Livonian, a Finnic language spoken in Latvia, went without a native speaker for only 7 years. The last speaker died in 2013 but in 2020, the child of two revitalization activists is now the sole L1 speaker
Ok, I really like this story but it sounds like the first new speaker was a child of crazy scientists using them for an experiment. Like I can imagine them procreating only because adoption is more difficult. Then, after years of experiments, they both said something like "Finally we were able to produce the first L1 speaker"
I met him in person in Latvia and I learned some Livonian there. He speaks other languages as well. He's a really nice guy doing his best to revitalise Livonian.
Aren't you forgetting another classical language used as a liturgical language in the Christian world and whose influence into the Western civilization (derived from its role as the official language of the Roman Empire) simply cannot be understated? Yes, I am speaking about Koine Greek.
Koine Greek is technically alive because if you speak Koine Greek to a modern Greek person, you will be able to go along on communication, except that there may be some slow understanding
@@ShankarSivarajan Latin is a Indo-European Language, used in the Roman Empire and the Roman Chatholic Church. Not all languages are named after their English places, since... English didn't even existed back in the Roman Empire days. This is why when talking about dead languages still being used we expected Latin to come up, but it never did lol.
While technically not extinct (although two of the three main varieties are fully extinct), I'm proud that my university is taking even a small part in the revival of the Ainu language. It has AFAIK the only university Ainu language course outside of Japan. I took it as a minor, it was very interesting
@@Idkpleasejustletmechangeit well for one, the university has always had a close connection to Japan and East Asia in general, but the Ainu course is pretty much all the professor's doing. He's a linguist who specializes in Ainu and Nivkh, he came back from Hokkaido in I think 2019
True story: when Manx was officially declared a dead language by UNESCO in the early 2000s, a group of schoolchildren at a Manx-speaking school wrote letters to UNESCO in Manx, asking them: "If Manx is a dead language, then what language are we writing in?"
Genius. I mean it's a little inaccurate because a language can be spoken and written despite being "dead", as "dead" only means "no *native* speaker" (that important Christian language he keeps talking about in the video is a perfect example of that). But it's genius nonetheless.
@@dragskcinnay3184 It is, isn't it? Although, an interesting thing has developed since then: there are now children on the Isle of Man (whose parents had attended these Manx schools) who now speak Manx as their first language!
Most of us in the Arab World (Gen Z and Millennials) grew up watching cartoons which are mainly dubbed into Standard Arabic so in my case I was actually learning it ALONGSIDE my dialect albeit with a slower rate. I remember uttering some Standard Arabic when I was like... 3yo or something (even before going to school!) resulting in the weird situation where you learn Classical Arabic from SpongeBob
Australian linguist Jakelin Troy advocates using the term 'sleeping' instead of 'dead' for Australia's indigenous languages for exactly the reasons you explain at the end of this video - 'dead' is far too final a word, and really hurts the public image of revival and revitalisation.
In context of Australia, most of over 9000 native languages are lost to the ages anyway, so the term "sleeping" is promoted just so Aussies could feel better about themselves.
www.youtube.com/@spinningabetteryarndecolon461 There's also this UA-cam series called "Spinning a Better Yarn" talking about how we should rethink our understanding and treatment of Aboriginal languages.
I think that could work if we name 'dead' just the languages that are lost to time (i.e. not only no speakers, but also no written sources that you could use to reconstruct it)
'sleeping' is also used for some of Canada's indigenous languages. I've seen it used in articles about revitalizing First Nations languages in British Columbia
@@ChildrenOfRadiation What are you yapping about? 9000 languages? More than the entire world today? There were a couple hundred. Most of those have been lost, but many survive, and you spit in the face of the countless good people working to support and revive them - some of them friends of mine - by pretending their work means nothing and is done only to comfort guilty Aussies. Shame on you.
Etruscan is not a dead language and calling it such is a lie fabricated by Joseph Mayton, Etruscan is actually still spoken in Italy as the primary vernacular. My source? Joseph Mayton.
@@dunkleosteusterrelli Engineered and assembled by a human being, initially inanimate, then came to life. If the existence of native speakers is what makes a language "alive" to us, that is what happened to Esperanto (I think it is arguably more alive than Frankenstein's monster, though)
That point you made about Coptic possibly having some remaining habitual speakers can probably be applied to MSA as well. I've always found it crazy that the official language of 20ish countries apparently has ZERO native speakers. I would've thought that at least some people would've tried to raise their children in it, especially considering the prestige it carries.
Virtually no one in those countries use MSA at home, it's considered *extremely* formal. That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if some children grew up learning both the colloquial Arabic dialect of their region alongside the formal MSA. MSA isn't really its own language, just a standard dialect used in settings where informal/slang speech would be inappropriate.
I wouldn’t say it has zero native speakers considering no one learn it we just grew up able to understand it, i remember since i grew up watching tv in MSA and understanding everything
Its literally extremely impractical and sounds goofy and local "dialects" more like languages if we are honest are much more preferred and even languages like spanish, french and English are preferred over the essentially useless msa taught in school
Well I personally grew up with both Tunisian Arabic and MSA in a way. TV stations used to put anime shows that were dubbed with MSA and I used to watch them all the time as a kid. I also used to read a lot both irl and online and as most of that material was in MSA I found myself speaking a hybrid of my dialect and MSA as a child (which most people found to be extremely strange). I had to "re-learn" my dialect afterwards but to this day people say I have a hint of Fusha in my speech. I remember being able to easily guess tenses and vowel endings as a kid without even knowing the rules while most of my classmates struggled with that so I suppose my upbringing might have had something to do with that. That aside, the prestige MSA carries is entirely formal in nature, its perception as "the language of writing" means it sounds unnatural to the ears of people when spoken on an everyday basis. I suppose that might have played a role in no one ever calling for its adoption as a main spoken language (which ironically helped preserve Arabic dialects, to this day it isn't that hard to not just guess someone's country but sometimes even village just from their dialect).
I honestly hope Coptic is revived purely for linguistics-nerd reasons. Having a direct descendent of the language of Ancient Egypt still being spoken today would be super cool, and the alphabet is just wonderful. Even without a revitalisation, the fact it still exists as a liturgical language at all is great
If coptic were revived then there should be an attempt at reviving its predecessor, demotic. Only difference between the two is mainly the script and a few loan words from greek
@@ZOMBIEo07 I can only see a Coptic revival happening now in some other place, like a remote corner of South America with a large group of refugees/settlers from Egypt.
The case for Hebrew is quite complicated as well, because all the time it was dead it was used as a liturgical language, and at least since the middle ages it was used for poetry as well. The transition that happened at the end of the 19th century mostly added vocabulary, and allowed it to be used ask a language for commerce, followed by it getting L1 speakers and becoming fully revitalised.
The Catholic church has a department responsible for managing vocabulary updates for Latin, as it's still an important language for church documents. You can't tell people "No looking at smut on the internet" without 'interrēte.'
I guess it's like Latin if people started speaking it on a daily basis again (eventually producing L1 speakers), in Italy or something. It's pretty much alive as a liturgical language (even a bit outside the church), even though it severely lost influence as a cultural language since the Middle Ages (due to Reformation and especially the advent of nationalism). But there once was lots of poetry as well, and the language dominated science for quite some time (it arguably still has considerable influence).
I feel like Hebrew deserved more than a passing mention, as it is perhaps the best example of a revived language: a language that had 0 native speakers for nearly 2,000 years, used only for liturgical purposes that today has millions of native speakers and is the main language of an entire country
It was used as much as the other "dead" languages mentioned. And besides, the video trolled us about Latin, and called MSA, a prominent language in the Arab world "dead"...
@@adrianblake8876It is not prominent though. It is only used in extremely formal situations and usually only on paper or news. But nobody actually speaks it in their daily life, nobody.
@@LeegallyBliindLOL Being used in formal situations and appearing in every newspaper is quite prominent IMO... There's a circulating opinion that "Hebrew wasn't dead because people wrote literature in it, used it in liturgical situations, and as a lingua franca if two Jews from different backgrounds happened to meet" which is almost how MSA is used today...
@@adrianblake8876 You really wanna compare a few hundred news outlets a day to the millions of conversations people have on the daily, the language they think in? That's like saying I use Portuguese prominently just because I greet my Portuguese friends once a day.
Ita, iocus me irritat haha. Sed sci, lingua Latina vivit! Multi homines Latine loqui possunt. Quaere Scorpio Martianus in _UA-cam_, si Latine audire vis.
As a Coptic person working to become more fluent in my own ancestral and liturgical language I hope we one day find success 🙏🏼 Coptic did die out as a non liturgical tongue in the 17th century but revival efforts in the late 19th century happened and yes I can confirm at least two families do speak it thanks to this revival, it is also taught to kids in a village in Luxor Egypt called Al Zayniyyah who learn both Coptic and Arabic growing up. Ofc there’s Copts everywhere trying to learn it independently too we’re in a new era where we might see another revival
I investigated the claims of native Coptic speakers today and as far as I could tell, a village near Luxor is teaching kids the language as a second language, that's it. Now that is unusual indeed, as most Copts don't really learn the language (aside from a few words and phrases) with the exception of the clergy (who are already grown ups by then). After all, even church services are mostly conducted in Arabic today and most church material has been produced in Arabic for the last thousand years. I suspect people picked up on the story of this attempt at teaching kids the language at school and misunderstood it to be the language still having native speakers. ua-cam.com/video/Ggnpx5ZGzFc/v-deo.htmlsi=ATW401ET9rr5cipt This is a link about the story. The village's name is Ziniya, and as the lady in the middle of the video says, some families in the village are sending their kids to church so thy can learn writing in Coptic as well as basic phrases and expressions in Coptic.
@@andrewternet8370 Church services are equally divided between Coptic (mainly in hymns), Classical Arabic (mainly when the bible is being read) and Egyptian Arabic (mainly in the sermon). There are also Classical Arabic hymns, and in some rare occasions some priests conduct the whole church service in Coptic, but generally the three languages are used. As far as I know, fluency in Coptic isn't really common even among the clergy, cantors are usually able to read the language and have a grasp of the basics, but I wouldn't really call that fluency.
@andrewternet8370 With journey into Orthodoxy I've actually went to an Coptic Church first and they've performed their entire liturgy in Arabic and English.
One case I CAN imagine because I know somebody like this: a nonspeaking Autistic child whose favourite place is the Coptic Divine Liturgy and who picks up the words by repetition, chanting, and the fact that it’s formulaic and standardized. I speak English with a Brooklyn Jewish accent because an NPR broadcaster in my area had one, for quite similar reasons, and am thus a rare example of an L1 English speaker with an accent totally different from my parents.
I thought Coptic was still alive after the Rosetta stone was discovered? Champollion somehow discovered a link between the stone inscription and the Coptic Church language and used that to decipher the hieroglyphs.
What about the revival of Wiradjuri in NSW, an Aboriginal language which had (almost) died out completely, but is now being revived, along with quite a number of other Aboriginal languages.
I read somewhere very recently that, according to the latest census, 35 households in Cowra (NSW) report using an Aboriginal language (probably Wiradjuri) in the home.
The defunct article shown at 6:31 is availible on the Wayback Machine. In it, it was said that there were 4 families that spoke Coptic, with the language having around 300 (native) speakers. They interviewed Titti Mouris - a housewife & native speaker of Coptic -, where she "exposed how much she loved this language, and the reasons why they use this language until now".
I am thinking about Classical Chinese here. Nobody speaks Classical Chinese as their native language, but if I understand correctly, its written form is widely taught, if not mandatory, at school in China, Taiwan, and South Korea continuously for thousands of years.
@@johnlastname8752 The earlier stage of French is old French. French is not the only language that came from Latin. Besides, I wrote "I'm not sure", I'm not saying it can't possibly be that way.
@@J.o.s.h.u.a. sorry if my comment came off as aggressive. The time distance between Classical Chinese and modern day Chinese (Mandarin) is comparable to Latin and French, and the closest modern language to Classical Chinese vocabulary and phonology is actually Cantonese.
I feel like Hebrew deserved a bit more attention, since it's by far the most successful revitalisation of a previously dead/dormant language. I mean, no matter how many people learn and use Manx we're probably not going to get to the point where somebody can live comfortably as a monolingual Manx speaker for their entire life. Hebrew should be the example anyone looking to revitalise a language should look towards.
I've been researching the Ainu language of Hokkaidō recently, and it frustrates me seeing people say it's "dead." It's true that it's thought that no true native speakers of Ainu exist anymore, but I've interacted with the Ainu community of Hokkaidō, and I've seen how they are holding on to their language through storytelling, songs, ceremony etc. In this sense, the Ainu language is something like a liturgical language, although not one with a huge community that is holding on to it. It's still still very much at risk of disappearing, as Ainu people face prejudice and pressure to just be like any other "normal" Japanese people, but even so, it's not exactly "dead" in the sense of its demise is final and irreversible, and insinuating otherwise ignores the agency and efforts of the very real community that cherishes it.
Same for regional languages, often times It'll be paraded the language is dead and not worth learning by common media and It's really disturbing to see modern day efforts be shushed or said useless by people... It'd be so cool to have space to practice these more. I'd love more niche translations so you can enjoy media in your small tongues to keep It up and stay fluent c:
Cool video. Just wanted to let you know that at 2:06 the first stock image of Hebrew text (black on white paper) contains something slightly political. (Probably taken from an editorial)
@@LincolnDWard very unclear what it says since the beginning and ends of the lines/sentences are cut off. ... Lamest... ... Lamest ever, [alm]... ...i pushed, the zionist left... ... The labor party... ... Three members of Kneset...
I think technology is a double edged sword for smaller languages because mass communication contributes to them going extinct, but we are also recording the phonology of these languages on websites like UA-cam and Forvo. Practical recording devices are like 100 years old, and it's been a decade since a lot of these communities even got smart phones. I think in the future there will be a lot more languages on life support, but maybe some day no languages will fully die.
@@Dwarfplayer Only issue there being that all it takes is 1 kid not doing the same to their children and the line can be irreparably snapped. Arguably it is impractical to keep certain languages around, I am not saying we should let them die, but in terms of raw objective practicality, it would be a lot easier to just let the linguistic osmosis happen and let the lingua franca take over. And as more and more of those kids break the line, the easier it becomes for others to do the same, especially since most languages that are in this situation are not exactly going to be common or supported online, which is an increasingly major part of our lives. If you are going to have to learn the lingua franca anyway, why bother with the other language when everyone will just speak the lingua franca too? Again, I do want to note, I by no means think this is a good thing. I myself am trying to repair the line that was broken between me and my great-grandparents over the years, I speak neither of the languages my 2 immigrant great-grandparents spoke, even though one of which is still in (admittedly very minor) active use where I live. But that effort is tedious, slow and sometimes almost impossible due to a lack of good and easily accessible sources. I wouldn't exactly have much issue trying to learn French or German is my point, smaller languages lack that support and so the lines are harder to repair by later generations without a wider movement, which is really only practical in the national homeland and rarely helps those like me reaching back to people who moved away from said homeland.
@@juliabarrow-hemmings6624 There comes a point when language preservation efforts start to feel more like a living museum than anything of practical value.
Current LLM revolution may be just what smaller languages need to be saved. language has to continue being modern to be appealing to next generation, the bigger the usage of a language the more "modern" it is. That's why language of a colony always struggles to compete with a language of a metropoly. But what if you had a tool that allows for a near instantaneous translation of a piece of media into whatever language you need? Suddenly your language is always "modern and interesting" purely because you have access to most (except songs and poetry) modern media
@@Poctyk I mean, you just have to ignore how crap LLMs are and that we've been able to do the same thing with simple databases for years now. In addition, LLMs require an *obscene* amount of data input to be developed, smaller languages have less available data for this process so making said LLM would still require a lot of effort in the form of collecting language data from living speakers... At which point you lose the entire benefit of the LLM and may as well input that data into a simple database and algorithm Note that LLMs do have a place, midsized languages can more easily be served by them as they will have a significant enough amount of available data while still possibly going under the radar. These results will almost always need to be altered by a human later on though, we can barely get English LLMs to work properly, let alone something with literal thousands of terabytes less data.
@@Dwarfplayer This is the only reply to my comment I have seen so I assume as such if you made another, if you are refering to the original comment, it is still there for me.
Reminds me of a friend of mine who is obsessed with his tribe language and can't stop talking about all the efforts done to initiate a writing system, it's called fur language spoken in the some Darfur states of sudan
"fur" sounds like it's the language of furries... Then again, there's Tigre, an Ethiopian language, whose name sounds like it's the language of tigers; and Kannada, a language native to India rather than Canada...
I remember hearing about Darfur on the news a lot as a kid in the early 2000s. Region is pronounced more like “Dar-foor” and language is pronounced “Foor.” :)
I live on a remote Swedish island and I can’t stress enough how I want Gutnish to re emerge onto the scene. I think I’m gonna send a letter to our prime minister about this
I am a Mandaean, and our Mandaic language is an ancient Mesopotamian language that is often referred to as an Southeastern Aramaic dialect. Unfortunately, it is currently facing the threat of extinction. As part of the new generation, we are making significant efforts to preserve and revitalize our language. 😓
Certainly, I work with some Syriac speakers friends. They are always kind enough to assist me. We are making an effort to preserve the ancient Mesopotamian languages.
I think you missed a very important liturgical language that has been influencing one of the major world religions in a significant way and is still used by monastics for example. It is often used for recitation at ceremonies and also for sermons by the clergy of a very specific, rather traditional branch. The variety of texts that are preserved keep inspiring people all around the world and the majestic sound of the language often has something soothing and uplifting. I was baffled by the fact that such an influential language for a not so insignificant part of the earth went simply unnoticed during the video... I am talking about Pali and Theravada Buddhism, of course!
Kind of disappointed that there wasn't any mention of the many indigenous languages that have either been successfully revitalized or are being preserved. My native Cape Cod has a school that teaches reconstructed Massachusset (the language), & there are linguists all over the Americas, Africa, Oceania, & parts of Asia working to preserve & revitalize languages that have been threatened by colonialism. Those seem like relevant points of reference to omit.
seems like most countries promote just one centralized language. when one language is promoted, then dialects or other languages are suppressed as an indirect effect
It's unfortunate but it is the most convenient way of running countries. It's more expensive to promote many languages (but some, like France, just suppress them)
In case of Arabic, diglossia is a blissing. Imagine not having a higher register what would be the centralized dialect? Even within one country there are more than one. Egypt have like 2-3 at minimum. S.Arabia have at least 5 not counting all the accents. The higher register is for everyone. No one can claim it to themselves it is for Christian Arabs as well as Muslims. And for Chadians as much as for Yemenites. My only complaint is how spoken varieties are neglected. Like we don't have a concise and agreed upon classification for them. That map is good enough but not really. Let alone enough resources for learners. Sometimes people just want to speak to natives and they'll be faced with a crucial lack of learning materials.
@@sasino4569 In the case of Arabic, it was the central Imperialistic language that killed of (or severely reduced the prominence of) the many native languages in the MENA: Aramaic, Berber, Punic (a sister language to Hebrew spoken in Tunisia) and Coptic mentioned in the video... The Persians and the Kurds were lucky to have kept their original languages unscathed...
@@adrianblake8876 That's the nature of languages. It's perfectly normal for languages to evolve and change. And it's perfectly normal for languages to die out and new languages to be reborn. My only issue is that some people try to push a narrative that Arab imperialists tried to eliminate these local languages. But what we know is that these languages was spoken for centuries after the Arab conquests ended, and was gone during the Ottomans time. As for berber languages, they are still spoken today by the millions. Maybe Farsi was the exception but it still fought off and survived.
@@sasino4569 This isn't normal evolution and change, it's one language suppressing other languages. Not a case unique to Arabic by any chance, Florentine Italian also suppressed the many languages of Italy, and it's hard to say whether it was intentional or not. Even if it was intentional, it was probably just encouraging Arabic, not by persecution (although they did forcibly convert them to Islam...)
As a Coptic Egyptian myself who learns Coptic in deacon school, i can say that one of my biggest dreams is the revival / revitalisation of coptic and i absolutely love how you shed some light on it and your perfect explanation
i'd really love to see coptic revived, i'm a second generation Egyptian in Australia and would love to show people more of my actual heritage instead of just the ancient stuff or the post-arab stuff
I was thinking about Old Javanese, a language that's not really used "liturgically" (but its primary texts are philosophical in nature), but is extensively used in performance art (i.e., dance and drama), specifically wayang kulit shadow plays and gambuh dance drama in Bali, *not* the original home of Old Javanese - which would be next door in east Java. Would've been cool if that were mentioned.
I suppose Cymraeg (Welsh) didn't quite die out (Thankfully) but only due to the Nationalist Revitalisation Efforts in the mid to late 60's, now it seems to be in a fairly healthy state about the same as Irish Gaelic from what I know. Sad that it seems the same conservation efforts haven't been made for Scots and Scottish Gaelic
To be fair, almost all the languages that are in the limbo of dead/alive are already doomed if we just let time decide to eventually end them. I’m talking to you France and Italy
we study Latin for 5 years in high school almost universally here, the way it's taught makes it inevitable that nobody will ever ever use it or remember it outside of high school but that's an issue with our education system not with us "letting Latin die"
@@lorefox201 I meant the comment more for actual endangered languages than to the languages used officially in a religious matter, there’s literally no way Latin or standard Arabic stops being used unless the religion stops existing altogether 😅
@@lorefox201I think they mean more stuff like Occitan, the regional languages in these countries which are dead, endangered, or on process of being revived.
@@thelakeman2538I thought they were talking about how French and Italian are monitored by their respective governments and not allowed to evolve naturally
I had a friend in Danbury, Connecticut, who taught Latin at the college level. While he was not a native Latin speaker, he and his second wife used Latin at home and so their children were native speakers, at least until they went to school and had to speak English.
I’d love to see a list of interesting revived languages and how the revival occurred. A Czech manager of mine described how Czech was revived to me. Hebrew is an obvious example. I’ve seen several comments here talking about many other interesting examples.
My understanding is the Czech revival was primarily of the language as a literary one. Under the Holy Roman and later Austro Hungarian Empires, German became the language of education and the aristocracy. As a result, Czech went into decline, particularly in writing. Many peasants still spoke it though
@@monkeykingeater Yet it was estimated that if nothing would be done, last native speaker would die in middle or second half of 19th century. So the Czech language was on verge of extinction back then, not to mention that the form of the language that was used by peasants was bit strange, at least in form that was preserved in print, certainly strange to anybody that uses current version of Czech. As current version of "high" Czech was in part reconstructed based on language used in Bible of Kralice that was printed in late 16th century and thus possibly using some high form of the language spoken back than and thus perhaps even older than late 16th century. Now is rewriting language rules based on several centuries old book(s) considered as language necromancy?
@@monkeykingeaterit is important to know, that it was Austrian German that influenced Czech so havily, not Standard German. By the 19th century the Czech aristocracy, even the ones of pure slavic origin, basically spoke Viennese German. Now Viennese German is dying out and the last remnants will survive in vernacular Czech and Hungarian.
@@MrToradragon I can agree that czech was in a bad linguistic spot and had problems of being used by middle and upper classes in Czechia, but it was not "on verge of extiniction". That makes it sound like there was barely less than 10 000 people left speaking it, which is untrue
Both Yurok & Hawaiian come to mind. Yurok is actively undergoing a language revival akin to what Hawaii went through in the late 80's; however, both revivals are happening with an academic, missionary-penned version of the language that is markedly different to how people spoke in the past. This disconnect is fascinating from a linguistic standpoint, but I don't know if a term exists for it or not. It's like Americans learning Anglo-Saxon from sources written from Chinese scholars.
You can get a bit of an idea with other Algonquian languages that still have native speakers, but, sadly, I think the only ones left are Anishinaabeg & Cree. Better, if you can find old recordings of Native speakers speaking their language.
@@MrChristianDT Interestingly, the Niihau dialect is still alive & a wonderful representation of what Hawaiian looked like before missionaries mangled their language by fusing consonents & manipulating the grammar, but Yurok, although an Algic language, has no real modern surviving counterparts to compare to because of how isolated/distant they are from other Algonquian languages. Even Wiyot really isn't that close to Yurok linguistically, but I think Aboriginal languages are the closest non-American examples I can think of for this same phenomenon in other continents.
@@MrChristianDT huh? I'm pretty sure mi'gmawi'simg is also alive and well? There are a lot of active language revitalization efforts underway for indigenous languages in Canada especially with Algonquin family languages in the east
@@S3lkie-GutzI know several of them still have a few Native speakers. Off the top of my head, I think the two I brought up were the only two that were currently doing well. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
i am an egyptian coptic deacon(the guys in the white and red clothes), that although nobody in the coptic christian community uses coptic as their day-to-day language its used liturgically, (like other deacons)i've memorised a bunch of hymns in coptic, coptic is somewhat similar to english, because coptic was heavily influenced by greek. infact, most words that are similar to their english counterpart are stuff that relate to christianity and religion in general.
Endangered languages like Manchu and Quechua fascinate me maybe more than dead languages. But there is definitely something mysterious and striking about languages like Minoan and Etruscan that we know were once widely spoken and that have not been spoken for thousands of years, which were already dead when the "great ancient civilizations" that spoke other now-dead languages were thriving, and which were just as mysterious then as they are now. Edit: Quechua, not quenya... had lotr on the brain
Speaking as somebody who has visited the Andes, I would call Quechua 'potentially vulnerable' but it still flourishes in all rural areas. The issue is it is a very difficult language so measures need to be put in place if it ever starts to be replaced with Spanish.
1:19 I'd like to add that not only was there economic pressure that leads to these things but usually also some social pressure. I'm not sure for Manx but for the Irish and Scottish celtic languages people weren't allowed to speak them and were banned from being educated in them
Egyptian here. Well coptic isn't completly dead because it has influinced egyptian arabic alot in grammer and vocab And some of the phonetics Like I once looked at coptic grammer and discoverd that egyptian arabic has alot of simmlerties I found it easier to understand then standerd arabic which is mind bogling, so in the end there is some hope for coptic to be revived because alot of its pieces still exist in egyptian arabic
Great video! I have to make a small correction however. At 2:50 you say that Church Slavonic is a liturgical language for Eastern Orthodoxy. It might be better to say it is a language used in some of the Orthodox churches. Not all of them use it and there isn’t one Eastern Orthodox Church but literally dozens of them. At 3:20 the text on your slide says that Church Slavonic is about 2000 years old and that Sanskrit is approximately 5000 years old. (New) Church Slavonic has a few varieties, but they all are a representation of old South Slavic dialects from around the 9th to 11th centuries CE. Old Church Slavonic, the language that New Church Slavonic comes from, was the first Slavic literary language, and was spoken at that time. Sanskrit that we now know as the Vedic Sanskrit, after the oldest and most conservative ancient Indian religious hymns, was spoken about 1500 to 600 BCE, not 5000 years ago (which fits more into when the Proto-Indo-European was spoken, or at least the non-Anatolian dialect continuum).
sorry that was unclear, the bit at 3:20 is referring to the age of the religions not the age of the languages. and i should probably have been more precise with eastern orthodoxy as well lol
Gonn meur ras a’th gwydheo splann! “People know scraps of languages” - a very astute observation by you. When Cornish went into eclipse,during most of the 19th century, there were no remaining fluent speakers but …There were plenty of folk who knew songs or rhymes or who still counted in the language. So, you are right to challenge our definition of when a language is dead. Keslowena yn hwir!😃
The language that you can't quite remember is probably Classical Edessan Syriac which is the liturgical language of the Syriac Orthodox Church. The Aramaic Peshitta is entirely written in the language (Biblical Scriptures). I have spent the past 10 years working on projects to keep the liturgical language alive. My wife and I even compiled a three-volume Classical Syriac - English Dictionary of over 2000 pages which was published at the beginning of 2023. So, there are those who are working to popularize and preserve these liturgical languages and, thus, revive and revitalize them. The majority of Syriac Orthodox Christians today have at least a working knowledge of the language and I worked with several Syriac Orthodox Churches in order to compile the needed material for my three-volume Dictionary.
I speak an endangered language Syloti which is widely viewed as a so called 'low language' and is subjected to diglossia vernacularism. Bengali is given more prevalence. The script is technically near extinction. However, I am proud to be actively working to bring back the language in my tongue with native words and use th script in a different contexts.
As you say, _fuṣḥā_ is obviously not a dead language - but I'd describe it as a language of literacy. And the relationship between Classical Arabic (CA) and Mosern Standard Arabic (MSA) is really one of register, not distinction between languages. CA is now a (mostly) religious or literary register of _fuṣḥā,_ while MSA is a more day-to-day register of the language.
I think there'll always be a degree of ambiguity with such designations (a langauge being dead or dormant), like for example Sanskrit technically does get thousands of people claiming it to be their L1 in every Indian census but that number has big fluctuations every census, and even in the supposedly sanskrit speaking places few people actually use it in their day to day conversations, so there probably could be some actual L1 speakers around, but for all intents and purposes the language is dead or maybe dormant at best, similar to what I'd say for latin. Extinction on the other hand is pretty final, not all languages enjoy the luxury of being well documented, and having strong cultural, religious or political reasons to continue their usage.
Interesting! Coptic friends told me some families in Egypt speak Coptic in the house. Didn’t even seem like anything special. I didn’t realize it was thought to be so rare. That’s really cool.
4:58 Love how you described Copts as residing in Egypt instead of doing something more accurate and calling them EGYPTIANS , the actual ethnic group whose culture and language are directly descended from Ancient Egypt despite constant Arabic persecution .
Hebrew survived as a liturgical language but was dead as in it had no native speakers for over 1000 years probably. I also wonder how many Jews before the establishment of Israel spoke it. But now, there are millions of people who only speak Hebrew!
Hoping that Cajun French doesn’t actually die out…although it may be too late :( most of the people I know (myself included) use some words colloquially or study it academically but the last time I heard someone actually speaking in Cajun French was my maw maw when I was a little kid.
I do think there is a meaningful difference between "dead" and "alive" languages, because dead things don't change. A catholic priest who studied Latin for years and used it in his day to day life for decades might have a good sense of the rules, but he (like every priest before and after him) got those rules from ancient texts that are (sometimes literally) set in stone.
But even that is not black and white. In the Middle Ages, Latin was only used as a second language, but it still changed and evolved in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. That stopped only with the Renaissance (which tried to eradicate all evolution since Cicero or so), and the switch to modern languages in all areas except some very specific uses in the Catholic church. Nowadays, it is as you describe, but "dead" languages can still evolve if they are used actively.
@@varana Your example works with that thought, too. A revived Latin was evolving throughout the middle ages, and then that "evolved Latin" died again. And people don't want to use an evolved stage, when they have two dead languages in front of them, of course they want the "real deal". (Also I don't mean to say that only native speakers can play a part in language change, of course they can also evolve a language, especially when there are no native speakers to determine what is "right" or "wrong")
@@Саша-о8г7в But medieval Latin was not "revived". The "official" prestige version of Latin just evolved slower than the spoken form. In everyday conversation, people spoke varieties of Latin that we call the early forms of the Romance languages. The written form evolved as well but not as fast. In the Renaissance, scholars didn't want to revive Latin - the language was perfectly fine and widely spoken as a second language. They wanted to "prune" it of the medieval "impurities" - as if someone started to get rid of all Romance words in English.
4:04 it's not just new vocab for new concepts, msa and classical arabic also differ slightly in syntax, speech patterns, exclamations/interjections, and in how common certain words are! not so much that they're different dialects, but you can definitely hear the difference if you've learned either, to the point that you can hear people switch between them in the same sentence because their tone changes. i'd say it's comparable to different accents. also, fun fact, a lot of native arabic speakers will combine their native dialect with msa when speaking semi-formally (i.e. a news anchor wouldn't, but an expert guest/interviewee might) so they'll use msa vocab, syntax, grammar, etc but with regional pronounciation, ex. an egyptian would be speaking msa correctly but still change j to g and th to z as they would in their dialect.
this is very common for standard language practices, it's very similar in Germany, where a Bavarian will speak Standard German on a news show or in a company meeting, but will still keep their Bavarian pronunciation (even though they're not speaking the Bavarian language fully).
This is a great video. Dead languages and their corresponding revival efforts have always fascinated me; I've read a lot into the revitalisation efforts of Livonian and Cornish, for instance. I think the suppression of any language is a bad thing, as when a language dies a culture dies with it. Here's to hoping those languages that have either faded naturally or been suppressed can one day make full comebacks if people are interested in speaking them. As an aside, I like that you refuse to mention Latin by name throughout this video. Latin steals all the press from other dead languages and that has always frustrated me a little bit.
I wish we would define native language as that language which a person is most comfortable with. My parents language is German. I grew up with it. Yet I am much more comfortable with English, simply because I speak it every single day. Whereas I speak only German when absolutely required, and am getting worse at it.
A person can be considered medically dead, but be revived using CPR. But we don't go around calling that person undead. Sounds like manx is a bit similar.
Old Church Slavic is still close enough to modern Slavic languages to be understandable. It’s actually a way that speakers of different modern languages can kind of shift between each other. Almost like a really really old dialect.
Add to that the languages of several aboriginal and indigenous peoples that were destroyed during the colonial era (1600-2000 CE). Many of them are being revived, including in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand.
Some people still use coptic in normal use but its in parallel with egyptian arabic and their fluency is actually quite variable depending on their level of exposure
The revival process discriminates whether the language is supposed to go on as a literary, clerical, academic (uniform and true to source) language or whether instead to build a more comprehensive language based on the primary language which accommodates new vocabulary and general usage in the 21st century, as well as useful simplifications. The (at first) academic revival of Old Prussian then led to various standards of Prussian being proposed. Ultimately a mixture made the cut and missing words were introduced by cross-referencing from neighbouring languages or introducing loan words. This is how Nawaprūsiskan came into existence which for the most part remains mutually intelligible with the original language and meanwhile made the jump into the modern era. The Prussian language has a leg up on some other language revival movements as the archaic Indo-European features of the language and it being condensed to the minimum, means that it is not difficult and simple to learn. A dozen children have been raised in the new language too. Ultimately with language revival one should strongly consider if to stay true to source or not. A "living" language naturally progresses and as such any full revival has to take into account the consequence that from that moment on the language will once again change over time as its speakers see fit.
2:47 Aside from religious purposes, CA can also provide you with rich history of literature and poetry (including pre-Islamic poetry) so it has much more to offer even for a non-muslim speaker. 4:00 the differences between MSA and CA are much greater than simply an "added vocab". MSA first appeared as a language of literal translations of European languages a couple of centuries ago. So even tho it was based in CA, it is still heavily affected by English especially in its calqued usages, style and nuances. When it comes to usages, it deviates from CA (and even spoken varieties) the most. Not to mention the extremely simplified grammar and morphology and the tons of words erased from it. Distinction between MSA and CA is none-existing for most speakers. Maybe because most people are not proficient in any.
One im very passionate about is Wampanoag, since I’m from Massachusetts and a distant relative of mine is Wampanoag. It went extinct many years ago but a linguist named Jessie Little-Doe Baird began the revitalization process, as she was a Wampanoag linguist who went to MIT!! She’s honestly the reason I became so interested in linguistics in the first place. Now Wampanoag is a second language of hundreds in the native community, and a first language to some young children who were brought up learning it with resources starting from childhood. It’s all very beautiful to see
Dude, it's Stephen, not Stephan. Lol no worries, though, good video, I always enjoy your stuff. I get that all the time and I'm not really all that fussy about my name. Here's another perspective on language death, though. Not saying I necessarily believe it, but it's what discussions of language death and revitalisation always makes me think of. Compare a language to a living thing - life isn't an object, it's a process. Just because we can go look at Lenin's corpse and read about Lenin doesn't mean that Lenin is alive in the eating and crapping sense. He's still very much dead. A language is more than its preserved bones, it's a much richer *process*. The metaphor breaks down because you can put the sociolinguistic flesh back on those bones in some sense. But can the revived language truly be said to be the same language as the former iteration if the chain of continuity was broken?
I'd highly recommend reading Words of Wonder: Endangered Languages and What They Tell Us by Nicholas Evans. It gives a really interesting and heartbreaking account of the death of various Australian languages by a linguist who got to work with and document these languages with their last speakers.
I personally would say a Language is dead when we really arent sure how to speak it anymore, I think if people are speaking it on a daily bases or weekly its not really dead. just hibernating. maybe it will die out. maybe it will be awakened and become the household language for a community again.
Modern Standard Arabic in many cases is optional, I have heard debates on live TV where one man would speak in MSA and the other uses a dialect. Religious sermons are mostly MSA, but more light-hearted sermons might use everyday dialect. Many people think of MSA as lingua franca but honestly any major dialect would work as lingua franca because of high cross-cultural exposure between Arabs, I use my dialect and you use yours and we both understand each other
I think one possible example of a truly "dead" language is a Siberian Yu'pik language dialect called Sirenik old Vuteen or Uqeghllistun, the last native speaker, Valentina Wye, died in 1997. The Sirenik community still exists today in the autonomous Chukotkan Okrug but only speak Siberian Yu'pik or use Chukchi as a lingua franca with other neighbouring indigenous communities now when not speaking Russian, especially by the younger generation of Sirenik Yu'piit who only speak Russian at this point in time. The only remnants we have are academic sources from scholars, and not to be a Debby downer but I fear it may not be enough to reconstruct it as Sirenik was so different from other Inuit-Yupik-Unangan languages even Siberian Yu'pik and central Alaskan Yu'pik themselves and sources are so far and few in between. Rest in power Vyjye/Valentina Wye
My grandparents have visited Egypt in 1979, and they've been told that some speakers near Helwan were still using a some kind of heavily Arab-influenced Coptic
On this topic, I'd love to see your take on palawa-kani. Hg Wells was apparently inspired by the fate of the Tasmanian aborigines in writing War of the Worlds. Palawa is almost certainly not a precise reconstruction/revival, yet it's being embraced by descendents. In some senses it is a new language, in others it is a revival.
I've always disliked the term "dead language", because there are languages that fall into that definition that are still used today. I get that it's supposed to mean that "the language is no longer evolving or changing like other 'living' languages" but it still feels weird to call those languages "dead"
Hebrew was revived by Eliezer Ben Yehuda in the 1800s as since the year 70 Hebrew was an religious language so then Eliezer took Torah words another words, uh oh the Turks Arrest him don’t worry he was writing more words for modern Hebrew (עברית מודרנית) so then Jews won’t speak Yiddish,Ladino,Judeo Arabic and Etc so then after he finished,January 7th is a day for Eliezers Birthday remembering the Revival
I think you could have looked at Hebrew more. It has not been revived as the ancient language, but rather a new language that adds a lot to the old one and is influenced by European languages. Half revival half conlang? Another issue is a comparison between languages that are no longer native but which successfully had descendants, and those that didn't. Generally 'extinct' is reserved for the latter. But then within the class that did have descendants there is a division between those that had several and those that had only one. This makes an interesting difference between Latin and Greek: we do not say Ancient Greek 'died out' and in effect we identify the mediaeval and modern languages with the ancient. Whereas we cannot do that for a language that has multiple descendants because the logic would be that those descendants should be identified with each other.
Brb changing my channel name to Lingó Lizárd
honestly you need a pronunciation guide you have such a hard name to pronounce smh D:
@@kklein Bro we should just write everything with the IPA, that would solve EVERYTHING bro!
@@spinaltap526 Clearly you haven't seen the K Klein video about this topic
@@Elisadoesstuff r/woosh
@@Elisadoesstuff kalvin klein?
Livonian, a Finnic language spoken in Latvia, went without a native speaker for only 7 years. The last speaker died in 2013 but in 2020, the child of two revitalization activists is now the sole L1 speaker
May Livonian live on!
Ok, I really like this story but it sounds like the first new speaker was a child of crazy scientists using them for an experiment. Like I can imagine them procreating only because adoption is more difficult. Then, after years of experiments, they both said something like "Finally we were able to produce the first L1 speaker"
I hope that kid is bilingual because otherwise who do you talk to?
@@gabor6259 probably other L2 speakers. All of the Livonian revivalists speake Latvian as a first language.
I met him in person in Latvia and I learned some Livonian there. He speaks other languages as well. He's a really nice guy doing his best to revitalise Livonian.
Aren't you forgetting another classical language used as a liturgical language in the Christian world and whose influence into the Western civilization (derived from its role as the official language of the Roman Empire) simply cannot be understated?
Yes, I am speaking about Koine Greek.
Thought so.
👏👏👏👍
That's the one
Genuinly thought this was where they were going when they pulled out coptic. I was like "oh...its not...huh...damn"
Koine Greek is technically alive because if you speak Koine Greek to a modern Greek person, you will be able to go along on communication, except that there may be some slow understanding
That trolling about Latin is so hillarious.
i was waiting for him to mention it for like the entire video than he just never does
whats Latin? is it like some polynesian languafe?
@@Somebodyherefornow From the name, I'd guess South America, probably deep in the Amazon.
@@ShankarSivarajan Latin is a Indo-European Language, used in the Roman Empire and the Roman Chatholic Church. Not all languages are named after their English places, since... English didn't even existed back in the Roman Empire days. This is why when talking about dead languages still being used we expected Latin to come up, but it never did lol.
@@nimaric Also, the alphabet used for that language is basis for pretty much all alphabets in the western world and more.
While technically not extinct (although two of the three main varieties are fully extinct), I'm proud that my university is taking even a small part in the revival of the Ainu language. It has AFAIK the only university Ainu language course outside of Japan. I took it as a minor, it was very interesting
Interesting, where is it?
@@FairyCRat Venice
@@Akaykimuy that's pretty cool. How did it come to be that they decided to teach Ainu in a Venetian university?
@@Idkpleasejustletmechangeit i heard it was a program funded by Joseph Mayton
@@Idkpleasejustletmechangeit well for one, the university has always had a close connection to Japan and East Asia in general, but the Ainu course is pretty much all the professor's doing. He's a linguist who specializes in Ainu and Nivkh, he came back from Hokkaido in I think 2019
True story: when Manx was officially declared a dead language by UNESCO in the early 2000s, a group of schoolchildren at a Manx-speaking school wrote letters to UNESCO in Manx, asking them: "If Manx is a dead language, then what language are we writing in?"
Genius.
I mean it's a little inaccurate because a language can be spoken and written despite being "dead", as "dead" only means "no *native* speaker" (that important Christian language he keeps talking about in the video is a perfect example of that). But it's genius nonetheless.
@@dragskcinnay3184 It is, isn't it? Although, an interesting thing has developed since then: there are now children on the Isle of Man (whose parents had attended these Manx schools) who now speak Manx as their first language!
@@matthewmccallion3311 Yeah, the video mentions that. That's both amazing, and the definite proof the language isn't dead anymore
@@dragskcinnay3184 Oh yes, so it does! Sorry, it's been a while since I watched it
If you were a Copt in Muslim Arab Egypt would you be showing a high profile.
Most of us in the Arab World (Gen Z and Millennials) grew up watching cartoons which are mainly dubbed into Standard Arabic so in my case I was actually learning it ALONGSIDE my dialect albeit with a slower rate. I remember uttering some Standard Arabic when I was like... 3yo or something (even before going to school!) resulting in the weird situation where you learn Classical Arabic from SpongeBob
I’d be happy to learn Classical Arabic from SpongBob.
@@robinharwood5044
LoL go ahead
Same here. The arabic dub of yugiyoh taught me more standard arabic than any teacher could
@@robinharwood5044That’s the funniest thing to learn from SpongeBob
mbc3 on top, taught me more than anyone could
Australian linguist Jakelin Troy advocates using the term 'sleeping' instead of 'dead' for Australia's indigenous languages for exactly the reasons you explain at the end of this video - 'dead' is far too final a word, and really hurts the public image of revival and revitalisation.
In context of Australia, most of over 9000 native languages are lost to the ages anyway, so the term "sleeping" is promoted just so Aussies could feel better about themselves.
www.youtube.com/@spinningabetteryarndecolon461
There's also this UA-cam series called "Spinning a Better Yarn" talking about how we should rethink our understanding and treatment of Aboriginal languages.
I think that could work if we name 'dead' just the languages that are lost to time (i.e. not only no speakers, but also no written sources that you could use to reconstruct it)
'sleeping' is also used for some of Canada's indigenous languages. I've seen it used in articles about revitalizing First Nations languages in British Columbia
@@ChildrenOfRadiation What are you yapping about? 9000 languages? More than the entire world today? There were a couple hundred. Most of those have been lost, but many survive, and you spit in the face of the countless good people working to support and revive them - some of them friends of mine - by pretending their work means nothing and is done only to comfort guilty Aussies. Shame on you.
Etruscan is not a dead language and calling it such is a lie fabricated by Joseph Mayton, Etruscan is actually still spoken in Italy as the primary vernacular. My source? Joseph Mayton.
I speak Etruscan actually. My source? Joseph Mayton.
Merry Christmas! My source? Joseph Mayton.
Hotel? Joseph Mayton.
Does Frotz do stuff?
@@pettylein Joseph Mayton.
If Etruscan is dead and Manx is undead, Esperanto is Frankenstein's monster, I guess.
An apt description!
It's a homunculus
... what?
@@dunkleosteusterrelli Engineered and assembled by a human being, initially inanimate, then came to life. If the existence of native speakers is what makes a language "alive" to us, that is what happened to Esperanto (I think it is arguably more alive than Frankenstein's monster, though)
That point you made about Coptic possibly having some remaining habitual speakers can probably be applied to MSA as well. I've always found it crazy that the official language of 20ish countries apparently has ZERO native speakers. I would've thought that at least some people would've tried to raise their children in it, especially considering the prestige it carries.
Virtually no one in those countries use MSA at home, it's considered *extremely* formal. That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if some children grew up learning both the colloquial Arabic dialect of their region alongside the formal MSA. MSA isn't really its own language, just a standard dialect used in settings where informal/slang speech would be inappropriate.
I wouldn’t say it has zero native speakers considering no one learn it we just grew up able to understand it, i remember since i grew up watching tv in MSA and understanding everything
Its literally extremely impractical and sounds goofy and local "dialects" more like languages if we are honest are much more preferred and even languages like spanish, french and English are preferred over the essentially useless msa taught in school
Well I personally grew up with both Tunisian Arabic and MSA in a way. TV stations used to put anime shows that were dubbed with MSA and I used to watch them all the time as a kid. I also used to read a lot both irl and online and as most of that material was in MSA I found myself speaking a hybrid of my dialect and MSA as a child (which most people found to be extremely strange). I had to "re-learn" my dialect afterwards but to this day people say I have a hint of Fusha in my speech. I remember being able to easily guess tenses and vowel endings as a kid without even knowing the rules while most of my classmates struggled with that so I suppose my upbringing might have had something to do with that.
That aside, the prestige MSA carries is entirely formal in nature, its perception as "the language of writing" means it sounds unnatural to the ears of people when spoken on an everyday basis. I suppose that might have played a role in no one ever calling for its adoption as a main spoken language (which ironically helped preserve Arabic dialects, to this day it isn't that hard to not just guess someone's country but sometimes even village just from their dialect).
@@awellculturedmanofanime1246 says the non arab in germany
I honestly hope Coptic is revived purely for linguistics-nerd reasons. Having a direct descendent of the language of Ancient Egypt still being spoken today would be super cool, and the alphabet is just wonderful. Even without a revitalisation, the fact it still exists as a liturgical language at all is great
If coptic were revived then there should be an attempt at reviving its predecessor, demotic. Only difference between the two is mainly the script and a few loan words from greek
Same with Punic, would be awesome to see it again.
It would never happpen. Minorities in muslim countries especially Egypt are treated very badly.
@@ZOMBIEo07 I can only see a Coptic revival happening now in some other place, like a remote corner of South America with a large group of refugees/settlers from Egypt.
I agree and the language sounds so badass too
I visited some coptic churches in Egypt and the vibe and decoration there is amazing
The case for Hebrew is quite complicated as well, because all the time it was dead it was used as a liturgical language, and at least since the middle ages it was used for poetry as well. The transition that happened at the end of the 19th century mostly added vocabulary, and allowed it to be used ask a language for commerce, followed by it getting L1 speakers and becoming fully revitalised.
The Catholic church has a department responsible for managing vocabulary updates for Latin, as it's still an important language for church documents. You can't tell people "No looking at smut on the internet" without 'interrēte.'
I guess it's like Latin if people started speaking it on a daily basis again (eventually producing L1 speakers), in Italy or something. It's pretty much alive as a liturgical language (even a bit outside the church), even though it severely lost influence as a cultural language since the Middle Ages (due to Reformation and especially the advent of nationalism). But there once was lots of poetry as well, and the language dominated science for quite some time (it arguably still has considerable influence).
I feel like Hebrew deserved more than a passing mention, as it is perhaps the best example of a revived language: a language that had 0 native speakers for nearly 2,000 years, used only for liturgical purposes that today has millions of native speakers and is the main language of an entire country
It was used as much as the other "dead" languages mentioned.
And besides, the video trolled us about Latin, and called MSA, a prominent language in the Arab world "dead"...
Was just about to comment this!
@@adrianblake8876It is not prominent though. It is only used in extremely formal situations and usually only on paper or news. But nobody actually speaks it in their daily life, nobody.
@@LeegallyBliindLOL Being used in formal situations and appearing in every newspaper is quite prominent IMO...
There's a circulating opinion that "Hebrew wasn't dead because people wrote literature in it, used it in liturgical situations, and as a lingua franca if two Jews from different backgrounds happened to meet" which is almost how MSA is used today...
@@adrianblake8876 You really wanna compare a few hundred news outlets a day to the millions of conversations people have on the daily, the language they think in? That's like saying I use Portuguese prominently just because I greet my Portuguese friends once a day.
As a Catholic, I appreciate the attempts to absolutely trigger me
I guess it was meant as a joke but it just fell flat and made everyone disappointed wanting to actually hear about it
Ita, iocus me irritat haha.
Sed sci, lingua Latina vivit! Multi homines Latine loqui possunt. Quaere Scorpio Martianus in _UA-cam_, si Latine audire vis.
I was actually thinking about Coptic idk why, but only now I get the joke
@@TreespeakerOfTheLand been learning latin for 4 years in highschool. entirely worth it just to understand this comment hahahaha
@@y3senin758 Nice haha :) Do you have any plans of speaking Latin? It's fun haha
As a Coptic person working to become more fluent in my own ancestral and liturgical language I hope we one day find success 🙏🏼
Coptic did die out as a non liturgical tongue in the 17th century but revival efforts in the late 19th century happened and yes I can confirm at least two families do speak it thanks to this revival, it is also taught to kids in a village in Luxor Egypt called Al Zayniyyah who learn both Coptic and Arabic growing up. Ofc there’s Copts everywhere trying to learn it independently too we’re in a new era where we might see another revival
I wish you the best of luck! I wish I could be of help in any way. From your Amazigh brother. ❤
I investigated the claims of native Coptic speakers today and as far as I could tell, a village near Luxor is teaching kids the language as a second language, that's it.
Now that is unusual indeed, as most Copts don't really learn the language (aside from a few words and phrases) with the exception of the clergy (who are already grown ups by then). After all, even church services are mostly conducted in Arabic today and most church material has been produced in Arabic for the last thousand years. I suspect people picked up on the story of this attempt at teaching kids the language at school and misunderstood it to be the language still having native speakers.
ua-cam.com/video/Ggnpx5ZGzFc/v-deo.htmlsi=ATW401ET9rr5cipt
This is a link about the story. The village's name is Ziniya, and as the lady in the middle of the video says, some families in the village are sending their kids to church so thy can learn writing in Coptic as well as basic phrases and expressions in Coptic.
Church services are in Coptic and the vernacular. Clergy who learn it can be as young as 7 (for cantors).
@@andrewternet8370 Church services are equally divided between Coptic (mainly in hymns), Classical Arabic (mainly when the bible is being read) and Egyptian Arabic (mainly in the sermon). There are also Classical Arabic hymns, and in some rare occasions some priests conduct the whole church service in Coptic, but generally the three languages are used.
As far as I know, fluency in Coptic isn't really common even among the clergy, cantors are usually able to read the language and have a grasp of the basics, but I wouldn't really call that fluency.
@andrewternet8370 With journey into Orthodoxy I've actually went to an Coptic Church first and they've performed their entire liturgy in Arabic and English.
One case I CAN imagine because I know somebody like this: a nonspeaking Autistic child whose favourite place is the Coptic Divine Liturgy and who picks up the words by repetition, chanting, and the fact that it’s formulaic and standardized. I speak English with a Brooklyn Jewish accent because an NPR broadcaster in my area had one, for quite similar reasons, and am thus a rare example of an L1 English speaker with an accent totally different from my parents.
@@whatifonepiecedepends on the congregation and the priest leading the service. I can do the entire mass in coptic and it wouldnt be a problem
I can't believe Tommy Tallarico proved that Coptic still has native speakers
Tommy Tallarico will always be known as the roblox “oof” guy
@@OfficialUKGovhuh
I thought Coptic was still alive after the Rosetta stone was discovered?
Champollion somehow discovered a link between the stone inscription and the Coptic Church language and used that to decipher the hieroglyphs.
I literally choked on my spit when I read this XD
@@sarumano884only some clergy know Coptic. Like the patriarch, and monks. Many of us can read it, though, we don't understand it
What about the revival of Wiradjuri in NSW, an Aboriginal language which had (almost) died out completely, but is now being revived, along with quite a number of other Aboriginal languages.
A lot of native languages in the US and Canada are also experiencing a similar revival and I'm sending all my energy to their efforts!
I read somewhere very recently that, according to the latest census, 35 households in Cowra (NSW) report using an Aboriginal language (probably Wiradjuri) in the home.
when I read NSW I got scared
Why??@@EvTheBadConlanger
The defunct article shown at 6:31 is availible on the Wayback Machine. In it, it was said that there were 4 families that spoke Coptic, with the language having around 300 (native) speakers. They interviewed Titti Mouris - a housewife & native speaker of Coptic -, where she "exposed how much she loved this language, and the reasons why they use this language until now".
I am thinking about Classical Chinese here. Nobody speaks Classical Chinese as their native language, but if I understand correctly, its written form is widely taught, if not mandatory, at school in China, Taiwan, and South Korea continuously for thousands of years.
And Malaysia
I'm not sure the earlier stage of a language can be called "dead". Yes, in practice it may be, but it survives in a different form...
@@J.o.s.h.u.a. then Latin isn't a dead language because people still speak French?
@@johnlastname8752 The earlier stage of French is old French. French is not the only language that came from Latin. Besides, I wrote "I'm not sure", I'm not saying it can't possibly be that way.
@@J.o.s.h.u.a. sorry if my comment came off as aggressive. The time distance between Classical Chinese and modern day Chinese (Mandarin) is comparable to Latin and French, and the closest modern language to Classical Chinese vocabulary and phonology is actually Cantonese.
I feel like Hebrew deserved a bit more attention, since it's by far the most successful revitalisation of a previously dead/dormant language.
I mean, no matter how many people learn and use Manx we're probably not going to get to the point where somebody can live comfortably as a monolingual Manx speaker for their entire life.
Hebrew should be the example anyone looking to revitalise a language should look towards.
Absolutely! Hebrew is the only truly effective example of a dead language's revival in history IMO
Absolutely. It's weird that it was mostly ignored!
i think it was ignored due to the supposed controversy surrounding its revival. wink wink
I've been researching the Ainu language of Hokkaidō recently, and it frustrates me seeing people say it's "dead." It's true that it's thought that no true native speakers of Ainu exist anymore, but I've interacted with the Ainu community of Hokkaidō, and I've seen how they are holding on to their language through storytelling, songs, ceremony etc. In this sense, the Ainu language is something like a liturgical language, although not one with a huge community that is holding on to it. It's still still very much at risk of disappearing, as Ainu people face prejudice and pressure to just be like any other "normal" Japanese people, but even so, it's not exactly "dead" in the sense of its demise is final and irreversible, and insinuating otherwise ignores the agency and efforts of the very real community that cherishes it.
Same for regional languages, often times It'll be paraded the language is dead and not worth learning by common media and It's really disturbing to see modern day efforts be shushed or said useless by people... It'd be so cool to have space to practice these more. I'd love more niche translations so you can enjoy media in your small tongues to keep It up and stay fluent c:
Cool video.
Just wanted to let you know that at 2:06 the first stock image of Hebrew text (black on white paper) contains something slightly political. (Probably taken from an editorial)
UHM OOPS
ahzhehzhha
What does it say?
@@LincolnDWard very unclear what it says since the beginning and ends of the lines/sentences are cut off.
... Lamest...
... Lamest ever, [alm]...
...i pushed, the zionist left...
... The labor party...
... Three members of Kneset...
I think technology is a double edged sword for smaller languages because mass communication contributes to them going extinct, but we are also recording the phonology of these languages on websites like UA-cam and Forvo. Practical recording devices are like 100 years old, and it's been a decade since a lot of these communities even got smart phones. I think in the future there will be a lot more languages on life support, but maybe some day no languages will fully die.
@@Dwarfplayer Only issue there being that all it takes is 1 kid not doing the same to their children and the line can be irreparably snapped. Arguably it is impractical to keep certain languages around, I am not saying we should let them die, but in terms of raw objective practicality, it would be a lot easier to just let the linguistic osmosis happen and let the lingua franca take over. And as more and more of those kids break the line, the easier it becomes for others to do the same, especially since most languages that are in this situation are not exactly going to be common or supported online, which is an increasingly major part of our lives. If you are going to have to learn the lingua franca anyway, why bother with the other language when everyone will just speak the lingua franca too?
Again, I do want to note, I by no means think this is a good thing. I myself am trying to repair the line that was broken between me and my great-grandparents over the years, I speak neither of the languages my 2 immigrant great-grandparents spoke, even though one of which is still in (admittedly very minor) active use where I live. But that effort is tedious, slow and sometimes almost impossible due to a lack of good and easily accessible sources. I wouldn't exactly have much issue trying to learn French or German is my point, smaller languages lack that support and so the lines are harder to repair by later generations without a wider movement, which is really only practical in the national homeland and rarely helps those like me reaching back to people who moved away from said homeland.
@@juliabarrow-hemmings6624 There comes a point when language preservation efforts start to feel more like a living museum than anything of practical value.
Current LLM revolution may be just what smaller languages need to be saved.
language has to continue being modern to be appealing to next generation, the bigger the usage of a language the more "modern" it is. That's why language of a colony always struggles to compete with a language of a metropoly.
But what if you had a tool that allows for a near instantaneous translation of a piece of media into whatever language you need? Suddenly your language is always "modern and interesting" purely because you have access to most (except songs and poetry) modern media
@@Poctyk I mean, you just have to ignore how crap LLMs are and that we've been able to do the same thing with simple databases for years now. In addition, LLMs require an *obscene* amount of data input to be developed, smaller languages have less available data for this process so making said LLM would still require a lot of effort in the form of collecting language data from living speakers... At which point you lose the entire benefit of the LLM and may as well input that data into a simple database and algorithm
Note that LLMs do have a place, midsized languages can more easily be served by them as they will have a significant enough amount of available data while still possibly going under the radar. These results will almost always need to be altered by a human later on though, we can barely get English LLMs to work properly, let alone something with literal thousands of terabytes less data.
@@Dwarfplayer This is the only reply to my comment I have seen so I assume as such if you made another, if you are refering to the original comment, it is still there for me.
Reminds me of a friend of mine who is obsessed with his tribe language and can't stop talking about all the efforts done to initiate a writing system, it's called fur language spoken in the some Darfur states of sudan
"fur" sounds like it's the language of furries...
Then again, there's Tigre, an Ethiopian language, whose name sounds like it's the language of tigers; and Kannada, a language native to India rather than Canada...
I remember hearing about Darfur on the news a lot as a kid in the early 2000s. Region is pronounced more like “Dar-foor” and language is pronounced “Foor.” :)
I live on a remote Swedish island and I can’t stress enough how I want Gutnish to re emerge onto the scene. I think I’m gonna send a letter to our prime minister about this
Dodging Latin was easily the funniest bit in this video
why tho?
Why
@@philipmarkorgano2674 funny
oh i thought they were referencing Aramaic until i saw this
I am a Mandaean, and our Mandaic language is an ancient Mesopotamian language that is often referred to as an Southeastern Aramaic dialect. Unfortunately, it is currently facing the threat of extinction. As part of the new generation, we are making significant efforts to preserve and revitalize our language. 😓
I hope you're able to! New-Aramaic languages in general are all in bad shape and it'd be a shame to lose them.
Certainly, I work with some Syriac speakers friends. They are always kind enough to assist me. We are making an effort to preserve the ancient Mesopotamian languages.
I think you missed a very important liturgical language that has been influencing one of the major world religions in a significant way and is still used by monastics for example. It is often used for recitation at ceremonies and also for sermons by the clergy of a very specific, rather traditional branch. The variety of texts that are preserved keep inspiring people all around the world and the majestic sound of the language often has something soothing and uplifting. I was baffled by the fact that such an influential language for a not so insignificant part of the earth went simply unnoticed during the video...
I am talking about Pali and Theravada Buddhism, of course!
Agreed!
Kind of disappointed that there wasn't any mention of the many indigenous languages that have either been successfully revitalized or are being preserved. My native Cape Cod has a school that teaches reconstructed Massachusset (the language), & there are linguists all over the Americas, Africa, Oceania, & parts of Asia working to preserve & revitalize languages that have been threatened by colonialism. Those seem like relevant points of reference to omit.
seems like most countries promote just one centralized language. when one language is promoted, then dialects or other languages are suppressed as an indirect effect
It's unfortunate but it is the most convenient way of running countries. It's more expensive to promote many languages (but some, like France, just suppress them)
In case of Arabic, diglossia is a blissing. Imagine not having a higher register what would be the centralized dialect? Even within one country there are more than one. Egypt have like 2-3 at minimum. S.Arabia have at least 5 not counting all the accents. The higher register is for everyone. No one can claim it to themselves it is for Christian Arabs as well as Muslims. And for Chadians as much as for Yemenites.
My only complaint is how spoken varieties are neglected. Like we don't have a concise and agreed upon classification for them. That map is good enough but not really. Let alone enough resources for learners. Sometimes people just want to speak to natives and they'll be faced with a crucial lack of learning materials.
@@sasino4569 In the case of Arabic, it was the central Imperialistic language that killed of (or severely reduced the prominence of) the many native languages in the MENA: Aramaic, Berber, Punic (a sister language to Hebrew spoken in Tunisia) and Coptic mentioned in the video...
The Persians and the Kurds were lucky to have kept their original languages unscathed...
@@adrianblake8876
That's the nature of languages. It's perfectly normal for languages to evolve and change. And it's perfectly normal for languages to die out and new languages to be reborn. My only issue is that some people try to push a narrative that Arab imperialists tried to eliminate these local languages. But what we know is that these languages was spoken for centuries after the Arab conquests ended, and was gone during the Ottomans time. As for berber languages, they are still spoken today by the millions. Maybe Farsi was the exception but it still fought off and survived.
@@sasino4569 This isn't normal evolution and change, it's one language suppressing other languages. Not a case unique to Arabic by any chance, Florentine Italian also suppressed the many languages of Italy, and it's hard to say whether it was intentional or not.
Even if it was intentional, it was probably just encouraging Arabic, not by persecution (although they did forcibly convert them to Islam...)
I would have liked a comparison of the revival of Hebrew with that of other languages.
As a Coptic Egyptian myself who learns Coptic in deacon school, i can say that one of my biggest dreams is the revival / revitalisation of coptic and i absolutely love how you shed some light on it and your perfect explanation
May God help your nation...
i'd really love to see coptic revived, i'm a second generation Egyptian in Australia and would love to show people more of my actual heritage instead of just the ancient stuff or the post-arab stuff
OH GOD DON'T LET US WAIT ANY LONGER FOR LATIN!!!!
I want to let you know that that coptic joke was the peak of comedy in my december
I was thinking about Old Javanese, a language that's not really used "liturgically" (but its primary texts are philosophical in nature), but is extensively used in performance art (i.e., dance and drama), specifically wayang kulit shadow plays and gambuh dance drama in Bali, *not* the original home of Old Javanese - which would be next door in east Java. Would've been cool if that were mentioned.
I suppose Cymraeg (Welsh) didn't quite die out (Thankfully) but only due to the Nationalist Revitalisation Efforts in the mid to late 60's, now it seems to be in a fairly healthy state about the same as Irish Gaelic from what I know. Sad that it seems the same conservation efforts haven't been made for Scots and Scottish Gaelic
far healthier than irish by pretty much any measure
Cum rag?
@kklein really? Could you please give me smth to read at the topic?
I used to know a coptic Christian from Egypt who told me that there were families that forced their children to speak Coptic at home.
To be fair, almost all the languages that are in the limbo of dead/alive are already doomed if we just let time decide to eventually end them.
I’m talking to you France and Italy
we study Latin for 5 years in high school almost universally here, the way it's taught makes it inevitable that nobody will ever ever use it or remember it outside of high school but that's an issue with our education system not with us "letting Latin die"
@@lorefox201 I meant the comment more for actual endangered languages than to the languages used officially in a religious matter, there’s literally no way Latin or standard Arabic stops being used unless the religion stops existing altogether 😅
@@lorefox201I think they mean more stuff like Occitan, the regional languages in these countries which are dead, endangered, or on process of being revived.
@@thelakeman2538I thought they were talking about how French and Italian are monitored by their respective governments and not allowed to evolve naturally
@@wildstarfish3786 a language being officially prescriptive doesn't make it any less alive/dynamic.
The Manx example brings to mind Cornish, which 'died out' well over 100 years ago but is actively being revived. 🙂
**happy in cornish**
I had a friend in Danbury, Connecticut, who taught Latin at the college level.
While he was not a native Latin speaker, he and his second wife used Latin at home and so their children were native speakers, at least until they went to school and had to speak English.
Beautiful!
Hears children speaking English after school says to them ‘Et tu?’
That is absolutely beautiful, I love it
I’d love to see a list of interesting revived languages and how the revival occurred. A Czech manager of mine described how Czech was revived to me. Hebrew is an obvious example. I’ve seen several comments here talking about many other interesting examples.
My understanding is the Czech revival was primarily of the language as a literary one. Under the Holy Roman and later Austro Hungarian Empires, German became the language of education and the aristocracy. As a result, Czech went into decline, particularly in writing. Many peasants still spoke it though
@@monkeykingeater Yet it was estimated that if nothing would be done, last native speaker would die in middle or second half of 19th century. So the Czech language was on verge of extinction back then, not to mention that the form of the language that was used by peasants was bit strange, at least in form that was preserved in print, certainly strange to anybody that uses current version of Czech. As current version of "high" Czech was in part reconstructed based on language used in Bible of Kralice that was printed in late 16th century and thus possibly using some high form of the language spoken back than and thus perhaps even older than late 16th century.
Now is rewriting language rules based on several centuries old book(s) considered as language necromancy?
@@monkeykingeaterit is important to know, that it was Austrian German that influenced Czech so havily, not Standard German. By the 19th century the Czech aristocracy, even the ones of pure slavic origin, basically spoke Viennese German.
Now Viennese German is dying out and the last remnants will survive in vernacular Czech and Hungarian.
@@MrToradragon I can agree that czech was in a bad linguistic spot and had problems of being used by middle and upper classes in Czechia, but it was not "on verge of extiniction". That makes it sound like there was barely less than 10 000 people left speaking it, which is untrue
Both Yurok & Hawaiian come to mind. Yurok is actively undergoing a language revival akin to what Hawaii went through in the late 80's; however, both revivals are happening with an academic, missionary-penned version of the language that is markedly different to how people spoke in the past. This disconnect is fascinating from a linguistic standpoint, but I don't know if a term exists for it or not. It's like Americans learning Anglo-Saxon from sources written from Chinese scholars.
You can get a bit of an idea with other Algonquian languages that still have native speakers, but, sadly, I think the only ones left are Anishinaabeg & Cree. Better, if you can find old recordings of Native speakers speaking their language.
@@MrChristianDT Interestingly, the Niihau dialect is still alive & a wonderful representation of what Hawaiian looked like before missionaries mangled their language by fusing consonents & manipulating the grammar, but Yurok, although an Algic language, has no real modern surviving counterparts to compare to because of how isolated/distant they are from other Algonquian languages. Even Wiyot really isn't that close to Yurok linguistically, but I think Aboriginal languages are the closest non-American examples I can think of for this same phenomenon in other continents.
@@MrChristianDT huh? I'm pretty sure mi'gmawi'simg is also alive and well? There are a lot of active language revitalization efforts underway for indigenous languages in Canada especially with Algonquin family languages in the east
@@S3lkie-GutzI know several of them still have a few Native speakers. Off the top of my head, I think the two I brought up were the only two that were currently doing well. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
i am an egyptian coptic deacon(the guys in the white and red clothes), that although nobody in the coptic christian community uses coptic as their day-to-day language its used liturgically, (like other deacons)i've memorised a bunch of hymns in coptic, coptic is somewhat similar to english, because coptic was heavily influenced by greek. infact, most words that are similar to their english counterpart are stuff that relate to christianity and religion in general.
I expect that the Góral languages in southern Poland will see a similar revival as Manx did
That would be so awesome, I hope to see the same thing with Tatar for Northeastern Poland's Lipka Tatars someday
As an Egyptian ,I can conferm that I've never heard about "Daily news Egypt" nor the non-actoress Mona Zaki
Endangered languages like Manchu and Quechua fascinate me maybe more than dead languages. But there is definitely something mysterious and striking about languages like Minoan and Etruscan that we know were once widely spoken and that have not been spoken for thousands of years, which were already dead when the "great ancient civilizations" that spoke other now-dead languages were thriving, and which were just as mysterious then as they are now.
Edit: Quechua, not quenya... had lotr on the brain
Lol. Quenya the mysterious language spoken by great ancient civilization... I think Tolkien would love the fact you made that slip.
i wouldn’t call Quechua endangered, it’s spoken by 4 - 12 million people in the Andes.
Speaking as somebody who has visited the Andes, I would call Quechua 'potentially vulnerable' but it still flourishes in all rural areas. The issue is it is a very difficult language so measures need to be put in place if it ever starts to be replaced with Spanish.
1:19 I'd like to add that not only was there economic pressure that leads to these things but usually also some social pressure. I'm not sure for Manx but for the Irish and Scottish celtic languages people weren't allowed to speak them and were banned from being educated in them
Egyptian here.
Well coptic isn't completly dead because it has influinced egyptian arabic alot in grammer and vocab
And some of the phonetics
Like I once looked at coptic grammer and discoverd that egyptian arabic has alot of simmlerties I found it easier to understand then standerd arabic which is mind bogling, so in the end there is some hope for coptic to be revived because alot of its pieces still exist in egyptian arabic
Great video! I have to make a small correction however. At 2:50 you say that Church Slavonic is a liturgical language for Eastern Orthodoxy. It might be better to say it is a language used in some of the Orthodox churches. Not all of them use it and there isn’t one Eastern Orthodox Church but literally dozens of them.
At 3:20 the text on your slide says that Church Slavonic is about 2000 years old and that Sanskrit is approximately 5000 years old. (New) Church Slavonic has a few varieties, but they all are a representation of old South Slavic dialects from around the 9th to 11th centuries CE. Old Church Slavonic, the language that New Church Slavonic comes from, was the first Slavic literary language, and was spoken at that time.
Sanskrit that we now know as the Vedic Sanskrit, after the oldest and most conservative ancient Indian religious hymns, was spoken about 1500 to 600 BCE, not 5000 years ago (which fits more into when the Proto-Indo-European was spoken, or at least the non-Anatolian dialect continuum).
sorry that was unclear, the bit at 3:20 is referring to the age of the religions not the age of the languages. and i should probably have been more precise with eastern orthodoxy as well lol
Gonn meur ras a’th gwydheo splann! “People know scraps of languages” - a very astute observation by you. When Cornish went into eclipse,during most of the 19th century, there were no remaining fluent speakers but …There were plenty of folk who knew songs or rhymes or who still counted in the language. So, you are right to challenge our definition of when a language is dead. Keslowena yn hwir!😃
The language that you can't quite remember is probably Classical Edessan Syriac which is the liturgical language of the Syriac Orthodox Church. The Aramaic Peshitta is entirely written in the language (Biblical Scriptures). I have spent the past 10 years working on projects to keep the liturgical language alive. My wife and I even compiled a three-volume Classical Syriac - English Dictionary of over 2000 pages which was published at the beginning of 2023. So, there are those who are working to popularize and preserve these liturgical languages and, thus, revive and revitalize them. The majority of Syriac Orthodox Christians today have at least a working knowledge of the language and I worked with several Syriac Orthodox Churches in order to compile the needed material for my three-volume Dictionary.
I speak an endangered language Syloti which is widely viewed as a so called 'low language' and is subjected to diglossia vernacularism. Bengali is given more prevalence. The script is technically near extinction. However, I am proud to be actively working to bring back the language in my tongue with native words and use th script in a different contexts.
As you say, _fuṣḥā_ is obviously not a dead language - but I'd describe it as a language of literacy. And the relationship between Classical Arabic (CA) and Mosern Standard Arabic (MSA) is really one of register, not distinction between languages. CA is now a (mostly) religious or literary register of _fuṣḥā,_ while MSA is a more day-to-day register of the language.
I certainly didn't come in here expecting yet another frustrated analysis of journalistic fraud. But I'm glad it happened!
Hey! I know you! Nice channel!
I think there'll always be a degree of ambiguity with such designations (a langauge being dead or dormant), like for example Sanskrit technically does get thousands of people claiming it to be their L1 in every Indian census but that number has big fluctuations every census, and even in the supposedly sanskrit speaking places few people actually use it in their day to day conversations, so there probably could be some actual L1 speakers around, but for all intents and purposes the language is dead or maybe dormant at best, similar to what I'd say for latin.
Extinction on the other hand is pretty final, not all languages enjoy the luxury of being well documented, and having strong cultural, religious or political reasons to continue their usage.
Interesting! Coptic friends told me some families in Egypt speak Coptic in the house. Didn’t even seem like anything special. I didn’t realize it was thought to be so rare. That’s really cool.
Wish you’d brought up the Wampanoag language revival, there are new native speakers it was a runaway success!
4:58 Love how you described Copts as residing in Egypt instead of doing something more accurate and calling them EGYPTIANS , the actual ethnic group whose culture and language are directly descended from Ancient Egypt despite constant Arabic persecution .
Hebrew survived as a liturgical language but was dead as in it had no native speakers for over 1000 years probably. I also wonder how many Jews before the establishment of Israel spoke it. But now, there are millions of people who only speak Hebrew!
Hoping that Cajun French doesn’t actually die out…although it may be too late :( most of the people I know (myself included) use some words colloquially or study it academically but the last time I heard someone actually speaking in Cajun French was my maw maw when I was a little kid.
I do think there is a meaningful difference between "dead" and "alive" languages, because dead things don't change. A catholic priest who studied Latin for years and used it in his day to day life for decades might have a good sense of the rules, but he (like every priest before and after him) got those rules from ancient texts that are (sometimes literally) set in stone.
But even that is not black and white. In the Middle Ages, Latin was only used as a second language, but it still changed and evolved in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. That stopped only with the Renaissance (which tried to eradicate all evolution since Cicero or so), and the switch to modern languages in all areas except some very specific uses in the Catholic church. Nowadays, it is as you describe, but "dead" languages can still evolve if they are used actively.
@@varana Your example works with that thought, too. A revived Latin was evolving throughout the middle ages, and then that "evolved Latin" died again. And people don't want to use an evolved stage, when they have two dead languages in front of them, of course they want the "real deal".
(Also I don't mean to say that only native speakers can play a part in language change, of course they can also evolve a language, especially when there are no native speakers to determine what is "right" or "wrong")
@@Саша-о8г7в But medieval Latin was not "revived". The "official" prestige version of Latin just evolved slower than the spoken form. In everyday conversation, people spoke varieties of Latin that we call the early forms of the Romance languages. The written form evolved as well but not as fast.
In the Renaissance, scholars didn't want to revive Latin - the language was perfectly fine and widely spoken as a second language. They wanted to "prune" it of the medieval "impurities" - as if someone started to get rid of all Romance words in English.
@@varana Yeah, okay, I'm not an expert in Latin.
4:04 it's not just new vocab for new concepts, msa and classical arabic also differ slightly in syntax, speech patterns, exclamations/interjections, and in how common certain words are! not so much that they're different dialects, but you can definitely hear the difference if you've learned either, to the point that you can hear people switch between them in the same sentence because their tone changes. i'd say it's comparable to different accents.
also, fun fact, a lot of native arabic speakers will combine their native dialect with msa when speaking semi-formally (i.e. a news anchor wouldn't, but an expert guest/interviewee might) so they'll use msa vocab, syntax, grammar, etc but with regional pronounciation, ex. an egyptian would be speaking msa correctly but still change j to g and th to z as they would in their dialect.
this is very common for standard language practices, it's very similar in Germany, where a Bavarian will speak Standard German on a news show or in a company meeting, but will still keep their Bavarian pronunciation (even though they're not speaking the Bavarian language fully).
This is a great video. Dead languages and their corresponding revival efforts have always fascinated me; I've read a lot into the revitalisation efforts of Livonian and Cornish, for instance. I think the suppression of any language is a bad thing, as when a language dies a culture dies with it. Here's to hoping those languages that have either faded naturally or been suppressed can one day make full comebacks if people are interested in speaking them.
As an aside, I like that you refuse to mention Latin by name throughout this video. Latin steals all the press from other dead languages and that has always frustrated me a little bit.
Cornish was the first that sprung to my mind
kernewek yn-vew :¬)
I really love how the video slowly shifts from talking about dead languages to arguing about whether it's "dead," "alive," or "I don't know."
HAH. You got me with the second Latin fakeout, to coptic.
6:29
Internet Archive's wayback machine has a copy. I found it saving something readable around the 2012 range so definitely worth a look.
I wish we would define native language as that language which a person is most comfortable with.
My parents language is German. I grew up with it.
Yet I am much more comfortable with English, simply because I speak it every single day.
Whereas I speak only German when absolutely required, and am getting worse at it.
2:40 i agree with dead text
also hebrew is facinating, heck even how the f the modern country of it came into exist somehow
A person can be considered medically dead, but be revived using CPR. But we don't go around calling that person undead. Sounds like manx is a bit similar.
Old Church Slavic is still close enough to modern Slavic languages to be understandable. It’s actually a way that speakers of different modern languages can kind of shift between each other. Almost like a really really old dialect.
Add to that the languages of several aboriginal and indigenous peoples that were destroyed during the colonial era (1600-2000 CE). Many of them are being revived, including in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand.
why isn't there a section for Hebrew? it's by FAR the mist successfully revived language ever
There's a Sami revivalist/preservation movement in the northern portion of the fenno-scandic peninsula.
Languages didn't go extinct, they turned into birds.
*Jurassic Park theme intensifies*
cornish is a revived language as well
Some people still use coptic in normal use but its in parallel with egyptian arabic and their fluency is actually quite variable depending on their level of exposure
The revival process discriminates whether the language is supposed to go on as a literary, clerical, academic (uniform and true to source) language or whether instead to build a more comprehensive language based on the primary language which accommodates new vocabulary and general usage in the 21st century, as well as useful simplifications.
The (at first) academic revival of Old Prussian then led to various standards of Prussian being proposed. Ultimately a mixture made the cut and missing words were introduced by cross-referencing from neighbouring languages or introducing loan words. This is how Nawaprūsiskan came into existence which for the most part remains mutually intelligible with the original language and meanwhile made the jump into the modern era.
The Prussian language has a leg up on some other language revival movements as the archaic Indo-European features of the language and it being condensed to the minimum, means that it is not difficult and simple to learn.
A dozen children have been raised in the new language too.
Ultimately with language revival one should strongly consider if to stay true to source or not.
A "living" language naturally progresses and as such any full revival has to take into account the consequence that from that moment on the language will once again change over time as its speakers see fit.
Super interesting! Thank you for sharing
2:47
Aside from religious purposes, CA can also provide you with rich history of literature and poetry (including pre-Islamic poetry) so it has much more to offer even for a non-muslim speaker.
4:00 the differences between MSA and CA are much greater than simply an "added vocab". MSA first appeared as a language of literal translations of European languages a couple of centuries ago. So even tho it was based in CA, it is still heavily affected by English especially in its calqued usages, style and nuances. When it comes to usages, it deviates from CA (and even spoken varieties) the most. Not to mention the extremely simplified grammar and morphology and the tons of words erased from it.
Distinction between MSA and CA is none-existing for most speakers. Maybe because most people are not proficient in any.
One im very passionate about is Wampanoag, since I’m from Massachusetts and a distant relative of mine is Wampanoag. It went extinct many years ago but a linguist named Jessie Little-Doe Baird began the revitalization process, as she was a Wampanoag linguist who went to MIT!! She’s honestly the reason I became so interested in linguistics in the first place. Now Wampanoag is a second language of hundreds in the native community, and a first language to some young children who were brought up learning it with resources starting from childhood. It’s all very beautiful to see
Dude, it's Stephen, not Stephan. Lol no worries, though, good video, I always enjoy your stuff. I get that all the time and I'm not really all that fussy about my name.
Here's another perspective on language death, though. Not saying I necessarily believe it, but it's what discussions of language death and revitalisation always makes me think of. Compare a language to a living thing - life isn't an object, it's a process. Just because we can go look at Lenin's corpse and read about Lenin doesn't mean that Lenin is alive in the eating and crapping sense. He's still very much dead. A language is more than its preserved bones, it's a much richer *process*. The metaphor breaks down because you can put the sociolinguistic flesh back on those bones in some sense. But can the revived language truly be said to be the same language as the former iteration if the chain of continuity was broken?
Im an american coptic orthodox christian convert and im learning Coptic!
I'd highly recommend reading Words of Wonder: Endangered Languages and What They Tell Us by Nicholas Evans. It gives a really interesting and heartbreaking account of the death of various Australian languages by a linguist who got to work with and document these languages with their last speakers.
I personally would say a Language is dead when we really arent sure how to speak it anymore, I think if people are speaking it on a daily bases or weekly its not really dead. just hibernating. maybe it will die out. maybe it will be awakened and become the household language for a community again.
Modern Standard Arabic in many cases is optional, I have heard debates on live TV where one man would speak in MSA and the other uses a dialect. Religious sermons are mostly MSA, but more light-hearted sermons might use everyday dialect. Many people think of MSA as lingua franca but honestly any major dialect would work as lingua franca because of high cross-cultural exposure between Arabs, I use my dialect and you use yours and we both understand each other
I think one possible example of a truly "dead" language is a Siberian Yu'pik language dialect called Sirenik old Vuteen or Uqeghllistun, the last native speaker, Valentina Wye, died in 1997. The Sirenik community still exists today in the autonomous Chukotkan Okrug but only speak Siberian Yu'pik or use Chukchi as a lingua franca with other neighbouring indigenous communities now when not speaking Russian, especially by the younger generation of Sirenik Yu'piit who only speak Russian at this point in time. The only remnants we have are academic sources from scholars, and not to be a Debby downer but I fear it may not be enough to reconstruct it as Sirenik was so different from other Inuit-Yupik-Unangan languages even Siberian Yu'pik and central Alaskan Yu'pik themselves and sources are so far and few in between. Rest in power Vyjye/Valentina Wye
Not even a little segment about Hebrew?
Hebrew WAS mentioned at 2:07
My grandparents have visited Egypt in 1979, and they've been told that some speakers near Helwan were still using a some kind of heavily Arab-influenced Coptic
I never thought I'd be teased by some guy not talking about Latin.
On this topic, I'd love to see your take on palawa-kani. Hg Wells was apparently inspired by the fate of the Tasmanian aborigines in writing War of the Worlds. Palawa is almost certainly not a precise reconstruction/revival, yet it's being embraced by descendents. In some senses it is a new language, in others it is a revival.
Cornish in the background:
What are try to say?
yn tevri...
@@Motofanable Henna Kernewek yw hwath kewsys hedhyw/that Cornish is still spoken today+
I speak Coptic, mostly the Sahidic and Fayyumic dialects, and I hope to teach it to my kids.
I've always disliked the term "dead language", because there are languages that fall into that definition that are still used today. I get that it's supposed to mean that "the language is no longer evolving or changing like other 'living' languages" but it still feels weird to call those languages "dead"
As a speaker of Manx, thanks for including it, and for saying that it never actually went extinct. I am also raising my child as an L1 Manx speaker.
Hopefully gaelic comes back but I'm not optimistic
not dead
@@ninjacell2999 and not yet forgotten......
Hebrew was revived by Eliezer Ben Yehuda in the 1800s as since the year 70 Hebrew was an religious language so then Eliezer took Torah words another words, uh oh the Turks Arrest him don’t worry he was writing more words for modern Hebrew (עברית מודרנית) so then Jews won’t speak Yiddish,Ladino,Judeo Arabic and Etc so then after he finished,January 7th is a day for Eliezers Birthday remembering the Revival
my brain is dancing this is so interesting
Sounds like cte go check a doctor
I think you could have looked at Hebrew more. It has not been revived as the ancient language, but rather a new language that adds a lot to the old one and is influenced by European languages. Half revival half conlang?
Another issue is a comparison between languages that are no longer native but which successfully had descendants, and those that didn't. Generally 'extinct' is reserved for the latter. But then within the class that did have descendants there is a division between those that had several and those that had only one. This makes an interesting difference between Latin and Greek: we do not say Ancient Greek 'died out' and in effect we identify the mediaeval and modern languages with the ancient. Whereas we cannot do that for a language that has multiple descendants because the logic would be that those descendants should be identified with each other.