Cause Of Language Death

Dead Language A dead language is a language that is no longer used in everyday conversations or a language that is no longer learned as a native language. Language death is a process that affects communities that communicate using a variety of language. This process happens when the linguistic competence that these community has of a language is decreasing. Due to that, the numbers of native or fluent speakers of the language of that community will eventually decrease. Language death can happen to any variety of a language including dialects or standard languages. Language death has different causes that depend on the different situation of every society. On the other hand, we can identify three typed of language death. First

First, is by enslaving the minority. Second, by occupying the land and the sources of the natives that they rely on to make them submissive or by making the language of the colonizer mandatory. When the colonizer resort to destroying the economic and cultural basis of a society and force them to shift their language that makes a perfect example of forced language shift. The second type of language shift is the voluntary language shift in which a community of speakers starts to believe that speaking another language other than their mother tongue would be better for them as it will help them find opportunities and enhancing their lives. The main difference between forced and voluntary shift is that in the voluntary shift case the community can still choose whether to speak their original language or not. Language death is usually gradual where the dominating language replacing the original language over a long (hundreds of years) or short (decades) period of time which depends on the different situations of every community of

Latin is no longer used in everyday spoken language in daily conversations. Also, it 's no one native language. On the other hand, Although Latin is still used in the Roman Catholic Church in a religious setting or have some uses in mathematics and medicine communities, Latin cannot be considered a developing language to the extent of most used languages of nowadays. The causes of Latin death are numerous. The most important one is the decline of the Roman Empire which led to the loss of the Latin language. In the Roman Empire people needed to learn Latin to be able to succeed and reach high positions as Latin was standardized and used in all the official institutions of the empire. Due to that, the Latin language spread rapidly. Latin continued to be used in the middle ages and remain the language of choice in Europe. When the Roman Empire began to decline there was nothing to unite the continent so there was no need to a uniform language. Eventually, over a long period of decades the Latin language started to change as every region started to develop its own variety. These varieties became unique and developed enough to be standard languages. Examples of some of these standard languages that we know today are: Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and