The world is composed of thousands of languages. Each nation possesses an official language and contains multiple sublanguages, dialects, and vernaculars. Nonetheless, several of these numerous languages are becoming or considered as extinct already. An extinct language is considered such when it loses native speakers already. Eventually, it becomes dead when a certain language is in the process of replacement from one language to another. An example sited from Wikipedia is the Native American languages replaced by English, French, Portuguese, or Spanish.

Knowing the fact that languages could really die and become extinct opens a great possibility that even the most commonly used language today, once it will not be used any longer could have the same fate like the rest of the considered extinct or dead languages. Here are the lists of some of the extinct languages globally:

In Africa:

• Kwadi (Angola)
• Yeni (Cameroon)
• Horo (Chad)
• Esuma (Cote d’Ivoire)
• Ancient Egyptian (Egypt)
• Sened (Tunisia)
• Singa (Uganda)

In Asia:

• Jurchen (China)
• Silla language (Korea)
• Yugh language (Siberia)
• Akar-Bale (India)
• Arwi (Sri Lanka)
• Sabaean (Arabia)
• Hurran (Mesopotamia)

In America

• Newfoundland Irish (Canada)
• Greenlandic Norse (Greenland)
• Tepecano (Mexico)
• Northern and Southern Costanoan (U.S.)
• Saraveca (Bolivia)
• Arua (Brazil)
• Mochica (Peru)
• Maipure (Venezuela)

In Europe:

• Gaulish (France)
• Latin (Italy)
• Germanic and Celtic languages (British Isles)
• Tartessian (Iberian Peninsula)

As these dead languages were detailed, you probably have not known most of these. Of course, these are not known to you because they are basically unused, that’s why they’re considered dead. Imagine the possibility that Spanish, French, English, or even Mandarin languages might not be used anymore, fifty or one hundred years from now. The modern languages of today would probably be just a part of language history in the future, considering the fate of the itemized languages above.

But there’s hope for extinct languages. There’s this recent news regarding a software company that helps in reviving “sleeping” or dead languages particularly, the Chitimacha tribe, a certain group of people residing in the wetlands of Louisiana. This tribe has only more than a thousand speakers but has tried to revive their language for several years already. It says in that news that the last speaker died in 1940.

The company’s goal in creating this software is to retain cultural identity. Aside from the Chitimacha tribe, they’re planning to have the same language project to Navajo, a language still spoken by thousands of people, but declining in numbers.

To desire this kind of objective will gradually restore extinct languages. There is indeed hope for dead languages since modern technology opens the doors for it. Yet, let us not wait for the time that globalization will take the possibilities in language extinction. Bear in mind that a language will not die unless spoken by numbers of people. Speakers of a particular language will determine the life of their own native tongue.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under Language News, Languages and Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.