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The article has an extensive Bibliography but no citations to it within the article text. -The links all seem to be to the works of one man. Very repetative, be nice to have more than one POV here. 82.152.209.210 ( talk) 00:03, 2 January 2010 (UTC)
From reading the talk page, it looks like the {accuracy} tag is mostly around these questions:
Wikipedia is not a place for original research. So, the solution to these questions is not to debate analogies to biology, but to do some academic research and see how the terms "dead language", "extinct language", and "language death" are actually used by linguists. If there's a big difference between how they're used by linguists and how they're used colloquially (as evidenced by cited examples), that could be mentioned in the article as well.
Given the huge bibliography on the end of this article, I'm surprised the question has remained unsettled for so long. Unfortunately, none of those bibliographical citations are footnoted to sentences in the text, so there's no way to tell which statements are supported by the works in the bibliography, and which aren't.
My quick search of scholar.google.com for documents publicly available online suggests that "dead language" and "extinct language" are used synonymously by linguists, and I also see references to Latin and other "ancestor" languages as dead/extinct 1 2 3 4. However, my findings are extremely limited, based on what I can find online. I'm sure that someone with access to a university library could get a much more definitive result by checking out some linguistics texts and journals. -- 66.81.67.25 20:26, 5 November 2005 (UTC)
I'm going to remove the reference to Irish from the section about language revival in this article. While "language revival" seems to refer to both extinct languages and endangered languages (assuming that the language revival article is correct), this is an article about extinct languages. The Irish language article says that Irish never went fully extinct, and this assertion doesn't seem to be contested. -- 66.81.67.25 19:44, 5 November 2005 (UTC) hi
can this be merged with the Linguicide article? — ishwar (SPEAK) 17:38, 2005 Jun 2 (UTC)
"Successive Irish governments since 1922 are thought to have done more harm than good to the Irish language." - this needs substantiating. Secretlondon 19:35, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
From personal experience I agree that with the critique of govt policies. The main problems are A: The syllabus concentrates almost exclusively on written rather than spoken Irish. Special Irish-medium schools called Gaelscoileanna are supposed to be much more successful at attaining fluency but people can lose it afterwards. B: The State has not facilitated interaction in Irish between citizens and the organs of the State. Personally, I found the problem in A so irritating I managed to get an exemption from Leaving Cert exams years ago (final second-level). We need more Gaelscoileanna and for the syllabus to be radically changed. It's so frustrating when you spend the class concentrating on poems and grammar instead of oral communication. - Peter
what followed I have removed to Num sit lingua Latīna mortua necne (haeret in "linguārum mūtātiōne"!)- Is Latin a dead language? (It's stuck in "language change") :-P Ūnus ē Latīnīs novīs ( talk) 00:51, 20 June 2011 (UTC)
The metaphor of death is used in many ways to describe what happens when people stop speaking a language. Death-related terms include:
I realize that many of these, especially "dead language" are standard terms for talking about this subject. The problem is, they also suppose a specific perspective on the process. Would a note about these terms help? Is there some way we can describe a full shift away from a language in terms where we don't anthropomorphize it into something which can die (and hence, whose passing should be mourned)? -- Jeff 04:32, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
I haven't yet looked closely into this article, but I concur with Ish ishwar that the Latin-becoming-a-dead-language case should not be treated under the heading of "language death". It's "dead" now, but it hasn't "died" in the sense of this article. Whatever it was that happened to Latin wasn't an instance of "language death" in the way this term is commonly used. That said, the text proposed by Ish ishwar seems a bit misleading to me too; I'll try and come up with another formulation later. Lukas (T.| @) 17:29, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
"changes caused by language death result from convergence, interference, and independent autogenetic processes"
Autogenetic processes?? Huh?
"overgeneralization" "undergeneralization"
Over and under eh?
Assuming the section isn't a joke, it's needs to be rewritten to actually make sense. Otherwise it needs to be removed and soon. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.27.210.84 ( talk • contribs) 19 May 2006, 18:40
please also take a look at the section, "Language loss & language acquisition"
it's very opaquely written and difficult to decode. in particular, what does a "temporal identity" refer to?
I was shocked to read: "Sociolinguistics may play a role in language death if the constructions of society fail to support linguistic diversity." Sociolinguistics is a science that studies the relation of social attitudes and social behaviors to language. I know of no way in which sociolinguistics "may play a role in language death" unless simply having more knowledge about how languages die actually contributes to their death. To the contrary, sociolinguistic understanding is one of the sources of support for the kind of "awareness" that the article goes on to say is important to language maintenance, and sociolinguists are often involved in developing language policies expressly aimed at language maintenance. Perhaps what the author meant to say was something like: "Language attitudes may play a role in laguage death if social institutions fail to support linguistic diversity". I know of no sociolinguist who does not support linguistic diversity. Lemccbr 13:14, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
I added a merge suggestion tag to add material from Killer language for several reasons:
almost a third of the external links are no longer opperational. unless anyone wants to replace them with updated links, i'll delete. Da Baron ( talk) 05:27, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
Currently at this time, the world has about 3,500 languages and 10,000 some dialects spoken, a sudden decrease from 6,500 known languages and over 20,000 dialects about a century ago. By the year 2050, there will be only 500 languages in the world and perhaps 1,000 dialects. A tremendous drop in tribal, regional and national languages in favor of "lingua francas" such as English, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin Chinese and other "official" languages of countries' governments, in global academia, economics and mass media.
The most controversial linguicide claim comes from the Occitan-speaking population of southern France, they accuse the French Republic government for over two centuries of aggressive, humiliating, nationalistic (to insist non-French speaking regions are disloyal people) and strict policies to destroy the Occitan language "the langue d'oc" with its subdialects (i.e. the Provencal language) and replacing them with the "official" French language or the "langue d'oil" originating in the Northern regions around Paris. Even to this day, the French republic was very slow and resilient to legally recognize and tolerate the use of regional "subdialect" languages like Occitan or Provencal in both regional and national government level.
The biggest casualities of linguicide was in North American Indians and most Indigenous peoples of the Americas have over 90% ratio of extinct languages, the rest are endangered and only 20 known languages to have some limited official usage. In South America- Quechua and Aymara in Peru and Bolivia, Guarani in Paraguay, Mapuche in Chile and Amazonian languages in Brazil. In North America- about 60 languages in Mexico and 30 languages in Canada have over 10,000 known fluent speakers, although the U.S. has the Navajo, Lakota, Cherokee and Pueblo Indians languages to each have over 10,000 speakers; and about 15 languages spoken by Inuit, Aleuts and Alaska Natives used semi-regularly in villages and communities across the state of Alaska.
Several hundreds of Native American languages have less than 100 speakers, most of them will become extinct when the last speaker of these languages dies whether or not their verbal or written language skills are recorded and preserved. The state governments in the U.S., provincial in Canada and the Mexican national government are taking drastic steps in protecting and promoting some few hundred total Native American languages, a reversal of former linguicidal policies and for Native Americans in the U.S., First Nations groups of Canada, or Indigenous peoples of Mexico to not lose an ancient part of their tribal heritage before it's gone forever. + 71.102.2.206 ( talk) 01:17, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
Quae dē "morte" linguae Latīnae scrīpta sunt, ē locō "Irish goverment & Irish death" īnscrīptō hunc in locum novum trānsposuī, praeter ānsam, quam duplicāvī.
What was written about the Latin language, I moved from the section "Irish goverment & Irish death" to this new section, except the "start", which I have copied.
(In īnfimō addidī, quae mhh.. plūs minusve futilem hanc disputātiōnem faciant! - Below, I've added, what, well, makes more or less futile this discussion!)
Ūnus ē Latīnīs novīs ( talk) 00:46, 20 June 2011 (UTC)
—
Ānsa, quam dīxī: - The said "start":
(There is extensive discussion of the counterproductive policies on the Irish language page. But Irisih isn't dead quite yet: it's moribund.) I'm more bothered by the assertion that "Latin never really died" and that we can't assign at least a rough date for the death of native colloquial Latin. (The dramatic collapse of the case system and the neuter gender in most daughter languages is a good place to start). -- Jpbrenna 21:51, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
respōnsī prīncipium est dē linuguā Hiberniā et ōmissum
The beginning of the answer is about the Irisch language and left out
The modern Romance languages differ from Classical Latin in a number of fundamental respects:
(From the Romance languages page).
It is wrong to say that Latin "grew up" and become Italian or French or Romanian. Rather, it grew up into Late Latin, and died a gradual death, but its children survived it. Sometimes its children visit its grave and fondly remember the good old days (Ecclesiastical Latin, Humanist Latin), but sadly, there was nothing they can really do to bring it back. All they could do is create a sad caricature of a living language by proppping their dead ancestor up at the table and pretending to have dinner with it, like the Inca used to do with their dead royalty. (No offense to the Inca, but all offense possible to modern "Living Latin" proponents). You can try to resurrect Latin, but if you do, and it becomes a living language again, and gradually change, and cease to be the fossilized creature we know as "Latin." That's exactly what happend with Greek in the 19th & 20th centuries. Modern higher-register Greek is a compromise between the naturally developed language and deliberate re-adoption of obsolete forms.
Sure, there is a strong family resemblance, but the children are their own people, as Latin was its own distinct person, different from its Old Latin ancestor and the Proto-Italic subgroup of the Celtic-Germanic-Italic branch of Indo-European that it descended from. There are strong family resemblances between Ancient and Modern Greek, Old, Middle and Modern Persian, Old, Middle & New English, etc., but they are separate languages. -- Jpbrenna 22:03, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
(No offense to the Inca, but all offense possible to modern "Living Latin" proponents).
...cease to be the fossilized creature we know as "Latin."(..)
...and gradually change,...
Ūnus ē Latīnīs novīs ( talk) 00:46, 20 June 2011 (UTC) maestus et caput quassāns valēdīcēns
So revert the article? Your facts seem very assured (you obviously know what you're talking about). Latin is dead. -- JDnCoke 00:22, August 18, 2005 (UTC)
Hi, thought I would join the cocktail party. One thing that I've noticed this whole discussion suffers from is a lack of clear understanding as to what the spatial and temporal borders of "a" language are. To speak of Latin as never having died out (but gradually changing form into the Romance languages of today) is and emic interpretation of language change. This interpretation makes a number of assumptions: 1) that linguistic features are understood in the same way by speakers of Romance languages and Latin speakers 2) that we can at all know how Latin speakers concieved of their semiotic universe 3) that the first assumption is due to gradual linguistic (not necessarilly Darwinian) "evolution." On the other hand, recognizing the phonological and morphosyntactic differences between Latin and the Romance languages as a reason to call these two categories "different languages" is an etic interpretation of language change. The morphosyntax and--assuming that an archaeology of phonology is possible--phonology of both Latin and the Romance languages are measurable. Differences can be statistically demonstrated. These differences, as discussed in other posts, are dramatic and point to a divergence. Personally, I would not call, for instance, French a modern form of Latin. I feel that I am qualified to make that claim because I have studied both languages and I know that French, apart from the morphosyntactic qualities discussed in other posts, is full of non-Latin influences. Indeed, are they at all influences? Could I not just as easily argue that French was "influenced" by Latin, but is in fact a continuation of the Gallic dialects spoken by a particular tribe that came to be known by the Romans as the Parisorum? Where in Latin do we find forms such as "jamais" ("never," Latin: "numquam") or "aller" ("to go," Latin: "ire")? Look at the French word for Germany: "Alemagne." Now look at the Latin word for the same: "Germania." There is no etymological continuity between the two. "Germania" was a name given to a particular region inhabited by all sorts of barbarians. "Alemagne" is a Germanic word that most likely comes to us from the combination of "alle" (all) and "mannir*" (men), since the region was not ethnically discrete but became known as "all men," or a federation of germanic tribes. So what is French? Is it a modern form of Latin? or is it a modern form of Gaulois? Is it useful to be asking these questions? Isn't it most practical to recognize French's independent status as a language? There is significant discontinuity between the French language as it is spoken today and the linguistic influences that gave rise to it.
"People call Latin dead because there are no native speakers today.". That's really circular. Is Shakespeare's English dead? Yes because there are no native speakers today. We are in a need of a distinction between "Variety A evolved into variety B" and "Variety A influenced variety B and died".
If language A evolved into language B then language A and B are instances of the same language: the language varieties are intelligible. The parallels between dachronic and synchronic linguistics are apparant. This is of course not without problems:
"For example, on both sides of the border between the Netherlands and Germany, the people living in the immediate neighbourhood of the border speak an identical language. They can understand each other without difficulty, and would even have trouble telling just by the language whether a person from the region was from the Netherlands or from Germany. However, the Germans here call their language German, and the Dutch call their language Dutch, so in terms of sociolinguistics they are speaking different languages."
[ [1]]
Thus this language is intelligible by Germans and by the Dutch. But is it German or is Dutch? It seems it's both.
If this area of overlap is not too large it can be regarded as a border line case. Turning to diachronic language this means: sudden changes are less problematic than gradual changes because the smaller overlap in intelligibility makes it easier to seperate the dead language from the living one.
Old English evolved into Middle English after 1066. The conquest by William the Conqueror lead to a great amount of change in the English language. This change happened in a short period so it was a sudden change. Middle English is intelligible by modern day speakers. Old English is not. This means Old English is a seperate language and a dead one too. This is what was called dead-through-change above
If there is not even a gradual change it is language shift. All speakers of variety A change to variety B and they consider B a different language than A. Language A is not changed; rather there are two distinct languages in the speakers' heads: language A and language B. If they don't teach language A to others (e.g. their children) the language will die with them. This is what was called dead-through-social-practise above.
kees -- 83.161.2.179 13:31, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
Salvēte legentēs scrībentēsque! Hello readers and writers!
Est fābula, nōn vērum linguam Latīnam esse mortuam/extīnctam - It's a legend, not the truth, that the Latin language would be dead/extinct.
Haec vincula satis faciant argūmentātiōnis: - These links should be enough of an argument:
"wikia": - wikis:
prīmus nexus huic locō est aptus: - The first link is apt to this site:
alter nōn secus: - not less the second:
http://la.bibliotheca.wikia.com/
pāgina Vicipaediae Latīnae: huic reī dēdicāta - the article of the Latin Wikipedia on this subjekt:
http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinitas_viva
('soror anglica' - 'the English sister': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_Latin#Living_Latin et quae īnfrā sunt omnia - and all below)
circulii Latiinii (omnibus prōpositīs apertī): Circles of Latin speakers (open to all subjects):
http://www.latinitatis.com/vita/circuli.htm
e.g.
http://www.circulus.fr/
etiam vinculārium fundātiōnis melissae īnspiciātur(per nexum alterum)! You should also look at the link collection of the Fundatio Melissa(via the second link)!
vinculāria: - link collections:
http://www.latinitatis.com/vita/vincula.htm
http://web.me.com/fundatiomelissa/Site/Nexus.html
http://www.circulus.fr/vincula/vincula.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_Latin#Notes ;-)
hoc ultimum certē satis interētiālium locōrum Latīnorum mōnstrat ! This last one surely shows enough Latin websites!
Quārē nunc ēnumerāre locōs dēsinō: ipsae ipsīque iam indicātōs scrūtāminī! Thus I stop enumerating sites: explore you yourself the already indicated ones!
Quod ad fācundiam attinet: Certē multae multīque sunt nōn tam facundī Latīnē loquentēs, sed hās tantum īnspiciātis epistulās:
http://ephemeris.alcuinus.net/epistulae.php
In multīs eārum magna appāret fācundia!
When it comes to fluency or even eloquence: Surely many of the Latin speakers are not that fluent or eloquent, but look at these letters alone: http://ephemeris.alcuinus.net/epistulae.php In many of them great eloquence is shown!
Hinc condiciōnī ad "mortem linguae" necessāriae nōn satisfacit lingua Latīna: Thence the condition necessary for "language death" is not fullfilled in case of Latin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death In linguistics, language death (...) is a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language variety is decreased, eventually resulting in no native and/or fluent speakers of the variety.
Nam istud "vel" absurdumst: īnspectīs exemplīs suprā allātīs et porrō secūtīs - QUIS MEHERCLE DĪCAT ESSE "MORTUAM" LINGUAM LATĪNAM - tantummodo ob eam "causam", quod nūllae nūllīque reperiuntur loquentēs nātīvī? As the "or" is absurd: having looked at and followed the examples cited above - WHO BY GOD WOULD SAY LATIN WOULD BE "DEAD" - only for the "reason", that there can't be found any native speakers?
In summam: Lingua Latīna minimē est mortua - conclusion: Latin is by no means dead!
Valēte - be fine
(aliās vērē respondēbō - I'll write real answers another time)
(...)A language that has reached such a reduced stage of use is generally considered moribund.<ref name="Crystal, David 2000"/> Once a language is no longer a native language - that is, if no children are being socialised into it as their primary language -the process of transmission is ended and the language itself will not survive past the current generation.
The latter for Latin is not true(1300 very vivid=not just "surviving" years!). The reason is that languages can be learned (= transmitted) at age far after childhood and that, given a good training in reading, listening, conversation and writing(e.g. by the Birkenkenbihl-method (c)), with a high level of fluency and even eloquence at reach. Reading needs texts - and there are many of them regarding Latin. Even if a full=perfect understanding of the semiotic world of the Romans, the Medieval times seems impossible, we can understand a wide range of their notions and therefor "learn their world" - we might not know the plants denounced by some words - so this small part of the Language is dead=not understandable - But the "rest"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ūnus ē Latīnīs novīs ( talk • contribs) 01:43, 20 June 2011 (UTC)
Are these extra rather funny names for language death important enough to deserve print in the lede and in bold? Seems humor like that can go in a footnote instead. - Stevertigo ( t | c) 02:11, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
Language death and Extinct language are an apparently accidental WP:CONTENTFORK of the exact same topic. However, the latter contradicts the former: "Extinct languages are sometimes contrasted with dead languages, which are still known and used in special contexts in written form, but not as ordinary spoken languages for everyday communication", and it links to Language death as if it covered "dead languages" in this sense, like Latin, which it does not. That use of "dead language" is a vernacular use, not a linguistic one; languages preserved for ritual and other specialized use are sociolects. (And that description of "dead-language" sociolects is wrong in other ways; they are frequently used in spoken, not just written, form.)
I propose merging the content of the articles, at the title Language extinction, and redirecting both original titles (and various other obvious terms like Dead language) to it, with Dead language going possible to a Language extinction#Dead languages subsection, if there is some need to preserve prose that addresses extinct languages themselves, as such, rather than the socio-linguistic process of their extinction.
As an illustration of why this pointless split is problematic, consider that probably 90+% of the time, anyone linking the word "extinct language" or "dead language" on WP intends that the reader go to the conceptual material at
Language death, as the material presently at
Extinct languages is about the languages as "things" unto themselves, and does not explain much of anything about language extinction. That article basically has no reason to exist, and its continued existence does little by divide content improvement efforts, confuse readers, and necessitate time-wasting coding like [[Language extinction|extinct language]]
.
— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 03:48, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
This graph, in the section "Types of language death", seems incomprehensible. It appears to be trying to be an Euler diagram, but the intersections of the circles make no sense—the graph shows that there are people who are both first language and second language learners of the language. I recommend that the image be removed, as it is confused and adds nothing to the article's content. Loraof ( talk) 22:16, 10 June 2016 (UTC)
In order to make this article more referable for common research there may be more reliability if the information being presented was cited more often. An example includes the beginning to the type section, while there are citations later in the information there could possibly be more. The first part to this section would look more reliable with citation. Also consider creating a lead section to the subfield headers to better explain what is to come in the following information. Miranda.Baranchak ( talk) 01:26, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
Removing it on the ground that it makes claims without citation and doesn't contain information that isn't elsewhere in the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Theycallmezeal ( talk • contribs) 17:27, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
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Linguicide and linguistic genocide redirect here, but there is no discussion of the topic at all. Hairy Dude ( talk) 11:16, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
This article contained a lot of superfluous internal links ranging from common languages, places, and even simple words like 'disease' and 'genocide'. These links don't help clarify anything in the article and such examples are specifically discouraged by MOS:OVERLINK. User @ Bonewah seems to want to keep these in for some reason I don't understand. Rather than engaging in an edit war, I'm putting this up on the talk page for discussion. Should this version of the page stay, or should another option be chosen?
Megaman en m ( talk) 21:22, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 5 September 2022 and 31 December 2022. Further details are available
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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 20 January 2023 and 3 May 2023. Further details are available
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some of which overlap or even repeat each other. I may do something about that soon. — Tamfang ( talk) 04:31, 7 October 2023 (UTC)
I would like to flag the section on "Health consequences for Indigenous communities" as potentially misleading, bias and false ( Wikipedia:Neutral point of view). It seems to read out as an opinion piece rather than actual fact, despite being seemingly well-sourced. There was an attempt to have it removed in 2022 with this edit with the user stating:
"This section of the article, aside from being misleading by using the term 'health' and the term 'mental health' interchangeably, is unrelated to the article. The section is about language loss which is a different topic in and of itself. Although language loss and assimilation may result in language death, this section does not belong in this article. Language death does is not a cause of poor mental health of indigenous communities, assimilation is a cause for both."
And then, shortly after the edit was reverted with this edit, with the user who reverted it stated:
"This section clearly mentions how language death is related to mental health consequences, it's well sourced too from what I see. Take it to the talk page if you want to discuss this further." I don't see any discussions on the talk page since that edit so I decided to start one here.
Some points I would like to mention from looking into this so far with my own opinions:
That's everything I have for now. I will add a NPOV dispute to the top of the section. Let's get a discussion going in here 🙂 HopefulLuck ( talk) 05:00, 2 January 2024 (UTC)