Language birth and

death
 ‘‘Our language is like a pearl inside a shell. The shell is like the people that carry the language. If our
language is taken away, then that would be like a pearl that is gone. We would be like an empty oyster
shell.”
 The documentation of language decline and death has reached a high level of awareness during the past
decade. The documentation of language birth is an unusual notion, because the birth of languages generally
takes at least a generation, from language contact, borrowing and code-switching, through pidgin
languages used by adult to creoles. Another language birth process, which takes much longer, is the
creation of a new language
The meanings of birth and death applied
to languages
The notions birth and death actually provide more arguments for treating languages as species. Languages
are unlike organisms in the way they are born or die. The relevant processes are protracted, spanning
several generations. The concept of “language birth” is in fact a misnomer of some sort. The birth involves
no pregnancy and delivery stages.
◦ For instance, no particular point in time can be associated with the emergence of creoles as separate
vernaculars from the colonial European languages from which they evolved. Unlike in the case of
organisms, but as in the case of species, language birth cannot be predicted.
The meanings of birth and death applied
to languages
Likewise, language death is used to describe community-level loss of competence in a language, it denotes
a process that does not affect all speakers at the same time nor to the same extent. Under one conception of
the process, it concerns the statistical assessment of the maintenance versus loss of competence in a
language variety among its speakers. Total death is declared when no speakers are left of a particular
language variety in a population that had used it.
A language may die out more or less suddenly when all of the speakers of the language themselves die or
are killed. Such was the case with Tasmanian languages, once spoken on the island of Tasmania, and
Nicoleño, a Native American Indian language once spoken in California. Similarly, a language may cease
to exist relatively abruptly when its speakers all stop speaking the language for the duration of their
lifetimes. Often the reason for this radical change is survival under the threat of political repression.
Indigenous languages embedded in other cultures suffer death this way. In order to avoid being identified
as “natives,” speakers simply stop speaking their native language. Children are unable to learn a language
that is not spoken to them, so when the last speaker dies, the language dies.
Most commonly, languages that become extinct do so gradually, often over several generations. This
happens to minority languages that are in contact with a dominant language, much as American Indian
languages are in contact with English. In each generation, fewer and fewer children learn the language
until there are no new learners. The language is said to be dead when the last generation of speakers dies
out
While not common, some languages suffer “partial death” in that they survive only in specific contexts,
such as a liturgical language. Latin and (at one time) Hebrew are such languages. Latin evolved into the
Romance languages and by the ninth century there were few if any peoples speaking Latin in daily
situations. Today its use is confined to scholarly and religious contexts.
Linguists have placed many languages on an endangered list. They attempt to preserve these languages by
studying and documenting their grammars—the phonetics, phonology, and so on. Each language provides
new evidence on the nature of human cognition through its grammar. In its literature, poetry, ritual speech,
and word structure, each language stores the collective intellectual achievements of a culture, offering
unique perspectives on the human condition. The disappearance of a language is tragic; not only are these
insights lost, but the major medium through which a culture maintains and renews itself is gone as well
The documentation and preservation of dying languages is not only important for social and cultural
reasons. There is also a scientific reason for studying these languages. Through examining a wide
array of different types of languages, linguists can develop a comprehensive theory of language that
accounts for both its universal and language-specific properties.