User:ElsaJK/Language death

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Linguicide (also known as sudden death, language genocide, physical language death, and biological language death): occurs when all or almost all native speakers of that language die because of natural disasters, wars etc.


 * In the case of linguicide and radical death, language death is very sudden therefore the speech community skips over the semi speaker phase where structural changes begin to happen to languages.The languages just disappear.

Cause of Language Death (add to types on the original article)

 * Death of all speakers: The death of all native speakers in a speech community. Death of all speakers can occur through warfare, genocide, epidemic diseases and natural disasters.
 * Change in the land of a speech community: This occurs when members of a speech community leave their traditional lands or communities and move to towns with different languages. For example, in a small isolated community in New Guinea, the young men of the community move to towns for better economic opportunities. The movement of people puts the native language in danger because more children become bilingual which makes the language harder to pass down to future generations.


 * Cultural contact and clash: Culture contact and clash affects how the community feels about the native language. Cultural, economic and political contact with communities that speak different languages are factors that may alter a community's attitude towards their own language.

Dead Languages

 * The language vitality for Ainu has weakened because of Japanese becoming the favoured language for education since the end of the nineteenth century. Education in Japanese heavily impacted the decline in use of the Ainu language because of forced linguistic assimilation.

Language Change
Language shift can be used to understand the evolution of Latin into the various modern forms. Language shift, which could lead to language death, occurs because of a shift in language behaviour from a speech community. Contact with other languages and cultures causes change in behaviour to the original language which creates language shift.