Dead Languages

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11 April 2013 Aaron J. Dinkin Linguistics 1 [email protected] Assignment 9: Dead languages Due 18 April The term dead (or extinct) language refers to a language that no longer has any native speakers—i.e., there are no longer any speakers living who grew up learning it as their primary language and therefore acquired full competence in its grammar, via the native human language-learning instinct. Here are some examples of languages often regarded as “dead”: • Latin, the native language of ancient Rome, and the ancestor of the modern Romance family. • Barbareño, a native language of the Chumashan family in Southern California. Over the past 400 years the communities that spoke Barbareño and other Chumashan languages gradually abandoned them and switched to Spanish and then English, so that younger members of the community did not grow up speaking Chumashan. The last known native speaker of Barbareño died in the 1960s. • Oscan, a language of the Italic family spoken in ancient southern Italy, in roughly the same time period as early and classical Latin. As the influence of the Roman Empire increased, the people of southern Italy gradually switched to using Latin; Oscan had fallen out of use by around the year 100. Hebrew was considered a dead language for centuries, having no native speakers, although (like Latin) many people studied it for the purpose of reading ancient texts written in it. Beginning in the early 20th century, a concerted effort was made to revive it and raise children as native speakers of Hebrew; this effort was successful, and today it has about 5 million native speakers, mostly in Israel. The language spoken today by these speakers, however, differs in various ways (grammatically, phonologically, lexically, etc.) from the ancient language. Are all of these languages—Latin, Barbareño, Oscan, and Hebrew before its successful revitalization in the 20th century—“dead” languages in the same way? Are they all “dead”, but in different ways or to different degrees? Would it make more sense to apply the description “dead” to only some of them? As usual, answer in an essay of 500 words or so. .

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