sort of. People learn to read it, but they don't really speak or write it. the ability to read a language doesn't make it an alive language. This contrasts t

sort of. People learn to read it, but they don't really speak or write it. the ability to read a language doesn't make it an alive language. This contrasts to Hebrew, which some say was a dead language, but was the living language of jewish law correspondence and jewish law / biblical exegesis, even when other languages were the day to day vernacular (ladino, yiddish or the like). People like to say that hebrew was a dead language before the modern hebrew movement, but that's not quite fair. It wasn't a day to day language of the streets, but new things in it were being written every day all over the diaspora. Basically, those who say it was a dead language are demonstrating their bias against religiously oriented texts and communications.