 2013 on Fat Wreck Chords. The band released the album for streaming shortly before its release. The album was subsequently nominated for "Metal/Hard Music Album of the Year" at the Juno Awards of 2014.