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First of all, Latin can not really "die" as it happens to some languages. A language dies when their last speakers die and nobody else knows how it sounds. Lati

First of all, Latin can not really "die" as it happens to some languages. A language dies when their last speakers die and nobody else knows how it sounds. Latin is in some sense still alive because lots of people can read and speak it, even if not fluently. Consider the similar example of Hebrew. During centuries this was a language that was not spoken natively by anyone, but remained alive through its religious literature. With the creation of the state of Israel, hebrew is now a spoken language again. Second, latin is not a natively spoken language for more than a thousand years already. The last people to speak latin natively were the educated people living in the Roman empire. Everybody else was using so-called vulgar latin that naturally evolved into some of the national languages of Europe. So, it is not a secret that latin has been "dead" and "alive" at the same time for several centuries, and this will probably not change for yet a few more centuries.

ars 11y ago
Aramaic is in a similar situation. It's dead as in no native speakers, but yet alive because it is still used (and spoken) daily in study by ordinary people not just specialized academics.
- oxryly1 11y ago
  Sanskrit too, right?
- pessimizer 11y ago
  Assyrians speak Aramaic. There aren't a lot of them, but I've known a few.
schoen 11y ago
Some linguists seem to focus on the distinction between languages with a self-perpetuating native speaker community and languages without one, partly because of the idea that native speaker competence and native speaker language communities are qualitatively different from adult second language acquisition (for example native speakers' intuitions as native speakers are seen as extremely important and valuable, whereas non-native speakers' intuitions aren't given much regard). Also, for language conservation efforts, it's worth noting that when most languages lose their native speaker community, they will immediately cease to be spoken because it's very unlikely that outsider enthusiasts (and/or non-speakers who see the language as part of their cultural heritage) will show up and revive the language, even though this has happened in a handful of cases and been proposed in other cases. In the scheme of languages that are threatened with extinction, revival that produces a new native speaker community virtually never happens; some people say it's only ever happened with Hebrew, and there's even a debate there about how much continuity modern Hebrew has with ancient and liturgical Hebrew. As a Latin speaker I was always annoyed that people said that Latin was "dead" when it had obviously never ceased to be spoken or written and when I had personally used it to communicate with people (one time with one of the people mentioned in this article, an Italian who doesn't speak English!). Events like the Rusticationes show that you can use Latin as a medium of day-to-day communication, and people do, so that should hardly count as "dead", right? On the other hand, very very few people have Nancy Llewelyn's level of fluency in Latin, even among people who regularly participate in spoken Latin events. I used to go the Cenae Latinae in Berkeley and, while it was super-fun and very satisfying, the majority of people there wouldn't be called "fluent" if we were applying the standards of a modern language. I feel like linguists sometimes have a hard time dealing with phenomena like conlangs, liturgical languages, and ancient languages used for communication, because the paradigm of human language acquisition that you see in every single human society all day long is transmission in communities of native speakers, so the concept of something that is exclusively 2L but is in systematic use comes across as kind of weird and not quite "real". And you can find ways in which these languages are impoverished, but it feels pretty real when you understand them and communicate with them! It's interesting to note that there have been some native Esperanto speakers (including George Soros) and some native post-classical Latin speakers (including Michel de Montaigne), as well as one native Klingon speaker. I'm pretty sure language acquisition specialists would still see this as qualitatively different than transmission within a native speaker community.
- coliveira 11y ago
  Another thing that changes this equation is the rise of the Internet. Nowadays it is much easier to create a community of people interested in a particular language, so it is not just a matter of a group of people in a geographical region speaking the language. It just takes a committed family of latin speakers to raise kids that have latin as their first language, and I don't think this is terribly difficult to do in the modern world.

ars 11y ago

Aramaic is in a similar situation. It's dead as in no native speakers, but yet alive because it is still used (and spoken) daily in study by ordinary people not just specialized academics.

oxryly1 11y ago
Sanskrit too, right?
pessimizer 11y ago
Assyrians speak Aramaic. There aren't a lot of them, but I've known a few.

schoen 11y ago

Some linguists seem to focus on the distinction between languages with a self-perpetuating native speaker community and languages without one, partly because of the idea that native speaker competence and native speaker language communities are qualitatively different from adult second language acquisition (for example native speakers' intuitions as native speakers are seen as extremely important and valuable, whereas non-native speakers' intuitions aren't given much regard). Also, for language conservation efforts, it's worth noting that when most languages lose their native speaker community, they will immediately cease to be spoken because it's very unlikely that outsider enthusiasts (and/or non-speakers who see the language as part of their cultural heritage) will show up and revive the language, even though this has happened in a handful of cases and been proposed in other cases. In the scheme of languages that are threatened with extinction, revival that produces a new native speaker community virtually never happens; some people say it's only ever happened with Hebrew, and there's even a debate there about how much continuity modern Hebrew has with ancient and liturgical Hebrew. As a Latin speaker I was always annoyed that people said that Latin was "dead" when it had obviously never ceased to be spoken or written and when I had personally used it to communicate with people (one time with one of the people mentioned in this article, an Italian who doesn't speak English!). Events like the Rusticationes show that you can use Latin as a medium of day-to-day communication, and people do, so that should hardly count as "dead", right? On the other hand, very very few people have Nancy Llewelyn's level of fluency in Latin, even among people who regularly participate in spoken Latin events. I used to go the Cenae Latinae in Berkeley and, while it was super-fun and very satisfying, the majority of people there wouldn't be called "fluent" if we were applying the standards of a modern language. I feel like linguists sometimes have a hard time dealing with phenomena like conlangs, liturgical languages, and ancient languages used for communication, because the paradigm of human language acquisition that you see in every single human society all day long is transmission in communities of native speakers, so the concept of something that is exclusively 2L but is in systematic use comes across as kind of weird and not quite "real". And you can find ways in which these languages are impoverished, but it feels pretty real when you understand them and communicate with them! It's interesting to note that there have been some native Esperanto speakers (including George Soros) and some native post-classical Latin speakers (including Michel de Montaigne), as well as one native Klingon speaker. I'm pretty sure language acquisition specialists would still see this as qualitatively different than transmission within a native speaker community.

coliveira 11y ago
Another thing that changes this equation is the rise of the Internet. Nowadays it is much easier to create a community of people interested in a particular language, so it is not just a matter of a group of people in a geographical region speaking the language. It just takes a committed family of latin speakers to raise kids that have latin as their first language, and I don't think this is terribly difficult to do in the modern world.