How does a language die?

A language usually dies when parents stop passing it on to their children. Technically, linguists say a language dies when its last native speaker does, but the real turning point comes much earlier. The most common path is quiet: a community becomes bilingual, the second language looks more useful or more prestigious, and each generation uses the old one a little less. Once no children grow up speaking it as their first language, it cannot outlive the people who still know it.

This is happening fast. Of roughly 7,000 languages spoken in the 2000s, most are endangered, half are no longer being taught to children, and the United Nations estimates that one language is lost every two weeks. Since about 1500, the main driver has been assimilation into a dominant language, often a European one spread by colonialism.

Sometimes we know the exact date. Dalmatian, a language descended from Latin on the Adriatic coast, ended with Tuone Udaina, killed in a road-construction explosion in 1898, a year after a linguist had recorded him. Manx, on the Isle of Man, lost its last native speaker, the fisherman Ned Maddrell, in 1974. But Manx did not stay silent: thanks to old recordings and books, learners revived it, and today some children go to school in Manx.