extinct language An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers, especially if the language has no living descendants. In contrast, a dead language is one that is no longer the native language of any community, even if it is still in use, l ...

may be narrowly defined as a

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

with no

native speaker Native Speaker may refer to: * ''Native Speaker'' (novel), a 1995 novel by Chang-Rae Lee * ''Native Speaker'' (album), a 2011 album by Canadian band Braids * Native speaker, a person using their first language or mother tongue {{disambigua ...

s and no descendant languages. Under this definition, a language becomes extinct upon the death of its last native speaker, the

terminal speaker Within the linguistic study of endangered languages, sociolinguists distinguish between different speaker types based on the type of competence they have acquired of the endangered language. Often when a community is gradually shifting away from ...

. A language like

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

is not extinct in this sense, because it evolved into the modern

Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...

; it is impossible to state when Latin became extinct because there is a diachronic continuum (compare synchronic continuum) between ancestors

Late Latin Late Latin ( la, Latinitas serior) is the scholarly name for the form of Literary Latin of late antiquity.Roberts (1996), p. 537. English dictionary definitions of Late Latin date this period from the , and continuing into the 7th century in t ...

and

Vulgar Latin Vulgar Latin, also known as Popular or Colloquial Latin, is the range of non-formal registers of Latin spoken from the Late Roman Republic onward. Through time, Vulgar Latin would evolve into numerous Romance languages. Its literary counterpa ...

on the one hand and descendants like

Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intellig ...

and Old Italian on the other; any cutoff date for distinguishing ancestor from descendant is arbitrary. For many languages which have become extinct in recent centuries, attestation of usage is datable in the

historical record Recorded history or written history describes the historical events that have been recorded in a written form or other documented communication which are subsequently evaluated by historians using the historical method. For broader world his ...

, and sometimes the terminal speaker is identifiable. In other cases, historians and historical linguists may infer an estimated date of extinction from other events in the history of the

sprachraum In linguistics, a sprachraum (; , "language area", plural sprachräume) is a geographical region where a common first language (mother tongue), with dialect varieties, or group of languages is spoken. Characteristics Many sprachräume are separ ...

List

21st century

20th century

19th century

18th century

17th century

16th century

15th century

14th century

13th century

11th and 12th centuries

10th century

9th century

8th century

7th century

6th century

5th century

4th century

3rd century

2nd century

1st century

1st century BCE

2nd century BCE

3rd century BCE

4th century BCE

5th century BCE

6th century BCE

7th century BCE

2nd millennium BCE

Unknown date

See also

Notes

References