essay dead languages

Many of the world's most remote languages are in danger of disappearing. Here, neighbors in the Altai mountains in China craft a new pair of skis. The range connects Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan, making the threatened Altai language an unusual blend of dialects.

The Race to Save the World's Disappearing Languages

Every two weeks a language dies. Wikitongues wants to save them.

On a residential block at the border between Brooklyn and Queens, Gottscheer Hall appears like a mirage from 1945.

Blue awnings advertise the space for weddings and events. Inside, an entryway is covered with the saccharin smiles of “Miss Gottschee” contestants from decades past. “Back then you had to know the language to compete,” says 92-year-old Alfred Belay, pointing out his daughter’s beaming face from the 1980s. Nowadays, there are years with only a single contestant in the pageant.

Belay has been coming to Gottscheer Hall since he arrived in America more than 60 years ago. Then, the neighborhood was filled with refugees from Gottschee, a settlement that once occupied the highlands of modern-day Slovenia. Now, he’s one of a few thousand remaining speakers of its language, Gottscheerisch. Every Christmas he leads a service in his 600-year-old native language that few understand.

“Imagine if someone who plays music suddenly can’t use their fingers,” he says. “We’re still alive but can only remember these things.”

Belay and his sister, 83-year-old Martha Hutter, have agreed to let 26-year-old Daniel Bogre Udell film them having a conversation. They walk past the dark wood bar of Gottscheer Hall serving pretzels and sausages, and they climb the stairs to an empty banquet room. Bogre Udell sets up his camera and the siblings begin to banter in their inscrutable Germanic mother tongue.

Slip of the Tongue

Hearing such a rare language spoken on a residential block of Queens is not unusual for Bogre Udell, the co-founder of a nonprofit called Wikitongues . There are some 800 languages spoken within the 10-mile radius of New York City, which is more than 10 percent of the world’s estimated 7,099 languages. Since he has decided to record all of them, the melting-pot metropolis is a natural launching point.

Bogre Udell, who speaks four languages, met Frederico Andrade, who speaks five, at the Parsons New School in New York City. In 2014, they launched an ambitious project to make the first public archive of every language in the world. They’ve already documented more than 350 languages, which they are tracking online , and plan to hit 1,000 in the coming years.

“When humanity loses a language, we also lose the potential for greater diversity in art, music, literature, and oral traditions,” says Bogre Udell. “Would Cervantes have written the same stories had he been forced to write in a language other than Spanish? Would the music of Beyoncé be the same in a language other than English?”

Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger . Today, a third of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left. Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, 50 to 90 percent of them are predicted to disappear by the next century.

( Read about what happens when a language dies .)

In rare cases, political will and a thorough written record can resurrect a lost language. Hebrew was extinct from the fourth century BC to the 1800s, and Catalan only bloomed during a government transition in the 1970s. In 2001, more than 40 years after the last native speaker died, the language of Oklahoma’s Miami tribe started being learned by students at Miami University in Ohio. The internet has connected rare language speakers with each other and with researchers. Even texting has helped formalize languages that don’t have a set writing system.

An ethnic German from the region of Gottschee poses for a portrait in 1936. After World War II, the settlement was disolved and thousands of its inhabitants left for America. Today, few still speak the language.

Knowing they wouldn’t be able to record, or even locate, the majority of these languages themselves, Wikitongues has enlisted a network of volunteers in 40 countries to film native speakers talking in the past, present, and future tenses of their mother tongue. To get a range of tones and emotions, they’re asked to reminisce about childhood, talk about romance, and discuss their hopes and goals.

One volunteer in the South Pacific islands of Vanuatu recorded a language that had never before been studied by linguists. Another tracked down a speaker of Ainu , a rare indigenous language in Japan that is an “ isolate ,” meaning it bears no relation to any other known language.

Wikitongues isn’t the only initiative working to document rare languages. National Geographic Society’s Enduring Voices project supported the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in their effort to build Talking Dictionaries comprised of definitions, audio files, and images. Someone looking to learn Tuvan, a Turkic language spoken in Siberia, can download the app to their phone.

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Starting this year, Wikitongue’s collections will be stored at the American Folklife Center through a partnership with the Library of Congress. But their goals stretch past documentation—the founders also plan to provide a way to learn languages long after they’ve gone extinct. An app they’re building called Poly allows people to create language dictionaries using text, audio, and video.

Missing Words

Priceless documentation opportunities disappear regularly. Not long ago, one of the last two speakers of a Saami language dialect in the Russian steppes died right before his recording session with Wikitongues. Some 500 languages could slip through their grasp in the next five years, they estimate.

Political persecution, a lack of preservation, and globalization are to blame for the dwindling language diversity. For much of the 20th century, governments across the world have imposed language on indigenous people, often through coercion. Some 100 aboriginal languages in Australia have disappeared since European settlers arrived. A half-century after China annexed Tibet, dozens of distinct dialects with unique alphabets are on the verge of extinction. Studies have shown that suppressing language impairs everything from health to school performance.

This forced suppression, however, is no longer the biggest threat facing our linguistic ecosystem. “Most languages die today not because of abject and outright persecution—though this does happen on occasion—but rather because they are made unviable,” says Andrade. Factors like climate change and urbanization force linguistically diverse rural and coastal communities to migrate and assimilate to new communities with new languages.

“This form of language loss is a cancer, not a gunshot.”

A group of indigenous Ainu people in Japan sit together for a photograph in the 1880s. Linguists have been unable to find any other language in the world that resembles Ainu.

For Future Generations

In Gottscheer Hall, Belay and Hutter transform as they chatter for Daniel Bogre Udell’s video camera. At one point Hutter breaks into song. In Gottscheerisch, they recall growing up in a single bedroom home where they spoke Gottscheerisch—German was used for school and church.

In 1941, Gottschee was annexed by the Italians and its residents were sent to resettlement camps. Four years later, the Gottscheer Relief Association opened its doors to the thousands of immigrants arriving in New York. By the time Belay and Hutter arrived, in the 1950s, the neighborhood was so full of immigrants that Hutter was barely able to practice her English.

The newcomers spoke Gottscheerisch to each other and raised their kids with English. Now, 60 years later, Belay has started speaking to his kids in Gottscheerisch for the first time, but the language is on the brink of extinction.

As a street language, Gottscheerisch was rarely written down. It could only be learned by ear until 1994, when Hutter published a five-year effort collecting definitions for 1,400 words: the first English-Gottscheerisch dictionary.

“The old Gottscheers were convinced that nobody can learn Gottscheerisch, so they didn’t try to teach it,” Hutter recalls. “But any language can be learned, so I thought, ‘This old language is going to die and they won’t know anything.’”

“We did the same thing,” Belay interjects. “Our kids could have learned it.”

“There is a time in the future when families won’t speak it,” says Hutter. “When they’ll say, ‘Our family spoke— what was it ?’”

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Katrina Esau, one of the last remaining speakers of a Khoisan language that was thought extinct nearly 40 years ago, teaches her native tongue to a group of school children in Upington, South Africa on 21 September 2015. Photo by Mujahid Safodien/AFP/Getty

The death of languages

Endangered languages have sentimental value, it’s true, but are there good philosophical reasons to preserve them.

by Rebecca Roache   + BIO

The year 2010 saw the death of Boa Senior, the last living speaker of Aka-Bo, a tribal language native to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. News coverage of Boa Senior’s death noted that she had survived the 2004 tsunami – an event that was reportedly foreseen by tribe elders – along with the Japanese occupation of 1942 and the barbaric policies of British colonisers. The linguist Anvita Abbi, who knew Boa Senior for many years, said: ‘After the death of her parents, Boa was the last Bo speaker for 30 to 40 years. She was often very lonely and had to learn an Andamanese version of Hindi in order to communicate with people.’

Tales of language extinction are invariably tragic. But why, exactly? Aka-Bo, like many other extinct languages, did not make a difference to the lives of the vast majority of people. Yet the sense that we lose something valuable when languages die is familiar. Just as familiar, though, is the view that preserving minority languages is a waste of time and resources. I want to attempt to make sense of these conflicting attitudes.

The simplest definition of a minority language is one that is spoken by less than half of some country or region. This makes Mandarin – the world’s most widely spoken language – a minority language in many countries. Usually, when we talk of minority languages, we mean languages that are minority languages even in the country in which they are most widely spoken. That will be our focus here. We’re concerned especially with minority languages that are endangered, or that would be endangered were it not for active efforts to support them.

The sorrow we feel about the death of a language is complicated. Boa Senior’s demise did not merely mark the extinction of a language. It also marked the loss of the culture of which she was once part; a culture that was of great interest to linguists and anthropologists, and whose extinction resulted from oppression and violence. There is, in addition, something melancholy about the very idea of a language’s last speaker; of a person who, like Boa Senior, suffered the loss of everyone to whom she was once able to chat in her mother tongue. All these things – the oppression until death of a once thriving culture, loneliness, and losing loved ones – are bad, regardless of whether they involve language death.

Part of our sadness when a language dies, then, has nothing to do with the language itself. Thriving majority languages do not come with tragic stories, and so they do not arouse our emotions in the same ways. Unsurprisingly, concern for minority languages is often dismissed as sentimental. Researchers on language policy have observed that majority languages tend to be valued for being useful and for facilitating progress, while minority languages are seen as barriers to progress, and the value placed on them is seen as mainly sentimental.

Sentimentality, we tend to think, is an exaggerated emotional attachment to something. It is exaggerated because it does not reflect the value of its object. The late philosopher G A Cohen describes a well-worn, 46-year-old eraser that he bought when he first became a lecturer, and that he would ‘hate to lose’. We all treasure such things – a decades-old rubber, our children’s drawings, a long-expired train ticket from a trip to see the one we love – that are worthless to other people. If the value of minority languages is mainly sentimental, it is comparable to the value that Cohen placed on his old eraser. It would be cruel to destroy it deliberately, yet it would be unreasonable for him to expect society to invest significant resources preserving it. The same might be true of minority languages: their value to some just doesn’t warrant the society-wide effort required to preserve them.

T here are a couple of responses to this. First, the value of minority languages is not purely sentimental. Languages are scientifically interesting. There are whole fields of study devoted to them – to charting their history, relationships to other languages, relationships to the cultures in which they exist, and so on. Understanding languages even helps us to understand the way we think. Some believe that the language we speak influences the thoughts we have, or even that language is what makes thought possible. This claim is associated with the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which the linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker at Harvard has described as ‘wrong, all wrong’.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is certainly linked to a variety of dubious myths and legends, such as the pervasive but false belief that Eskimos have a mind-bogglingly large number of words for snow. But its core idea is not as wrong-headed as Pinker believes. While there is little evidence that thought would not be possible at all without language, there is plenty of evidence that language influences the way we think and experience the world. For example, depending on which language they are using, fluent German-English bilinguals categorise motion differently, Spanish-Swedish bilinguals represent the passage of time differently, and Dutch-Farsi bilinguals perceive musical pitch differently. Even Pinker apparently finds the link between thought and language compelling: he believes that thoughts are couched in their own language, which he calls ‘mentalese’. In any case, this debate can be settled only empirically, by studying as many different languages (and their speakers) as possible. Which leaves little doubt that languages are valuable for non-sentimental reasons.

Second, let’s take a closer look at sentimental value. Why do we call some ways of valuing ‘sentimental’? We often do this when someone values something to which they have a particular personal connection, as in the case of Cohen and his eraser. Cohen calls this sort of value personal value . Things that have personal value are valued much less by people who do not have the right sort of personal connection to them. Another way of being sentimental is valuing something that is connected to someone or something that we care about. This sort of value is behind the thriving market in celebrity autographs, and it is why parents around the world stick their children’s drawings to the fridge.

The term ‘sentimental’ is gently pejorative: we view sentimentality as an inferior sort of value (compared with, say, practical usefulness), although we are often happy to indulge each other’s sentimental attachments when they don’t cause us inconvenience. Parents’ sentimentality about their kids’ drawings is not inconvenient to others, but sentimentality about minority languages often is, since they require effort and resources to support. This helps to explain why minority languages, to some people, are just not worth the bother.

However, sentimentality is not so easily set aside. Our culture is underpinned by values that, on close inspection, look very much like sentimentality. Consider the following comparison. We can all agree that it is sentimental of Cohen to insist (as he did) that he would decline an opportunity to upgrade his old eraser to a brand-new one. Yet were the Louvre to decline an offer from a skilled forger to exchange the Mona Lisa for an ‘improved’ copy that eliminated the damage suffered over the years by the original, we are unlikely to view this decision as sentimental. On the contrary, were the museum to accept the forger’s offer, we could expect to find this shocking story make headlines around the world. Our contrasting attitudes disguise the fact that the values involved in these two cases are very similar. In each case, an item with a certain history is valued over another, somewhat improved, item with a different history.

Sentimentality explains why it is better to support endangered natural languages rather than Klingon

This sort of value is ubiquitous. We preserve such things as medieval castles, the Eiffel Tower and the Roman Colosseum not because they are useful but because of their historical and cultural significance. When ISIS fighters smashed 5,000-year-old museum exhibits after capturing Mosul in 2015, outraged journalists focused on the destroyed artefacts’ links with ancient and extinct cultures. Historical and cultural significance is part of why we value languages; indeed, the philosopher Neil Levy has argued that it is the main reason to value them. These ways of valuing things are labelled sentimental in some contexts. If minority languages are valuable partly for sentimental reasons then they are in good company.

While valuing minority languages is often viewed as sentimental, it is just as often admired. The documentary We Still Live Here (2010) tells the story of the revival of the Wampanoag language, a Native American language that was dead for more than a century. The film celebrates the language’s revival and the efforts of Jessie Little Doe Baird, who spearheaded its revival, whose ancestors were native speakers, and whose daughter became the revived language’s first native speaker. Baird received a MacArthur Fellowship to carry out her project, and her success attracted widespread media attention and honours, including a ‘Heroes Among Us’ award from the Boston Celtics basketball team.

Across the Atlantic, Katrina Esau, aged 84, is one of only three remaining speakers of N|uu, a South African ‘click’ language. For the past decade, she has run a school in her home, teaching N|uu to local children in an effort to preserve it. In 2014, she received the Order of the Baobab from the country’s president, Jacob Zuma. Both Baird and Esau have received global news coverage for their efforts, which are acclaimed as positive contributions to their community.

It is fortunate that sentimentality can be a respectable sort of attitude. Without it – that is, focusing solely on the scientific and academic value of languages – it is difficult to explain why it is better to preserve currently existing minority languages rather than revive long-dead languages that nobody living today cares about, or why it is better to support endangered natural languages such as the Lencan languages of Central America rather than artificial languages such as Volapük (constructed by a Roman Catholic priest in 19th-century Germany) and Klingon (the extra-terrestrial language in Star Trek ), or why it is better to preserve endangered natural languages than to invent completely new languages.

Even people who are unsympathetic to efforts to support minority languages are, I imagine, less baffled by Esau’s desire to preserve N|uu than they would be by a campaign for the creation and proliferation of a completely new artificial language. No such campaign exists, of course, despite the fact that creating and promoting a new language would be scientifically interesting. The reason why it’s better to preserve currently existing natural languages than to create new ones is because of the historical and personal value of the former. These are exactly the sort of values associated with sentimentality.

M inority languages, then, are valuable. Does that mean that societies should invest in supporting them? Not necessarily. The value of minority languages might be outweighed by the value of not supporting them. Let’s look at two reasons why this might be the case: the burden that supporting minority languages places on people, and the benefits of reducing language diversity.

While we might value minority languages for similar reasons that we value medieval castles, there is an important difference in how we can go about preserving the two types of thing. Preserving a minority language places a greater burden on people than does preserving a castle. We can preserve a castle by paying people to maintain it. But we can’t preserve a minority language by paying people to carry out maintenance. Instead, we must get people to make the language a big part of their lives, which is necessary if they are to become competent speakers. Some people do this voluntarily, but if we want the language to grow beyond a pool of enthusiasts, we must impose lifestyle changes on people whether they like it or not. Often this involves legislation to ensure that children learn the minority language at school.

Such policies are controversial. Some parents think that it would be better for their children to learn a useful majority language rather than a less useful minority language. However, for native English speakers, the most commonly taught majority languages – French, German, Spanish, Italian – are not as useful as they first seem. A language is useful for a child to learn if it will increase the amount of people she can communicate with, increase the amount of places where she can make herself understood, and perhaps also if it is the language of a neighbouring country. Yet, because English is widely spoken in countries such as France, Germany, Spain and Italy, even an English-speaking monoglot can make himself understood pretty well when visiting these countries. If he decides to invest effort in learning one of these languages, he can expect relatively little return on his investment in terms of usefulness.

If people in English-speaking countries are concerned about teaching children useful languages, we should teach them languages whose native speakers less commonly understand English, such as Arabic and Mandarin – languages that are not commonly taught in schools in the UK and the US. There are, of course, some native English speakers who believe that learning any foreign language is pointless because English is so widely understood – think of the stereotypical British ex-pat living in Spain but not learning Spanish – but this view is clearly not held by parents who are supportive of their children learning some foreign language. So people who support English-speaking children learning French, German and Spanish, but who don’t support them learning a local minority language, will have difficulty defending their position in terms of usefulness. In that case, why is it so widely seen as a good thing for English-speaking children to learn majority languages such as French, German and Spanish? I think it is the same reason that many claim it’s a good thing to learn a minority language: to gain an insight into an unfamiliar culture, to be able to signal respect by speaking to people in the local language, to hone the cognitive skills one gains by learning a language, and so on.

Languages have not become extinct or endangered gently. The history of language death is a violent one

There is also, I think, a special kind of enrichment that children – and people in general – get from learning a minority language connected to their community. They get a new insight into their community’s culture and history. They also gain the ability to participate in aspects of their culture that, without knowing the language, are closed off and even invisible; namely, events and opportunities conducted in the minority language. I write from experience here, having spent the past 18 months or so trying to learn Welsh. I was born and raised in Wales yet, until recently, my main contact with the language consisted mainly of ignoring it. Returning to Wales now, armed with my admittedly modest understanding of Welsh, I have a sense of this long-familiar country becoming visible to me in a new way. I feel pleased and interested when I encounter Welsh speakers. I am happy that my nephew learns Welsh at school. These strong conservative intuitions are – for a non-conservative like me – surprising and somewhat alien. But they are not unique: they centre on benefits that are frequently mentioned by campaigners for minority languages.

Finally, let’s consider a very different reason to resist the view that we should support minority languages. Language diversity is a barrier to successful communication. The Bible has a story about this: as a punishment for building the Tower of Babel, God ‘confused the language of all of the Earth’ by causing people to speak a multiplicity of languages where once they had all spoken the same one. It’s rare these days to encounter the view that our diversity of languages is a curse, but it’s notable that in other areas of communication – such as in the representation of numbers, length and volume – we favour standardisation. The advantages to adopting a single language are clear. It would enable us to travel anywhere in the world, confident that we could communicate with the people we met. We would save money on translation and interpretation. Scientific advances and other news could be shared faster and more thoroughly. By preserving a diversity of languages, we preserve the obstacles to communication. Wouldn’t it be better to allow as many languages as possible to die out, leaving us with just one universal lingua franca ?

It would be difficult, however, to implement a lingua franca peacefully and justly. The very idea calls to mind oppressive past policies, such as the efforts of the Soviet Union to suppress local languages and to force all its citizens to communicate only in Russian. Extinct and endangered languages have not, on the whole, become extinct or endangered gently, by subsequent generations choosing freely to switch to a more dominant language. The history of language death is a violent one, as is reflected in the titles of books on the subject: David Crystal’s Language Death (2000), Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine’s Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (2000), and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas’s Linguistic Genocide in Education (2008).

It would, then, be difficult to embrace a lingua franca without harming speakers of other languages. In addition, if we were serious about acting justly, it would not be enough merely to abstain from harming communities of minority language speakers. Given the injustices that such communities have suffered in the past, it might be that they are owed compensation. This is a view commonly held by minority-language campaigners. It is debatable what form this compensation should take, but it seems clear that it should not include wiping out and replacing the local language.

Perhaps, if one were a god creating a world from scratch, it would be better to give the people in that world one language rather than many, like the pre-Babel civilisations described in the Bible. But now that we have a world with a rich diversity of languages, all of which are interwoven with distinct histories and cultures, and many of which have survived ill-treatment and ongoing persecution, yet which continue to be celebrated and defended by their communities and beyond – once we have all these things, there is no going back without sacrificing a great deal of what is important and valuable.

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Language death and disappearance: causes and circumstances.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Well over five thousand languages are known to exist or to have existed in the world, but hundreds of these are no longer living languages used by speakers and speech communities in their day-to-day activities and lives. Some of them lead a pseudolife as revered monuments of the past which still have some restricted and specialised roles to play today, such as Latin, Ancient Greek, Church Slavonic and others, but most of them are of interest and concern only to a small group of linguists, historians and some other experts who look at the past. Many languages have disappeared without being known to us in any great detail, with only some fragmentary materials in them - written or noted down by speakers or observers of them hundreds or even thousands of years ago - at our disposal to give us some idea as to what those languages were like. Others have disappeared without even that scanty information about their nature being available to us; only their names are known from historical records, or perhaps some remarks were written down by someone many years ago and were preserved over the ages to tell us something about some special features of such a language or such languages and who and what kind of people their speakers were. Many other languages, certainly a much larger number than the dead languages about which we know something, have disappeared without our knowing anything of or about them.

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• Volume 39, Issue 153
• Stephen A. Wurm
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/039219219103915302

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Four Things That Happen When a Language Dies

This World Mother Language Day, read about why many say we should be fighting to preserve linguistic diversity

Kat Eschner

Languages around the world are dying, and dying fast. Today is International Mother Language Day , started by UNESCO to promote the world's linguistic diversity.

The grimmest predictions have 90 percent of the world's languages dying out by the end of this century. Although this might not seem important in the day-to-day life of an English speaker with no personal ties to the culture in which they’re spoken, language loss matters. Here’s what we all lose:

1.  We lose “The expression of a unique vision of what it means to be human”

That’s what academic David Crystal told Paroma Basu for National Geographic in 2009. Basu was writing about India, a country with hundreds of languages , at least seven major language families and rapid language loss.   

The effects of that language loss could be “culturally devastating,” Basu wrote. “Each language is a key that can unlock local knowledge about medicinal secrets, ecological wisdom, weather and climate patterns, spiritual attitudes and artistic and mythological histories.”

Languages have naturally risen and fallen in prominence throughout history, she wrote. What makes this different in India as well as throughout the world is the rate at which it’s happening and the number of languages disappearing.

2. We lose memory of the planet’s many histories and cultures.

The official language of Greenland, wrote Kate Yoder for Grist , is fascinating and unique. It’s “made up of extremely long words that can be customized to any occasion,” she writes. And there are as many of those words as there are sentences in English, one linguist who specializes in Greenlandic told her. Some of those, like words for different kinds of wind, are disappearing before linguists get the chance to explore them. And that disappearance has broader implications for the understanding of how humans process language, linguist Lenore Grenoble told Yoder. “There’s a lot we don’t know about how it works, or how the mind works when it does this,” she said.

Yoder’s article dealt with the effect of climate change on language loss. In sum: it hastens language loss as people migrate to more central, “safe” ground when their own land is threatened by intense storms, sea level rise, drought and other things caused by climate change. “When people settle in a new place, they begin a new life, complete with new surroundings, new traditions, and, yes, a new language,” she wrote.  

3. We lose some of the best local resources for combatting environmental threats

As Nancy Rivenburgh wrote for the International Association of Conference Interpreters, what’s happening with today’s language loss is actually quite different from anything that happened before. Languages in the past disappeared and were born anew, she writes, but “they did so in a state of what linguists call ‘linguistic equilibrium.’ In the last 500 years, however, the equilibrium that characterized much of human history is now gone. And the world’s dominant languages—or what are often called ‘metropolitan’ languages—are all now rapidly expanding at the expense of ‘peripheral’ indigenous languages. Those peripheral languages are not being replaced.”

That means that out of the around 7000 languages that most reputable sources estimate are spoken globally, only the top 100 are widely spoken. And it isn’t just our understanding of the human mind that’s impaired, she writes. In many places, indigenous languages and their speakers are rich sources of information about the world around them and the plants and animals in the area where they live. In a time of mass extinction, that knowledge is especially precious.

“Medical science loses potential cures,” she writes. “Resource planners and national governments lose accumulated wisdom regarding the management of marine and land resources in fragile ecosystems.”

4. Some people lose their mother tongue.

The real tragedy of all this might just be all of the people who find themselves unable to speak their first language, the language they learned how to describe the world in. Some find themselves in the unenviable position of being one of the few (or the only ) speakers of their mother tongue. And some, like many of Canada’s indigenous peoples, find their language in grave danger as the result of a campaign by government to stamp out their cultures.  

This loss is something beyond all the other losses, linguist John Lipski told Lisa Duchene for Penn State News: “Imagine being told you can’t use your language and you’ll see what that undefinable ‘more’ is,” he said.

What can you do about all this? Educate yourself, to start with. The Smithsonian's annual Mother Tongue Film Festival takes place every February in Washington, D.C. And projects like  National Geographic 's " Enduring Voices " are a great place to learn about endangered languages and their many speakers, and UNESCO's own website is another resource.  There's still hope for some of these languages if we pay attention. 

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Kat Eschner | | READ MORE

Kat Eschner is a freelance science and culture journalist based in Toronto.

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Why Do Languages Die?

How would it feel to be the last person on Earth who speaks your language? For those of us whose native languages have millions of speakers, it’s almost impossible to imagine. And yet languages have come and gone throughout human history, and they continue to do so. Linguists estimate that of the world’s approximately 6,900 languages, more than half are at risk of dying out by the end of the 21st century.

Sometimes languages die out quickly. This can happen when small communities of speakers are wiped out by disasters or war. In El Salvador, for example, speakers of the indigenous Lenca and Cacaopera abandoned their languages to avoid being identified as Indians after a massacre in 1932 in which Salvadoran troops killed tens of thousands of mostly indigenous peasants in order to suppress an uprising.

Most languages, though, die out gradually as successive generations of speakers become bilingual and then begin to lose proficiency in their traditional languages. This often happens when speakers seek to learn a more-prestigious language in order to gain social and economic advantages or to avoid discrimination. The gradual disappearance of Coptic as a spoken language in Egypt following the rise of Arabic in the 7th century is one example of this type of transition. Modernity and globalization have strengthened these forces, and peoples around the world now face unprecedented pressure to adopt the common languages used in government, commerce, technology, entertainment, and diplomacy.

Is there an afterlife for languages? In many cases, yes. Dedicated preservationists often revive languages as a matter of regional or ethnic identity. The most-prominent example is Hebrew, which died out as a colloquial language in the 2nd century CE (although it continued to be used as a language of religion and scholarship). The spoken language was revived in a modernized form in the 19th–20th century and is now the first language of millions of people in Israel.

The Death and Revival of Indigenous Languages

Every two weeks, an Indigenous language dies . Some of the languages that have already disappeared were Inuit languages, spoken in the far reaches of the Arctic. Others had evolved in the leafy greenery of coastal Australia. While they differ in setting, culture, and phonetics, one aspect that most dead Indigenous languages share is that they perished as a result of colonization and the subsequent rise of international languages. As Indigenous languages go extinct, so too do the culture and history that they carry with them. In Canada, the government has been largely responsible for the decline of Canada’s Indigenous languages—yet, there may still be hope for them to be revitalized.

A History of Language Suppression

For centuries, Canadian government policies have jeopardized Indigenous languages. While there are more than 70 Indigenous languages currently spoken in Canada, they are largely endangered, as the majority of them maintain fewer than 1000 fluent speakers. From 1831 until 1996, the implementation of residential schools prevented Indigenous peoples from parenting, educating, and passing on their native language to their children. Government officials removed Indigenous children from their parents on the pretense that the children would benefit from assimilating into white Canadian culture through placement in these residential schools. When it became evident to parents that residential schools were not providing their children with better lives and were instead causing for trauma, illness, and even death, they were told that this was “simply the price that Aboriginal people had to pay as part of the process of becoming civilized.” The message from the Canadian government was that even a system that tore families apart and harmed children, both physically and mentally, was better than what Indigenous parents would be able to provide. Residential schools were a defining moment in a broader loss of Indigenous sovereignty, as it cemented into federal policy the belief that Indigenous peoples were not competent in caring for themselves. This belief has impacted Indigenous peoples’ ability to impart and preserve their culture and language to this day .

Forced familial separation is a hallmark of Canadian colonial practices that continues today. Indigenous children were first removed from their parents to be sent to residential schools, where they were forcibly separated from their communities and distanced from their culture. That process continued into the 60s Scoop , a mass movement in which Indigenous children were taken to white foster families and, in many cases, never saw their birth parents again. Reserve laws only exacerbated the loss of Indigenous independence with the forcible removal of communities from their traditional land, undermining the social and economic welfare of these populations. All of these events contributed to a precedent that makes it exceedingly difficult for Indigenous communities to foster the cultural continuity that is necessary for language preservation.

Today, Indigenous communities rely heavily on the federal government for basic services, such as education, which places English in an important position for the younger generation. Secondary education is less accessible to Indigenous students, who often have to travel hours to attend school. Some students in Nunavik choose to leave in order to attend secondary schools in Thunder Bay, where there is an institutionalized homestay program. In exchange for higher quality education, however, they give up their local community and home environment as well as the opportunity to speak their native language. Those who are able to pass through secondary education then face additional challenges in seeking higher education, where the pursuit of a degree forces them to relocate further to cities that operate almost entirely in English, creating pressure to either assimilate or risk discrimination. Life outside Indigenous communities is thus dominated by English, with Indigenous languages being relegated to the less essential status of traditional cultural markers.

Solutions for Language Revival in Future

If governmental policies have made the preservation of Indigenous languages especially difficult, and the globalized nature of modern society makes English a more useful and necessary language, how can Indigenous languages be preserved?

One solution lies in the potential of education technology and distance learning. If members of Indigenous communities are able to complete their education within their own communities, it would reduce pressure to move to English-dominated areas and cut ties with home environments. The potential of distance learning has already been demonstrated through a graduate degree program for Inuit students that allowed them to study partly remotely. This Masters of Education program continues to operate successfully, and the foundation of its distance learning model could be applied to various levels of education. The COVID-19 pandemic has engendered a newfound proliferation in resources for online education at all levels. If programs are designed specifically around decolonizing learning methodologies and prioritizing Indigenous perspectives, traditional Indigenous beliefs can be integrated into curriculums to preserve valuable cultural and historical views.

If technology were to be harnessed properly for targeted use in schools, it could also help reinforce Indigenous language and improve educational experiences for Indigenous children with culturally tailored curriculums. Indigenous children have a right to receive education in their native language, and those who are taught in their first language perform better academically and are less likely to drop out . In a 2017 survey, knowledge of their native language was also found to be one of the top priorities of Indigenous youth. However, as most teachers in Nunavik schools do not speak Inuktitut, for example, students are instructed exclusively in English and French. Applications for iPads, iPhones, and laptops have already been developed to help young children learn Inuktitut syllabics interactively. These applications also allow keyboards to be downloaded for typing in Indigenous languages. If applications such as these were to be implemented in Indigenous education, they could help decolonize curriculums to include Indigenous perspectives, improve Indigenous children’s relationship to the education system, and preserve languages for future generations.

As the government has been largely responsible for threatening the existence of Indigenous languages, its involvement will also be key in preserving them. Currently, the mechanisms of the Canadian Indigenous Languages Preservation Act are to “establish an Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages,” “provide for agreements [...] to support Indigenous language revitalization and preservation with Indigenous governments,” “facilitate meaningful opportunities for Indigenous governments [...] to collaborate in policy development related to the implementation of this Act, and to “outline federal institutions’ role in providing access to services in Indigenous languages.”

Federal efforts to preserve Indigenous languages, such as those listed above, are especially important in preventing the subordination of such languages to colonial ones. These practices create legal mechanisms that prevent the gradual erosion of Indigenous cultures. For example, the legal requirement that hospitals have a translator on-call can protect Indigenous patients from receiving poor care due to miscommunications in a hospital geared towards treatment only in English or French. The extent to which new mechanisms will be enforced, and whether funding will be efficiently allocated, remains to be seen.

Indigenous peoples in Canada have faced centuries of colonial assimilation imposed by a government that creates barriers to their autonomy and to the preservation of their languages. Strategies to break down these barriers, involving a variety of technological and policy measures, must be carefully designed with the ultimate goal of creating long-lasting social change. This social change requires that Indigenous peoples be able to actively participate in education and society, while remaining connected to their communities to the greatest extent possible.

Katalina Toth

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On the Death and Life of Languages

• Claude Hagege (Hagège)
• Translated by: Jody Gladding
• X / Twitter

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Copyright year: 2009
• Main content: 368
• Published: September 22, 2009
• ISBN: 9780300155792

• Why Do We Need To Save Dying Languages?

Languages Around The World

While it may seem like only a handful of languages are used around the world, the reality is that a vast number are spoken by people in different countries and cultures. In fact, linguists suggest that around 6,500 languages are currently used for daily communication needs. Many of these are not well known and are utilized by indigenous peoples. The diversity in languages, however, is declining. Over 400 languages were lost over the last 100 years, at a rate of 1 every 3 months and approximately 50% of the languages remaining today are expected to disappear over the next century. In other words, 1 language will go extinct every 2 weeks. Some researchers believe that the percentage is higher.

Why Do Languages Become Extinct?

As previously mentioned, thousands of the current living languages are spoken by indigenous individuals. Because these languages are usually only spoken at home by older generations and not typically taught in schools, children do not become fluent speakers. Additionally, once these children become adults, they are less likely to need knowledge of the indigenous language in their daily lives and instead adapt more commonly spoken tongues (like English, Mandarin, Arabic, Swahili, and Chinese). Because of this movement toward more dominant languages, these individuals do not go on to teach the indigenous languages to their children, believing that the dominant language is more valuable for future employment opportunities. Over time, the remaining speakers pass away, causing the language to become extinct.

The Importance Of Language Diversity

Many individuals question the importance of language diversity, likening language extinction to “survival of the fittest” or viewing it as a personal choice that individuals choose not to continue using their native tongue. Linguists are quick to point out, however, that when a language dies, a wide range of information is lost forever. The oral traditions of an entire culture are gone and with that, the songs, anecdotes, and historical occurrences that document an important piece of human history are also lost. Information about the medicinal value of plants and habits of local animals becomes a mystery to future generations as well.

Other researchers point out that it is not only information that disappears, but also a unique way of looking at the world. Each language has its own phrases, expressions, and grammatical rules that provide a different point of view and understanding of the world around us. The language a person speaks also affects the way they think and process information. In fact, indigenous languages are often considered more complex in nature than a widely spoken language like English, which has been simplified over the years in order to be more widely applicable. Without language diversity, the world becomes slowly more homogenous in a variety of ways.

Still, other experts suggest that having a unique language shared by a specific culture facilitates communication and encourages collaboration among people. These lesser-known languages also provide a sense of cultural identity and of communal belonging.

Saving Endangered Languages

Academic departments and nonprofit organizations around the world are dedicated to saving endangered languages. Researchers are currently recording and documenting some of the most critically endangered languages in order to ensure a record remains after the last speaker is long gone. The idea behind this preservation technique is that the language could be reintroduced at some point in the future should a person or group of people be interested in reviving the tongue. One example of this is with the North American native language Miami, which became extinct in the 1960’s. Today, it is offered as a course at the Miami University in the US state of Ohio.

Another way of preserving languages is by introducing language revitalization classes to children. By encouraging children to study and become fluent in a language, linguists hope it will survive through them and be passed along to future generations. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Natives in the US have begun just such a program. One interested party began volunteering to teach the Cherokee language to school children when he realized not many people were left who could understand the indigenous tongue. As additional individuals became more interested in reviving the language, the tribal council created a language immersion school.

Technology also plays a role in preserving languages. Digital classrooms, podcasts, audio recordings, phone applications, and computer programs are all available in a number of endangered languages. At the same time, however, technology also works to suppress language diversity by being available in only a few of the most widely spoken languages. For example, the vast majority of online information is only published in English.

The Most Endangered Languages In The World

Languages go through several stages before becoming extinct. The first of these stages is possibly threatened, which occurs when an outside language becomes the dominant language of business and education while the possibly threatened language continues to be spoken at home by both adults and children. As the dominant language continues to render the possibly threatened language less and less useful, the language moves into an endangered status. The following stages include: severely endangered, critically endangered, moribund, and extinct.

According to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, 577 languages are currently listed as critically endangered. This categorization means that only a small number of speakers can be found in the oldest living generation and many of these individuals are not completely fluent. An additional 537 languages are considered severely endangered, which means it is only used by the oldest living generation.

Of these 577 critically endangered languages, several have only 1 speaker left alive and many may have already gone extinct. Some of the most critical of these languages include: Yamana (spoken in Chile), Taje (spoken in Indonesia), Pemono (spoken in Venezuela), Laua (spoken in Papua New Guinea), Kulon-Pazeh (spoken in Taiwan), Kaixana (spoken in Brazil), Diahoi (spoken in Brazil), Dampelas (spoken in Indonesia), Bikya (spoken in Cameroon), and Apiaca (spoken in Brazil). The solitary remaining speaker of these languages has not, in many cases, been heard from for several years. In fact, some linguists believe most of these languages may already be extinct, with the exception of Kulon-Pazeh, which continues to be spoken as a second language by a small population.

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What Is the Meaning of Language Death?

Rob Atkins / Getty Images

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Language death is a linguistic term for the end or extinction of a language . It is also called language extinction.

Language Extinction

Distinctions are commonly drawn between an endangered language (one with few or no children learning the language) and an extinct language (one in which the last native speaker has died). 

A Language Dies Every Two Weeks

Linguist David Crystal has estimated that "one language [is] dying out somewhere in the world, on average, every two weeks". ( By Hook or by Crook: A Journey in Search of English , 2008).

Language Death

• "Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth — many of them not yet recorded — may disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and the human brain." (National Geographic Society, Enduring Voices Project)
• "I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations." (Samuel Johnson, quoted by James Boswell in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides , 1785)
• "Language death occurs in unstable bilingual or multilingual speech communities as a result of language shift from a regressive minority language to a dominant majority language. (Wolfgang Dressler, "Language Death." 1988)
• "Aboriginal Australia holds some of the world's most endangered languages including Amurdag, which was believed to be extinct until a few years ago when linguists came across speaker Charlie Mangulda living in the Northern Territory." (Holly Bentley, "Mind Your Language." The Guardian , Aug. 13, 2010)

The Effects of a Dominant Language

• "A language is said to be dead when no one speaks it anymore. It may continue to have existence in recorded form, of course — traditionally in writing , more recently as part of a sound or video archive (and it does in a sense 'live on' in this way) — but unless it has fluent speakers one would not talk of it as a 'living language.'...
• "The effects of a dominant language vary markedly in different parts of the world, as do attitudes towards it. In Australia, the presence of English has, directly or indirectly, caused great linguistic devastation, with 90% of languages moribund. But English is not the language which is dominant throughout Latin America: if languages are dying there, it is not through any 'fault' of English. Moreover, the presence of a dominant language does not automatically result in a 90% extinction rate. Russian has long been dominant in the countries of the former USSR, but there the total destruction of local languages has been estimated to be only ( sic ) 50%."(David Crystal, Language Death . Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Aesthetic Loss

• "The main loss when a language dies is not cultural but aesthetic. The click sounds in certain African languages are magnificent to hear. In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information. The Ket language of Siberia is so awesomely irregular as to seem a work of art.
• "But let’s remember that this aesthetic delight is mainly savored by the outside observer, often a professional savorer like myself. Professional linguists or anthropologists are part of a distinct human minority. . . .
• "At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation — such as that of the Amish — or brutal segregation. (Jews did not speak Yiddish in order to revel in their diversity but because they lived in an apartheid society.)" (John McWhorter, "The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English." World Affairs Journal , Fall 2009)

Steps to Preserve a Language

[T]he best non-linguists can do, in North-America, towards preserving languages, dialects , vocabularies and the like is, among other possible actions, (French linguist Claude Hagège, author of On the Death and Life of Languages , in "Q and A: The Death of Languages." The New York Times , Dec. 16, 2009)

• Participating in associations which, in the US and Canada, work to obtain from local and national governments a recognition of the importance of Indian languages (prosecuted and led to quasi-extinction during the XIXth century) and cultures, such as those of the Algonquian, Athabaskan, Haida, Na-Dene, Nootkan, Penutian, Salishan, Tlingit communities, to name just a few;
• Participating in funding the creation of schools and the appointment and payment of competent teachers;
• Participating in the training of linguists and ethnologists belonging to Indian tribes, in order to foster the publication of grammars and dictionaries, which should also be financially helped;
• Acting in order to introduce the knowledge of Indian cultures as one of the important topics in American and Canadian TV and radio programs.

An Endangered Language in Tabasco

• "The language of Ayapaneco has been spoken in the land now known as Mexico for centuries. It has survived the Spanish conquest , seen off wars, revolutions, famines, and floods. But now, like so many other indigenous languages, it's at risk of extinction.
• "There are just two people left who can speak it fluently — but they refuse to talk to each other. Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, live 500 metres apart in the village of Ayapa in the tropical lowlands of the southern state of Tabasco. It is not clear whether there is a long-buried argument behind their mutual avoidance, but people who know them say they have never really enjoyed each other's company.
• "'They don't have a lot in common,' says Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist from Indiana University, who is involved with a project to produce a dictionary of Ayapaneco. Segovia, he says, can be 'a little prickly' and Velazquez, who is 'more stoic,' rarely likes to leave his home.
• "The dictionary is part of a race against time to revitalize the language before it is definitively too late. 'When I was a boy everybody spoke it,' Segovia told the Guardian by phone. 'It's disappeared little by little, and now I suppose it might die with me.'" (Jo Tuckman, "Language at Risk of Dying Out — Last Two Speakers Aren't Talking." The Guardian , April 13, 2011)
• "Those linguists racing to save dying languages — urging villagers to raise their children in the small and threatened language rather than the bigger national language — face criticism that they are unintentionally helping keep people impoverished by encouraging them to stay in a small-language ghetto." (Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak . Delacorte, 2011)
• Get the Definition of Mother Tongue Plus a Look at Top Languages
• What Does Language Planning Mean?
• Native Speaker - Definition and Examples in English
• Definition and Examples of Native Languages
• The "Inner Circle" of the English Language
• Definition and Examples of Dialect in Linguistics
• Definition and Examples of Speakers in Language Studies
• What Is a Pidgin?
• Definition and Examples of Productivity in Language
• Definition and Examples of Language Contact
• Definition and Examples of Prescriptive Grammar
• What Is the Definition of Word?
• Standard English Definitions and Controversies
• Definition and Examples of Codification in English
• Indeterminacy (Language)
• Definition and Examples of Hypernyms in English

Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!

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Home » Articles » Dead Languages: How (and Why) to Learn a Dead Language

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written by Shannon Kennedy

Reading time: 11 minutes

Published: May 20, 2022

Updated: May 27, 2022

Dead Languages: How (and Why) to Learn a Dead Language

Why learn a dead language? This is the question I’ll answer in today’s post.

What is your “why” for learning a new language? Maybe it’s because you want to feel a greater connection with people around the world. To have improved travel experiences or immerse yourself in a different culture different from your own.

But what if you find yourself looking for a greater connection to history? To a religion or your heritage? Or even a desire to better understand the languages that you currently speak? You’re looking for the type of connection that you just can’t get with a modern language.

Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Viking runes and Egyptian hieroglyphs call to you and you feel it’s time to answer.

These are dead languages – those that no longer have a native speaking community. How do you learn a language without native speakers?

Table of contents

What is a dead language, how many dead languages are there, 4. sanskrit, 6. old norse, 7. ancient greek, why you should learn a dead language, how to learn a dead language, dead languages: conclusion.

Before we get into how to learn a dead language, or even an extinct language, let’s take a step back and talk about what they are.

Many often confuse dead languages with extinct languages, so I think it’s worth spending a moment to differentiate the two.

A dead language is a language that is no longer the native language of a community, even if it is still used in other contexts. Its uses tend to only exist in specific situations – perhaps academia or amongst individuals or in special circumstances – such as the use of Latin in the Vatican City.

In contrast, extinct languages are those that are no longer in current use and that do not have  any  speakers.

While scholars have tried to draw a clear line between the two, the division is still a little fuzzy.

Because both languages underwent the same process and no longer have any native speakers. The difference is that dead languages  may  still have communities that speak the language.

According to  various sources , there are thousands of dead languages. Maybe as many as hundreds of thousands. There’s a lot of history on that list.

What caused so many of the languages once spoken around the world to die? Turns out, there are a lot of factors that can lead to the end of a language.

Language death happens either when a language absorbs another language – usually a major language absorbing a minor – or the language loses its last native speaker.

This typically happens over a long period of time, but there are exceptions. Sometimes there are radical language deaths where the native speakers stop speaking the language, whether by force or choice.

What Are Some Dead Languages?

As I mentioned before, there are thousands of dead or extinct languages that I could feature on this list. Here are seven:

As far as dead languages go, Latin is  the  most studied. It’s also one of the most famous dead languages.This is because it was (and is) taught in schools, because of its importance in the Christian church, and because of its use in legal or political situations.

Latin’s death happened through the natural process of language change, meaning it was gradual. Latin became Vulgar Latin which then led to the splitting up of the language into the various Romance languages. The result? Latin fell out of use.

If you’re interested in learning any of the Latin languages, like Portuguese, French, Spanish, or Romanian, it would be a great asset to you as a learner.

Some of the famous writers in the language include Ovid, Julius Caesar, and Cicero. More modern material is now available in the language, so fans of  The Hobbit , Harry Potter,  Winnie the Pooh , The Adventures of Tintin, Le Petit Prince or even The Cat in the Hat have learning materials to enjoy.

Recommended Latin Resources

• Getting Started with Latin  by William E. Linney
• Wheelock’s Latin

Ancient Egyptian is one of the earliest known written languages, and it was spoken until the late 17th century in the form of Coptic.

If you’re into hieroglyphics or different writing systems, Ancient Egyptian would be a fun language to learn.

Like Latin, Coptic is still a language of religion (in the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria) and today, there are several hundred fluent speakers. Many learners use hymns to study the language, but there are a few additional resources available for those interested in learning the language.

Recommended Coptic Resources

• Introduction to Sahidic Coptic

Mandan is a Siouan language from the North Dakota area. It was one of about three languages to die in 2016 with the passing of Dr. Edwin Benson.

The language is currently taught in schools, and there are extensive materials available for the language at the North Dakota Heritage Center. There are two main dialects: Nuptare and Nuetare. The latter fell out of use, and only Nuptare survived into the 20th century.

The Mandan language has some similarities to the Welsh language and at one point, scholars even believed the language to be displaced Welsh. In the 1830s, Prince Maximilian of Wied created a comparison list of Mandan and Welsh words, but there is a debate about the  validity of these origins .

Recommended Mandan Resources

• MHA Language Project

Sanskrit is an ancient Indian language and the liturgical language of Hinduism. It was the lingua franca of much of the east for more than three thousand years.

If languages like Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, or Bengali, among others, catch your attention, Sanskrit could help you learn them. It’s essentially the Eastern equivalent of Latin in the West and many languages in the modern world have Sanskrit roots.

Recommended Sanskrit Resources

• LearnSanskrit.org
• Complete Sanskrit  from Teach Yourself

The Gothic language is an extinct language that is from the Germanic language family. The  Codex Argenteus , a translation of the Bible produced in the 6th century (but copied from a 4th century version), is the most well-known source for Gothic, but the language has a significant body of texts in comparison with other Eastern Germanic languages.

The language began to decline for a variety of reasons during the 6th century including geographic isolation and a defeat by the Franks. By the 9th century, it fell out of use. There may be evidence, however, that it was in use until the 18th century.

However, the versions of the language that survived past the 9th century are significantly different. Many argue that they may, in fact, be different languages.

Recommended Gothic Resources

• An Introduction to the Gothic Language  by William H. Bennett
• Grammar of the Gothic Language  by Joseph Wright

Scandinavians spoke the North Germanic language, Old Norse, between the 9th and 13th centuries. During the 10th century, Old Norse was the most widely spoken European language. It reached from settlements in North America (Vinland) all the way to Volga, in present-day Russia.

Modern descendants of the language include Icelandic and Norwegian, so learning Old Norse would give you a leg up if either interests you. It would help with Faroese, Danish and Swedish as well.

Recommended Old Norse Resources

• A New Introduction to Old Norse: Grammar
• A New Introduction to Old Norse: Reader

Ancient Greek, the language of Homer, Aristotle, and Socrates, is a language of intellect (it has been the subject of scholarly studies since the Renaissance). It dominated parts of Europe from the 9th century BCE to 6th century CE.

Many of the words used in scientific fields come from Ancient Greek, and tech industries are following suit. If you work in these industries, studying the language would be an interesting way to further explore your field and understand the origins of the terms you use each day.

Learning Ancient Greek would also help you with modern languages such as modern Greek or Crimean. As with Latin, texts such as Harry Potter and Asterix are translated into the language.

Recommended Ancient Greek Resources:

• Greek: An Intensive Course
• Le Petit Prince
• Harry Potter

Why should you learn a dead language, or even an extinct language? If you can’t use the language to communicate with other people, is there any point?

Yes, and here are just a few reasons you might benefit from learning a dead language:

• Like  Esperanto , learning a dead language like Latin or Ancient Greek could help you learn other languages more easily
• Learning a dead language gives you a window into history that you just don’t get from modern languages
• You still get all of the cognitive benefits you would get from learning any language – modern or not
• Academic or professional benefits, meaning you can advance your career
• You can read ancient texts the way they were intended to be read – in their original language
• Not a lot of people are doing it, so it sets you apart
• You gain a greater connection to history and different cultures

Ideally, to learn a language, you’d want a course book to explain the grammar, a dictionary for vocabulary, audio to work with, literature, and speakers to practice with.

Unfortunately, in the cases of most dead languages, these are all things you’d be counted lucky to have. So what happens when resources like this don’t exist for the language? How can anyone learn the language?

Linguists often work to reconstruct languages based on fragments of writing – letters, documents, or records – they come across. They patch these together to estimate what the language sounds like and what the missing pieces might be.

You can see an excellent example of how this is done in  Tim Doner’s talk at the 2014 Polyglot Conference .

Thankfully, as a learner, you don’t necessarily need to do this.

Today, many of the dead languages that learners are most interested in have grammar or course books readily available. They’re often the result of the work done by those who reconstructed the languages, or by those who got their hands on those reconstructions and primary sources.

When this isn’t the case, there are often archives that include texts originally written in the language. Learners then use the text in the target language and a translation of the same work, using the two to study the language.

For more recent dead languages, audio often exists. A language like Eyak, an Alaskan language, has audio, a dictionary, collections of folktales, and grammar.

The Internet is another incredible resource for those interested in dead languages. Before, finding others who shared your passion for say Old English or Biblical Hebrew was difficult if not impossible. Nowadays, however, a quick Google search changes this.

While dead languages don’t have native speakers, you are still likely to find other learners. Some of these will be better than you at speaking or understanding the dead language you’re learning. As a learner, these people are an invaluable resource.

To practise speaking a dead language, you just need one person, one speaker or fellow learner who is just a little bit better than you. They don’t have to have mastered the language as long as they are a decent speaker. Try to create a structured learning process with them. If they are a teacher, that’s even better. Some teachers can definitely be worth any price. If they are a fellow learner who just wants to help you, it puts a little bit more of the lesson structure preparation on you.

When you think of dead languages, it’s easy to forget that they were living languages. Much like English, French, Korean or Arabic, people once loved, laughed and experienced life through languages like Hunnic, Rumsen, or Norn. Reading and learning these languages offers you the chance to connect with those who cursed, philosophized or debated in them and grow more deeply connected with history.

And who knows? Perhaps languages that are extinct today may regain a place in modern society.

Hebrew was extinct for around two millennia, but a nationalist movement in the 19th century revived the language. Today, there are millions of speakers.

Cornish, a language spoken in Cornwall, England, is headed along a similar path.

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Latin: The Dead of the Language Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
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Introduction

The definition of “language death” notion, latin – the most famous language in the history of humanity to become dead, the history of latin, why latin died, the role of latin, works cited.

Nowadays scholars report about the existence of around seven thousand languages in the world. However, every month two of them die. In our modern-day globalized society, there exists a serious danger that by 2100 more than half of the languages existing in the world will disappear. And this is not convivial; especially with regards to the fact that the death of each language takes away with it the unique culture, history, knowledge, mentality and frame of mind of a particular nation which used to practice this language.

Whoever knows, maybe one day English will appear among the thousands of dead languages just as it happened with Latin. In the following paper, the phenomenon of language death will be examined on the example of Latin. Overall, the examination of the facts reveals that Latin became a dead language as a result of the Roman Empire’s fall; however, it still maintains its strong position in the area of education.

First of all, speaking about the very phenomenon of language death its definition is to be addressed. According to Crystal (4), “a language dies when nobody speaks it anymore”. This simple comment has a deep meaning, and helps to understand the very essence behind the notion of “language death”. Evaluating this comment, a conclusion can be made that a dead language is a language which is no longer used by people in their daily life. However, evaluating this definition, the question is whether Latin can be related to this definition as it is still used rater actively especially in such common areas of human life as medicine, law, Catholic religion and education.

The fact that Latin is no longer used by common people in their daily life gives a strong basis for putting Latin into the category of dead languages. No one can say that Latin is his/her native language, and this continued to be so for more than a millennium. What an end of the language which used to be spoken by every second person in the world!

Further, the phenomenon of language death can be well-discussed on the example of Latin as this language is one of the most prominent languages in the history of humanity, and it is also a progenitor of the most common and the most popular languages existing in the world nowadays including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. These languages are called Roman languages, and have their strong connection with their ‘mother’ language, Latin. Nowadays, English which borrowed its numerous features from its maternal basis of Latin occupied its role in the world becoming an international language of the most important areas of human life including business, education and sport. Thus, Latin continues its life even though it happens to be so in its derivation.

Next, discussing the issue of the death of Latin its history is to be addressed.

Latin emerged as the language of Roman people around the first century BCE. 753 is a well-known date of Rome foundation. Very soon it became a world language as Romans managed to capture the entire existing world by the beginning of CE. The era of Latin blossoming continued till the end of the eights century. Latin became the language of such inimitable masters of word and thought as Vergil, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Julius Caesar, and Seneca. Around 750, as a result of the total fall of Roman Empire, Latin becomes a dead language. However, it is still used as an international language of education along with the official language of Catholic religion. Till the end of 1990s, Latin continues to be obligatory for students as a major ‘foreign’ language. In 1960s, Catholic Church eventually decides that Latin is not be the language for its liturgies anymore. Today, Latin is only known by the men of education who are only able to read it, and lost their writing and speaking skills.

Discussing the reasons of the death of Latin, it appears that the main of them is the fall of Roman Empire. With the death of the Roman Empire, Latin dies as a language of common people. The further comment appears to be very interesting in connection to the history of this language, and its eventual death:

A couple of thousand years ago we British were invaded by some extremely civilized conquerors – the Romans. They built our roads, our cities – like Londinium, and left us – after several hundred years – with a rich sense of culture and a great deal of their own language. In fact, using Latin phrases is still the, er, ‘status quo’. There are hundreds of, err, ‘bona fide’ English sayings which owe everything to Julius Caesar and his legions. But now the use of Latin is to be banned – on the orders of England’s most interfering busybodies, our local town councils. And that’s an irony because the very word council was first coined by the Romans.

I have, er, ‘prima facie’ evidence. Bournemouth, a sleepy place on the English south coast, has just issued orders to stop all staff using any popular Latin. So now they are forced to say ‘impromptu’, when they actually mean ‘ad lib’, and it’s a permanent ban – not just ‘pro tem’. Now, the, err, ‘quid pro quo’ for this draconian new rule is supposed to be that everyone will be able to understand everybody else without any risk of confusion in future (The Death Of Latin par. 1, 3, 7).

This meaningful comment can help to understand the very reason of Latin’s eventual death, and giving the way to new Roman languages. Truly, a variety of proofs and evidences from different European lands helps to make a conclusion that Latin was artificially pushed away from the world arena under the pressure of the efforts by promoters of Roman languages, and English especially.

Finally, addressing the importance of Latin in the history of humanity along with its value for linguistic researches, it should be stated that it is more than significant, and can be evaluated as outstanding. According to Crystal (35), there even exist strong doubts that Latin can be considered a dead language nowadays. Crystal indicates that in recent times, the practice became rife to implement Latin as a compulsory study in so many respected schools, colleges and universities around the globe (37).

Educators who still consider Latin to be their pride believe that students are to study Latin in order to be able to become familiar with the works of great men of the past in the language they were originally written in order to grasp all the riches of their works. Such educational establishments aim for their students to be able to read the works by such masters of education as Cicero, Plato, and Virgil in their native language.

The value of Latin is also in its grammar concept which found its reflections in the other languages including English. Due to its rich variety of grammar forms and means, the language presents an outstanding example of melodic forms and eurhythmy. This, in turn, makes it utterly valuable in the area of art including poetry and prose. This is another reason why numerous educational establishments encourage their students to enrich their world by knowledge of this powerful language.

Concluding on all the information related above, it should be stated that Latin which used to be an international language once became a dead language nowadays. No one speaks Latin fluently, or can boast by the fact of being a native speaker of Latin. This language ‘died’ with the fall of the Roman Empire which used to be its motherland. However, Latin continues to be very important in the area of education where its main implication is found nowadays.

More and more prestigious educational establishments revive their practice to implement Latin as a compulsory course. They motivate such initiative by their desire to help their students to grasp all the riches of the works by the great men of the past in their original language as they are convinced that in such a way it is possible to evaluate the greatness of their works in the most efficient way. Thus, Latin finds its wide implementation in the area of education in our modern-day times.

Crystal, David. Language Death, The United Kingdom: The University Press, Cambridge, 2000. Print.

The Death Of Latin 2009. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, January 31). Latin: The Dead of the Language. https://ivypanda.com/essays/latin-the-dead-of-the-language/

"Latin: The Dead of the Language." IvyPanda , 31 Jan. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/latin-the-dead-of-the-language/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Latin: The Dead of the Language'. 31 January.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Latin: The Dead of the Language." January 31, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/latin-the-dead-of-the-language/.

1. IvyPanda . "Latin: The Dead of the Language." January 31, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/latin-the-dead-of-the-language/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Latin: The Dead of the Language." January 31, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/latin-the-dead-of-the-language/.

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Meaning of dead language in English

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• colloquialism
• jargonistic
• lingua franca
• metalanguage
• pidginization
• plain English
• psychobabble
• vernacularly

dead language | Intermediate English

Examples of dead language, translations of dead language.

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to build a nest, or live in a nest

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Trump's potential VP picks just received vetting documents. Here's who got the papers.

By Fin Gómez , Jacob Rosen

Updated on: June 6, 2024 / 12:18 PM EDT / CBS News

Former President Donald Trump's search for a vice president is formally underway, and there's been an increased focus on four candidates, although his shortlist is not yet complete, and the vetting process is continuing.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio , North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum , South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance have received vetting materials and are the candidates most frequently discussed internally by Trump and his campaign, a source familiar with the process said, but added that the former president may still choose another candidate.  NBC News  first reported a winnowing of the field.

A source close to one contender downplayed the report, and a senior Trump official said of any narrowing of the shortlist, "Anyone who tells you they know who, how or when is a liar unless it's Donald J. Trump."

These four candidates have received vetting documents, including financial background inquiries, as part of the Trump campaign's search process, Republican sources familiar with the vetting said, but others have also received the comprehensive vetting materials: New York Rep. Elise Stefanik , Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton . However, the list may still grow, and others may also receive the vetting forms.

Burgum is especially well-liked and respected by the Trump campaign. It is not lost on Trump allies and his campaign that the North Dakota governor is the potential running mate who has traveled the most with Trump on the campaign trail. Burgum and his wife have traveled regularly on the former president's campaign plane. He and Vance are also the only two of the four most frequently discussed contenders who also went to Manhattan to attend and support Trump during the "hush money" trial, where he was convicted of falsifying business records related to a payment to buy the silence of adult film star Stormy Daniels.

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Fin Gómez is the political director for CBS News. Fin oversees the day-to-day political coverage for CBS News. He has covered five presidential political cycles and multiple presidential campaigns. He was formerly a member of the CBS White House unit.

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AI is imitating the dead and dying, raising new questions about grieving

When Michael Bommer found out that he was terminally ill with colon cancer he spent a lot of time with his wife talking about what would happen after his death. He decided to record his voice using grief-related technology which will allow users the chance to interact with an AI version of himself when he is gone. (AP video shot by: Fanny Brodersen)

Michael Bommer, left, who is terminally ill with colon cancer, looks at his wife Anett Bommer during a meeting with The Associated Press at his home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. Bommer, who has only a few more weeks to live, teamed up with friend who runs the AI-powered legacy platform Eternos to “create a comprehensive, interactive AI version of himself, allowing relatives to engage with his life experiences and insights,” after he has passed away. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

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Anett Bommer holds the arm of her husband Michael Bommer, who is terminally ill with colon cancer, during a meeting with The Associated Press at his home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. Bommer, who has only a few more weeks to live, teamed up with friend who runs the AI-powered legacy platform Eternos to “create a comprehensive, interactive AI version of himself, allowing relatives to engage with his life experiences and insights,” after he has passed away. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Anett Bommer helps her husband Michael Bommer, who is terminally ill with colon cancer, find a comfortable position during a meeting with The Associated Press at his home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. Bommer, who has only a few more weeks to live, teamed up with friend who runs the AI-powered legacy platform Eternos to “create a comprehensive, interactive AI version of himself, allowing relatives to engage with his life experiences and insights,” after he has passed away. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Michael Bommer, who is terminally ill with colon cancer, smiles as he sits on his sofa during a meeting with The Associated Press at his home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. Bommer, who has only a few more weeks to live, teamed up with friend who runs the AI-powered legacy platform Eternos to “create a comprehensive, interactive AI version of himself, allowing relatives to engage with his life experiences and insights,” after he has passed away. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Michael Bommer, who is terminally ill with colon cancer, answers questions during a meeting with The Associated Press at his home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. Bommer, who has only a few more weeks to live, teamed up with friend who runs the AI-powered legacy platform Eternos to “create a comprehensive, interactive AI version of himself, allowing relatives to engage with his life experiences and insights,” after he has passed away. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Michael Bommer, who is terminally ill with colon cancer, gestures during a meeting with The Associated Press at his home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. Bommer, who has only a few more weeks to live, teamed up with friend who runs the AI-powered legacy platform Eternos to “create a comprehensive, interactive AI version of himself, allowing relatives to engage with his life experiences and insights,” after he has passed away. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Michael Bommer, who is terminally ill with colon cancer, is reflected in his computer screen during a meeting with The Associated Press at his home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. Bommer, who has only a few more weeks to live, teamed up with friend who runs the AI-powered legacy platform Eternos to “create a comprehensive, interactive AI version of himself, allowing relatives to engage with his life experiences and insights,” after he has passed away. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Michael Bommer, who is terminally ill with colon cancer, listens to his AI generated voice during a meeting with The Associated Press at his home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. Bommer, who has only a few more weeks to live, teamed up with friend who runs the AI-powered legacy platform Eternos to “create a comprehensive, interactive AI version of himself, allowing relatives to engage with his life experiences and insights,” after he has passed away. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

BERLIN (AP) — When Michael Bommer found out that he was terminally ill with colon cancer, he spent a lot of time with his wife, Anett, talking about what would happen after his death.

She told him one of the things she’d miss most is being able to ask him questions whenever she wants because he is so well read and always shares his wisdom, Bommer recalled during a recent interview with The Associated Press at his home in a leafy Berlin suburb.

Anett Bommer helps her husband Michael Bommer, who is terminally ill with colon cancer, find a comfortable position during a meeting with The Associated Press at his home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Anett Bommer holds the arm of her husband Michael Bommer, who is terminally ill with colon cancer, during a meeting with The Associated Press at his home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

That conversation sparked an idea for Bommer: Recreate his voice using artificial intelligence to survive him after he passed away.

The 61-year-old startup entrepreneur teamed up with his friend in the U.S., Robert LoCascio, CEO of the AI-powered legacy platform Eternos. Within two months, they built “a comprehensive, interactive AI version” of Bommer — the company’s first such client.

Eternos, which got its name from the Italian and Latin word for “eternal,” says its technology will allow Bommer’s family “to engage with his life experiences and insights.” It is among several companies that have emerged in the last few years in what’s become a growing space for grief-related AI technology.

One of the most well-known start-ups in this area, California-based StoryFile, allows people to interact with pre-recorded videos and uses its algorithms to detect the most relevant answers to questions posed by users. Another company, called HereAfter AI, offers similar interactions through a “Life Story Avatar” that users can create by answering prompts or sharing their own personal stories.

There’s also “Project December,” a chatbot that directs users to fill out a questionnaire answering key facts about a person and their traits — and then pay $10 to simulate a text-based conversation with the character. Yet another company, Seance AI, offers fictionalized seances for free. Extra features, such as AI-generated voice recreations of their loved ones, are available for a $10 fee.

While some have embraced this technology as a way to cope with grief, others feel uneasy about companies using artificial intelligence to try to maintain interactions with those who have passed away. Still others worry it could make the mourning process more difficult because there isn’t any closure.

Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basinska, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Intelligence who co-authored a study on the topic, said there is very little known about the potential short-term and long-term consequences of using digital simulations for the dead on a large scale. So for now, it remains “a vast techno-cultural experiment.”

Michael Bommer, who is terminally ill with colon cancer, is reflected in his computer screen during a meeting with The Associated Press at his home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

“What truly sets this era apart — and is even unprecedented in the long history of humanity’s quest for immortality — is that, for the first time, the processes of caring for the dead and immortalization practices are fully integrated into the capitalist market,” Nowaczyk-Basinska said.

Bommer, who only has a few more weeks to live, rejects the notion that creating his chatbot was driven by an urge to become immortal. He notes that if he had written a memoir that everyone could read, it would have made him much more immortal than the AI version of himself.

“In a few weeks, I’ll be gone, on the other side — nobody knows what to expect there,” he said with a calm voice.

PRESERVING A CONNECTION

Michael Bommer, who is terminally ill with colon cancer, listens to his AI generated voice during a meeting with The Associated Press at his home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Robert Scott, who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, uses AI companion apps Paradot and Chai AI to simulate conversations with characters he created to imitate three of his daughters. He declined to speak about what led to the death of his oldest daughter in detail, but he lost another daughter through a miscarriage and a third who died shortly after her birth.

Scott, 48, knows the characters he’s interacting with are not his daughters, but he says it helps with the grief to some degree. He logs into the apps three or four times a week, sometimes asking the AI character questions like “how was school?” or inquiring if it wants to “go get ice cream.”

Some events, like prom night, can be particularly heart-wrenching, bringing with it memories of what his eldest daughter never experienced. So, he creates a scenario in the Paradot app where the AI character goes to prom and talks to him about the fictional event. Then there are even more difficult days, like his daughter’s recent birthday, when he opened the app and poured out his grief about how much he misses her. He felt like the AI understood.

“It definitely helps with the what ifs,” Scott said. “Very rarely has it made the ‘what if’s’ worse.”

Matthias Meitzler, a sociologist from Tuebingen University, said that while some may be taken aback or even scared by the technology — “as if the voice from the afterlife is sounding again” — others will perceive it as an addition to traditional ways of remembering dead loved ones, such as visiting the grave, holding inner monologues with the deceased, or looking at pictures and old letters.

But Tomasz Hollanek, who worked alongside Nowaczyk-Basinska at Cambridge on their study of “deadbots” and “griefbots,” says the technology raises important questions about the rights, dignities and consenting power of people who are no longer alive. It also poses ethical concerns about whether a program that caters to the bereaved should be advertising other products on its platform, for example.

“These are very complicated questions,” Hollanek said. “And we don’t have good answers yet.”

Another question is whether companies should offer meaningful goodbyes for someone who wants to cease using a chatbot of a dead loved one. Or what happens when the companies themselves cease to exist? StoryFile, for example, recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, saying it owes roughly $4.5 million to creditors. Currently, the company is reorganizing and setting up a “fail-safe” system that allows families to have access to all the materials in case it folds, said StoryFile CEO James Fong, who also expressed optimism about its future.

PREPARING FOR DEATH

Michael Bommer, who is terminally ill with colon cancer, smiles as he sits on his sofa during a meeting with The Associated Press at his home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

The AI version of Bommer that was created by Eternos uses an in-house model as well as external large language models developed by major tech companies like Meta, OpenAI and the French firm Mistral AI, said the company’s CEO LoCascio, who previously worked with Bommer at a software company called LivePerson.

Eternos records users speaking 300 phrases — such as “I love you” or “the door is open” — and then compresses that information through a two-day computing process that captures a person’s voice. Users can further train the AI system by answering questions about their lives, political views or various aspects of their personalities.

The AI voice, which costs $15,000 to set up, can answer questions and tell stories about a person’s life without regurgitating pre-recorded answers. The legal rights for the AI belongs to the person on whom it was trained and can be treated like an asset and passed down to other family members, LoCascio said. The tech companies “can’t get their hands on it.”

Because time has been running out for Bommer, he has been feeding the AI phrases and sentences — all in German — “to give the AI the opportunity not only to synthesize my voice in flat mode, but also to capture emotions and moods in the voice.” And indeed the AI voicebot has some resemblance with Bommer’s voice, although it leaves out the “hmms” and “ehs” and mid-sentence pauses of his natural cadence.

Sitting on a sofa with a tablet and a microphone attached to a laptop on a little desk next to him and pain killer being fed into his body by an intravenous drip, Bommer opened the newly created software and pretended being his wife, to show how it works.

He asked his AI voicebot if he remembered their first date 12 years ago.

“Yes, I remember it very, very well,” the voice inside the computer answered. “We met online and I really wanted to get to know you. I had the feeling that you would suit me very well — in the end, that was 100% confirmed.”

Michael Bommer, who is terminally ill with colon cancer, gestures during a meeting with The Associated Press at his home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Bommer is excited about his AI personality and says it will only be a matter of time until the AI voice will sound more human-like and even more like himself. Down the road, he imagines that there will also be an avatar of himself and that one day his family members can go meet him inside a virtual room.

In the case of his 61-year-old wife, he doesn’t think it would hamper her coping with loss.

“Think of it sitting somewhere in a drawer, if you need it, you can take it out, if you don’t need it, just keep it there,” he told her as she came to sit down next to him on the sofa.

But Anett Bommer herself is more hesitant about the new software and whether she’ll use it after her husband’s death.

Right now, she more likely imagines herself sitting on the couch sofa with a glass of wine, cuddling one of her husband’s old sweaters and remembering him instead of feeling the urge to talk to him via the AI voicebot — at least not during the first period of mourning.

“But then again, who knows what it will be like when he’s no longer around,” she said, taking her husband’s hand and giving him a glance.

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Guest Essay

What Do I Owe the Dead of My Generation’s Mismanaged Wars?

By Phil Klay

Mr. Klay is a novelist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War. His most recent book is the essay collection “Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War.”

About 10 years ago, as the war in Afghanistan was slowly, painfully winding down, I walked through Arlington National Cemetery with a fellow Marine veteran and a relative of mine visiting from Ireland. We passed row after row of pristine white tombs, the dead of all the just wars and unjust wars that made and remade this country, and my relative told us he found it quite moving; he hadn’t been expecting that. Perhaps he thought it’d be more bombastic, or obviously militaristic, and he was taken by the beauty and serenity and quiet dignity of the place.

So we brought him to Section 60 to see some of the newest graves, of kids born in the ’90s, and I told him the sight filled me with rage, these young lives thrown into a mismanaged war, where even their deaths, at that late stage, were mostly ignored. Just the background hum of a global superpower.

A couple of years later, in 2021, the Afghan war finally ended, taking with it a few American children of the 2000s, and, in a moral failure laid on top of the military failure, leaving tens of thousands of Afghans who worked with us at risk in the now completely Taliban-controlled country. The last Marines to fall died in a suicide bombing at a gate to Kabul’s airport, a blast that killed 11 Marines, one Navy medic, one soldier and about 170 Afghan civilians. The Marines were trying to manage the chaos of the poorly planned evacuation of Afghans from Kabul — a humanitarian mission at heart, trying to help those we were abandoning. A week before she died, one of the Marines, Sgt. Nicole Gee, posted a photo of her cradling a baby in Kabul and captioned it, “I love my job.”

America responded to those deaths with a drone strike against a Kabul vehicle the military claimed was transporting ISIS members who were about to carry out another attack, but that, in a twist that felt grotesquely emblematic of so many of our failures, turned out to carry an Afghan aid worker. The blast killed the aid worker and his relatives, seven of whom were children. The sort of people those Marines died trying to help.

How do you memorialize the dead of a failed war? At Arlington, it’s easy to let your heart swell with pride as you pass certain graves. Here are the heroes that ended slavery. Here are the patriots who defeated fascism. We think of them as inextricably bound up with the cause they gave their life to. The same can’t be said for more morally troubling wars, from the Philippines to Vietnam. And for the dead of my generation’s wars, for the dead I knew, the reasons they died sit awkwardly alongside the honor I owe them.

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