On the death of languages

Factual Questions
1

How does a dead language become a dead language?

At one time, Latin was pretty widely used in Europe. Not so today, and I’ve seen it referred to often as a dead language. Ditto for Sanskrit, which I’ve seen referred to as “dead”.

Some cases of language death is easy to understand…many languages of various Native American tribes became threatened with extinction during the decline of Native American populations in the 19th century.

But I’m at a loss to understand why something like this would happen to Latin or Sanskrit.

Anyone know?

2

A language is dead if it has no native speakers and stops developing with the normal phonetic shifts, introduced slang, and other agents that work to bring about changes over time.

Latin has neologisms that have been introduced deliberately to handle new concepts, but no one on the street is changing the pronunciation or adding new words, casually. (They already did that and they call the new version Italian.)

3

And French and a couple of the other Romance languages.

4

There was once a separate social enclave in every river valley in the world. In each one a language grew. The languages borrowed from each other, and became similar, and over larger distances, evolved in different directions and became dissimilar. So did the social enclaves. Migration, voluntary, and forced caused the languages to mix, and left behind small regions where the unmixed originals were still spoken, only to be mixed with the languages of later invaders.

So, eventually, a single range of hills, or even mountains were not the barrier that once they were. Rivers were crossed, and even seas, and the small languages were assimilated and became larger languages. In Nigeria, today, there are still five hundred languages, many spoken only in a single small valley, or village. These language will never assimilate the dominant languages of the world, and as the children of those cultures become more cosmopolitan, they will speak other languages more and more in preference to the language of their homeland. Just as it happened to the two hundred and fifty languages in California, there will simply not be enough native speakers for common conversation. Grandparents will not be able to tell their grandchildren the tales of their people in their own language, because the children will not speak the language. So, the language dies.

As they die, other languages, such as English, (which absorbs terminology and expression with an astounding facility) will assimilate apt expressions from them. People on patios, noshing hors devours will build verbal mausoleums to languages they never knew.

Tris

“Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.” ~ Noah Webster ~

5

Triskadecamus It seems to me that your explanation, while relevant to a question about why small regional languages die out , is not as relevant to the question in the OP, “why did Latin and Sanskrit die out?”

I can’t speak for Sanskrit but Latin isn’t too difficult to explain: While Latin was widespread throughout Europe, it wasn’t common. After the fall of the Roman Empire, it was a learned language used by a pretty small group of people, the majority of whom were monks and priests but, and this is important, these were the people who wrote the histories and documents of the time. It wasn’t spoken, read or written by the vast majority of the population.

It’s use declined with the growth of literacy among the common classes, the decline of the power of the learned monks and priests (and of the Vatican), the rise of the Protestant churches and the rise of power of the mercantile classes.

That’s a gross oversimplification but gives some of the important reasons.

6

I should clarify, I was talking about Latin after the period of the Roman Empire (which I assume is what the OP is asking about).

If you were asking about its initial decline, it obviously went downhill quickly after the fall of the Roman Empire and the influx of the Germanic tribes into Southern Europe.

7

It’s either:

  1. The language shifts away from the original.
  2. All speakers of the language die. (As has happened with countless American Indian languages.)
  3. A ruling political or dominant social group puts a submissive group so far in the shadow, there’s no good reason to go on speaking the language.

All these factors could be acting at once. Particularly if the language “died” in various parts in different ways.

Latin as a street language started dying when the Roman Empire started breaking up and losing influence, but the church carried it on (while changing the pronunciation). And the people in the street in Britain, France, Spain and Italy started making the common language shift.

8

Talking of dying languages…

Triskadecamus wrote: “People on patios, noshing hors devours will build verbal mausoleums to languages they never knew.”

Hors devours? What? I thought this might be just a momentary brainstorm, but out of curiosity I put the phrase into Google and came up with 444 hits! How? It’s hors d’oeuvres, pronounced (roughly) orderv, so where does “devours” come into it? I can only assume it’s a spellchecker artifact, caused by people blindly accepting what their computer tells them is correct ('cos computers are so much smarter than us, right?)

9

For Latin specifically, one of the causes of its demise was the Protestant Reformation.

Prior to about 1500, if you wanted to read the Bible, you were pretty much limited to the Vulgate of St. Jerome – written in Latin. Reformers in a number of various countries believed that the Bible should be accessible to all Christians, and began their own translatins into the vernacular. The development of the printing press sped the process.

Suddenly, one of the major reasons for continuing to learn Latin disappeared, and the development and spread of “common language” among the educated class accelerated.

I don’t know anything about sanskrit, though.

10

Latin was spoken by common people in a version know at the time as “vulgar Latin.” (The original meaning of vulgar is “with regard to ordinary people,” sort of like popular is used today.) Vulgar Latin became Italian. Not sure of how the other Romance language evolved from that lineage. A linguist should fill in the rest but I believe that Latin eventually became a language of the learned, almost an artificial language.

Languages seem to follow similar life cycle as animal species. They evolve. Latin is dead and so are Neanderthals (well, not a perfect analogy since we are not direct descendents but you get the idea).