Dead language

An extinct language or dead language is a language that no longer has any speakers, especially if it has no living descendants.

In the modern period, language death has typically resulted from the process of cultural assimilation leading to language shift, and the gradual abandonment of a native language in favour of a foreign lingua franca.

A language that currently has living native speakers is called a modern language. As of the 2000s, a total of roughly 7,000 natively spoken languages existed worldwide. Most of these are minor languages in danger of extinction; one estimate published in 2004 expected that some 90% of the currently spoken languages will have become extinct by 2050.

Normally the transition from a spoken to an extinct language occurs when a language undergoes language death while being directly replaced by a different one. For example, some Native American languages were replaced by English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch as a result of colonization.

In contrast to an extinct language, which no longer has any speakers, or any written use, a historical language may remain in use as a literary or liturgical language long after it ceases to be spoken natively. Such languages are sometimes also referred to as "dead languages", but more typically as classical language. The most prominent Western example of such a language is Latin, but comparable cases are found throughout world history due to the universal tendency to retain the historical stage of a language as liturgical language.

Historical languages with living descendants that have undergone significant language change may be considered "extinct", especially in cases where they did not leave a corpus of literature or liturgy that remained in widespread use, as is the case with e.g. Old English or Old High German (etc.) relative to their contemporary descendants, English and German (etc.).

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