Topic summary
Terminal speaker
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Speaker types.
Terminal speakers
A terminal speaker is the final native speaker of a language; when the terminal speaker dies, they end the final step of the language death process, and the language becomes a "dead" or "extinct" language. In the process of language death, the remaining speakers begin to lose some of the vocabulary and grammar of the language. When only a terminal speaker remains, that person will not remember a complete form of the language as it had been spoken by a larger community which used it in all domains.