Talk:Language death

message: The article has an extensive Bibliography but no citations to it within the article text.
-The links all seem to be to the works of one man. Very repetative, be nice to have more than one POV here. 82.152.209.210 (talk) 00:03, 2 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Nice Bibliography but No Citations

message: From reading the talk page, it looks like the {accuracy} tag is mostly around these questions:
* Is there a difference between the terms "dead language" and "extinct language"?
* Can a language be called dead/extinct if it disappeared by gradual evolution into one or more child languages?
* Is Latin a dead language?
Wikipedia is not a place for original research. So, the solution to these questions is not to debate analogies to biology, but to do some academic research and see how the terms "dead language", "extinct language", and "language death" are actually used by linguists. If there's a big difference between how they're used by linguists and how they're used colloquially (as evidenced by cited examples), that could be mentioned in the article as well.
Given the huge bibliography on the end of this article, I'm surprised the question has remained unsettled for so long. Unfortunately, none of those bibliographical citations are footnoted to sentences in the text, so there's no way to tell which statements are supported by the works in the bibliography, and which aren't.
My quick search of scholar.google.com for documents publicly available online suggests that "dead language" and "extinct language" are used synonymously by linguists, and I also see references to Latin and other "ancestor" languages as dead/extinct 
1 2 3 4. However, my findings are extremely limited, based on what I can find online. I'm sure that someone with access to a university library could get a much more definitive result by checking out some linguistics texts and journals. --66.81.67.25 20:26, 5 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Since there doesn't seem to have been a lot of activity on this page in the past couple of months, I'm going to be bold and bring it in line with my (limited) findings, in regard to whether Latin is a living language or not. I won't remove the accuracy tag, though, because the article still needs more substantial research than the handful of journals that were accessible through scholar.google.com. --66.81.67.25 20:39, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

text: I remember in college learning that "dead language" is a colloquial term for any language that is no longer spoken regardless of whether it has living descendants. Linguists call this an "ancient language." They never use the term "dead language." If the language has no living descendants it is also called an extinct language. Bostoner (talk) 02:32, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Getting rid of the inaccuracy tag

message: I'm going to remove the reference to Irish from the section about language revival in this article. While "language revival" seems to refer to both extinct languages and endangered languages (assuming that the language revival article is correct), this is an article about extinct languages. The Irish language article says that Irish never went fully extinct, and this assertion doesn't seem to be contested. --66.81.67.25 19:44, 5 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Irish again

message: can this be merged with the Linguicide article? — ishwar  (SPEAK) 17:38, 2005 Jun 2 (UTC)
:Yeah maybe — I presume you mean moving the stuff from there into here (i.e., keeping it all at Language death). Language death seems the most common term to me; linguicide covers just a subset of cases where a certain intention is ascribed to a certain actor. — mark ✎ 22:23, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: merge with [[Linguicide]]?

message: The metaphor of death is used in many ways to describe what happens when people stop speaking a language.  Death-related terms include:
* Language death
* Linguicide
* Language murder
* Linguistic genocide
* Killer language
* Dead language
* Moribund language
I realize that many of these, especially "dead language" are standard terms for talking about this subject.  The problem is, they also suppose a specific perspective on the process.  Would a note about these terms help?  Is there some way we can describe a full shift away from a language in terms where we don't anthropomorphize it into something which can die (and hence, whose passing should be mourned)?  -- Jeff 04:32, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: First, of the terms you list, 'language death', 'dead language' and 'moribund language' are the most common and hence they sound somewhat less shrill (to me, at least) than the others. I feel less comfortable about the marginal terms 'killer language' and 'linguicide' and the like. My take on the most common terms would be that we don't need to 'de-anthropomorphize' them, because the metaphor conveys useful information about the subject at hand. Do you have a suggestion for an alternate term? — mark ✎ 07:16, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

text: Linguists don't still use the term "dead language" because of its confusion with the colloquial meaning, which includes languages that gradually evolved into other languages, such as Latin. The current term is "extinct language." Bostoner (talk) 01:19, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Many linguists still use the phrase "dead language", though some maybe not when they are trying to be precise. Some shout for more precision of expression, but they are few. It is a term that ordinary people use, also. Pete unseth (talk) 03:21, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  POV-ness of the death metaphor 

message: I haven't yet looked closely into this article, but I concur with Ish ishwar that the Latin-becoming-a-dead-language case should not be treated under the heading of "language death". It's "dead" now, but it hasn't "died" in the sense of this article. Whatever it was that happened to Latin wasn't an instance of "language death" in the way this term is commonly used. That said, the text proposed by Ish ishwar seems a bit misleading to me too; I'll try and come up with another formulation later. Lukas (T.|@) 17:29, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, it's actually correct in the sense of a shopping list of what might be covered in that section. But of course the technical jargon won't make much sense to the lay reader in this condensed form. I'm earmarking it and will try to work on it when I find the time. There's lots of interesting research on these questions, that much is for certain. Lukas (T.|@) 19:26, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recent reverts 

message: "changes caused by language death result from convergence, interference, and independent autogenetic processes"
Autogenetic processes??  Huh?
"overgeneralization"
"undergeneralization"
Over and under eh?  
Assuming the section isn't a joke, it's needs to be rewritten to actually make sense.  Otherwise it needs to be removed and soon. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.27.210.84 (talk • contribs) 19 May 2006, 18:40
:Well, it's actually correct in the sense of a shopping list of what might be covered in that section. But of course the technical jargon won't make much sense to the lay reader in this condensed form. I'm earmarking it and will try to work on it when I find the time. There's lots of interesting research on these questions, that much is for certain. Lukas (T.|@) 19:26, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Consequences on grammar - Nonsense or Vandalism

message: I was shocked to read: "Sociolinguistics may play a role in language death if the constructions of society fail to support linguistic diversity."  Sociolinguistics is a science that studies the relation of social attitudes and social behaviors to language.  I know of no way in which sociolinguistics "may play a role in language death" unless simply having more knowledge about how languages die actually contributes to their death.  To the contrary, sociolinguistic understanding is one of the sources of support for the kind of "awareness" that the article goes on to say is important to language maintenance, and sociolinguists are often involved in developing language policies expressly aimed at language maintenance.  Perhaps what the author meant to say was something like: "Language attitudes may play a role in laguage death if social institutions fail to support linguistic diversity".  I know of no sociolinguist who does not support linguistic diversity. Lemccbr 13:14, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sociolinguistics is not a cause 

message: I added a merge suggestion tag to add material from Killer language for several reasons:
*The term in not in popular use among academics. See these google results: linguistics "killer language" (about 600 hits)
**Compare that to: linguistics "language death" (about 57,000 hits)
*The essence of this definition of a killer language is 'a majority language that causes language death for a minority language'. The material in the article adds little to language death and possibly the sources can be merged and a mention of the term
*(Some academic speak ahead) The definition of a 'killer language' is unclear. It is defined as a language that 'kills' a mother tongue--which is a person's first language. In fact, language death is most common on the societal and not individual level: the process is typically that an immigrant or person in a colonized country speaks a native tongue and later generations choose to learn the new language instead. Converting mothertongue to something like 'the historical language of a group of people' and clarifying what is meant by 'at a cost' would fix this...though I think this would be best explained in the language death article. 
*AfD might be a better mechanism for this though I think the results would be about the same--adding a few cites or ideas from there to this article. Antonrojo 15:49, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you can merge it without going to AfD.  I don't see a problem with the merge.  Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 01:19, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge proposal 

message: almost a third of the external links are no longer opperational.  unless anyone wants to replace them with updated links, i'll delete.
Da Baron (talk) 05:27, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: External Links

message: Currently at this time, the world has about 3,500 languages and 10,000 some dialects spoken, a sudden decrease from 6,500 known languages and over 20,000 dialects about a century ago. By the year 2050, there will be only 500 languages in the world and perhaps 1,000 dialects. A tremendous drop in tribal, regional and national languages in favor of "lingua francas" such as English, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin Chinese and other "official" languages of countries' governments, in global academia, economics and mass media. 
The most controversial linguicide claim comes from the Occitan-speaking population of southern France, they accuse the French Republic government for over two centuries of aggressive, humiliating, nationalistic (to insist non-French speaking regions are disloyal people) and strict policies to destroy the Occitan language "the langue d'oc" with its subdialects (i.e. the Provencal language) and replacing them with the "official" French language or the "langue d'oil" originating in the Northern regions around Paris. Even to this day, the French republic was very slow and resilient to legally recognize and tolerate the use of regional "subdialect" languages like Occitan or Provencal in both regional and national government level. 
The biggest casualities of linguicide was in North American Indians and most Indigenous peoples of the Americas have over 90% ratio of extinct languages, the rest are endangered and only 20 known languages to have some limited official usage. In South America- Quechua and Aymara in Peru and Bolivia, Guarani in Paraguay, Mapuche in Chile and Amazonian languages in Brazil. In North America- about 60 languages in Mexico and 30 languages in Canada have over 10,000 known fluent speakers, although the U.S. has the Navajo, Lakota, Cherokee and Pueblo Indians languages to each have over 10,000 speakers; and about 15 languages spoken by Inuit, Aleuts and Alaska Natives used semi-regularly in villages and communities across the state of Alaska. 
Several hundreds of Native American languages have less than 100 speakers, most of them will become extinct when the last speaker of these languages dies whether or not their verbal or written language skills are recorded and preserved. The state governments in the U.S., provincial in Canada and the Mexican national government are taking drastic steps in protecting and promoting some few hundred total Native American languages, a reversal of former linguicidal policies and for Native Americans in the U.S., First Nations groups of Canada, or Indigenous peoples of Mexico to not lose an ancient part of their tribal heritage before it's gone forever. + 71.102.2.206 (talk) 01:17, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Language death policies continue worldwide

message: (...)A language that has reached such a reduced stage of use is generally considered moribund. 
 Once a language is no longer a native language - that is, if no children are being socialised
 into it as their primary language - the process of transmission is ended and the language
 itself will not survive past the current generation.
The latter for Latin is not true(1300 very vivid=not just "surviving" years!). The reason is that languages can be learned (= transmitted) at age far after childhood and that, given a good training in reading, listening, conversation and writing(e.g. by the Birkenkenbihl-method (c)), with a high level of fluency and even eloquence at reach. Reading needs texts - and there are many of them regarding Latin. Even if a full=perfect understanding of the semiotic world of the Romans, the Medieval times seems impossible, we can understand a wide range of their notions and therefor "learn their world" - we might not know the plants denounced by some words - so this small part of the Language is dead=not understandable - But the "rest"?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ūnus ē Latīnīs novīs (talk • contribs) 01:43, 20 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Types of language death" - a major error 

message: Are these extra rather funny names for language death important enough to deserve print in the lede and in bold? Seems humor like that can go in a footnote instead. -Stevertigo (t | c) 02:11, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: They're not humor just because you're unfamiliar with them and they sound funny to you.  They could move out of the lead, but they'd remain in bold per MOS:LINK, since they're attested terms that redirect to this page.  WP doesn't usually use footnotes for such things (no one reads them); we try to incorporate material into the main article body. That said, the concept of linguicide is not simply language extinction but intentional language extermination, and should be covered in its own section.  Glottophagy is the absorption of one language by another, so a) it also should not be in the lead, not being a synonym of language death, but a particular mechanism of it, and b) the concept and sources for it should be integrated into the article Language shift, and the term should redirect there. That article already covers glottophagy, but is doing is doing so without naming it and in a scattershot way (e.g. the entire section Language shift#Hungary is about repeat instances of glottophagy by the Hungarian language, and several other sections there involve it, but the process is not described in that article's lead).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  04:20, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Linguicide and glottophagy

message: Language death and Extinct language are an apparently accidental WP:CONTENTFORK of the exact same topic.  However, the latter contradicts the former: "Extinct languages are sometimes contrasted with dead languages, which are still known and used in special contexts in written form, but not as ordinary spoken languages for everyday communication", and it links to Language death as if it covered "dead languages" in this sense, like Latin, which it does not.  That use of "dead language" is a vernacular use, not a linguistic one; languages preserved for ritual and other specialized use are sociolects. (And that description of "dead-language" sociolects is wrong in other ways; they are frequently used in spoken, not just written, form.)
I propose merging the content of the articles, at the title Language extinction, and redirecting both original titles (and various other obvious terms like Dead language) to it, with Dead language going possible to a Language extinction#Dead languages subsection, if there is some need to preserve prose that addresses extinct languages themselves, as such, rather than the socio-linguistic process of their extinction.
As an illustration of why this pointless split is problematic, consider that probably 90+% of the time, anyone linking the word "extinct language" or "dead language" on WP intends that the reader go to the conceptual material at Language death, as the material presently at Extinct languages is about the languages as "things" unto themselves, and does not explain much of anything about language extinction. That article basically has no reason to exist, and its continued existence does little by divide content improvement efforts, confuse readers, and necessitate time-wasting coding like extinct language.
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  03:48, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Language death and extinct language are two distinct things with different literatures. Language death is a process and linguists study its causes and effects. Extinct languages are any language that is no longer spoken, including both languages that die and and languages that transform into daughter languages. I see no reason we shouldnt have articles on both topics.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 05:42, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I concur, they're different concepts. --Jotamar (talk) 18:09, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: This article about Language death is about a process. Extinct language is about those that have completed the process. It is more of a list. The two languages should both exist, but with links to each other.Pete unseth (talk) 19:38, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

text: A different question is that perhaps dead language should redirect to extinct languages and not here. --Jotamar (talk) 15:09, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed merger with [[Extinct language]] 

message: This graph, in the section "Types of language death", seems incomprehensible. It appears to be trying to be an Euler diagram, but the intersections of the circles make no sense—the graph shows that there are people who are both first language and second language learners of the language. I recommend that the image be removed, as it is confused and adds nothing to the article's content. Loraof (talk) 22:16, 10 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Incomprehensible graphic 

message: In order to make this article more referable for common research there may be more reliability if the information being presented was cited more often. An example includes the beginning to the type section, while there are citations later in the information there could possibly be more. The first part to this section would look more reliable with citation. Also consider creating a lead section to the subfield headers to better explain what is to come in the following information. Miranda.Baranchak (talk) 01:26, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 02:45, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Potential Revisions 

message: Removing it on the ground that it makes claims without citation and doesn't contain information that isn't elsewhere in the article.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Theycallmezeal (talk • contribs) 17:27, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Removing the section "Factors that promote language death"

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: and  redirect here, but there is no discussion of the topic at all. Hairy Dude (talk) 11:16, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Why don't you mend that yourself? --Jotamar (talk) 18:18, 22 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Linguicide 

message: This article contained a lot of superfluous internal links ranging from common languages, places, and even simple words like 'disease' and 'genocide'. These links don't help clarify anything in the article and such examples are specifically discouraged by MOS:OVERLINK. User @Bonewah seems to want to keep these in for some reason I don't understand. Rather than engaging in an edit war, I'm putting this up on the talk page for discussion. Should this version of the page stay, or should another option be chosen?
Megaman en m (talk) 21:22, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: There is more overlinking than I like to see. One prominent example is the paragraph containing revival of the Hebrew language, which is a useful link. The only other candidate for keeping there is liturgical language IMO. Just plain Bill (talk) 21:42, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I was mostly concerned with adding internal links to the Ainu, Sakhalin, Kuril languages i added here and you reverted here. At least those three are inarguably proper links per MOS:UNDERLINK as "Relevant connections to the subject of another article that will help readers understand the article more fully" being as they are dead or dying languages cited as examples of dead or dying languages in an article about language death. If you really think Catalan, Galician, Sardinian, Venetian are so commonly known that linking them is improper, i wont fight you, although i had never heard of any of them before reading this article.  So i reverted to the edit that contained the former and re-added the 6 year old ref improve template. Hopefully a skilled linguist can provide better references and remove this template. Bonewah (talk) 14:04, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Internal links 

message: — Assignment last updated by ElsaJK (talk) 09:18, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: ANTH473 INLG480 Living Languages

message: — Assignment last updated by JiaxunZhao (talk) 15:20, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: WR120

message: :
some of which overlap or even repeat each other.  I may do something about that soon. —Tamfang (talk) 04:31, 7 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  how many ways to die? 

message: I would like to flag the section on "Health consequences for Indigenous communities" as potentially misleading, bias and false (Wikipedia:Neutral point of view). It seems to read out as an opinion piece rather than actual fact, despite being seemingly well-sourced. There was an attempt to have it removed in 2022 with this edit with the user stating:
"This section of the article, aside from being misleading by using the term 'health' and the term 'mental health' interchangeably, is unrelated to the article. The section is about language loss which is a different topic in and of itself. Although language loss and assimilation may result in language death, this section does not belong in this article. Language death does is not a cause of poor mental health of indigenous communities, assimilation is a cause for both."
And then, shortly after the edit was reverted with this edit, with the user who reverted it stated:
"This section clearly mentions how language death is related to mental health consequences, it's well sourced too from what I see. Take it to the talk page if you want to discuss this further." I don't see any discussions on the talk page since that edit so I decided to start one here. 
Some points I would like to mention from looking into this so far with my own opinions:
* I feel like I agree with the first editor who removed the topic all together as it seems like a more probable cause for poor mental health in aboriginal communities would not be loss of language but rather lack of assimilation seems more likely. However, I do acknowledge that on Wikipedia we go by what the sources state, not our own personal opinions. 
* It feels like an opinion piece because in the topic there seems to be discussions on correlational facts, stating: "A study conducted on Aboriginal youth suicide rates in Canada found that Indigenous communities in which a majority of members speak the traditional language exhibit low suicide rates. Contrary, suicide rates were six times higher in groups where less than half of its members communicate in their ancestral language" but this could very well be a case of correlation, not causation. Which is partially why it feels like an opinion piece. The topic even ends with "Thus, language death can have severe effects on health." as if the article is concluding a opinionated argument, rather than stating a fact.
* Most of the sources linked here are in relation to Australian Aboriginal people, rather than global aboriginal people, so it seems disingenuous to discuss most of the topic on aboriginal people as a whole, rather than mostly Australian Aboriginal people. Each of these communities face different struggles depending on their geographical location and what they have been subjected to historically and currently.
* Having a looking through source 19 "Working Together: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mental Health and Wellbeing Principles and Practices" I couldn't find anything at all to back up what is stated in the article in relation to the source. It would be good if the editor referenced the actual pages being sourced. The user states "For Aboriginal communities in Australia, language loss, as part of broad colonial attempts at culturicide" as if culturicide is still on-going within Australia - this makes the article feel like the user was very politically motivated/bias.
That's everything I have for now. I will add a  NPOV dispute to the top of the section. Let's get a discussion going in here 🙂 HopefulLuck (talk) 05:00, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: The NPOV dispute banner has been removed and the section has been renamed and updated. It is much shorter and more concise. Some sources have been removed as well as they didn't seem important. If further changes should be made please add to this discussion thank you 🙂 HopefulLuck (talk) 11:20, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Health consequences for Indigenous communities" section is potentially misleading/bias