Specific Examples
Total revival of a "dead" language (in the sense of having no native speakers) into a self-sustaining community of several million first language speakers has happened only once, in the case of the Hebrew language, now the national language of Israel. In this case, there was a unique set of historical and cultural characteristics that facilitated the revival (see Revival of the Hebrew language).
However, during several periods in the past, literary languages without native speakers nonetheless enjoyed great prestige and practical use as lingua francas, often counting millions of fluent speakers at a time. In many such cases, a decline in the use of the literary language, sometimes precipitous, was later accompanied by a strong renewal. This happened, for example, in the revival of Latin in the Renaissance, and the revival of Sanskrit in the early centuries A.D. Many of these literary languages, although having few or no native speakers, were far from "dead", and were quite often used even in extemporaneous speech. This type of situation exists to this day in Arabic-speaking areas, where the literary language (Modern Standard Arabic, a form of the Classical Arabic of the 6th century A.D.) is taught to all educated speakers and is used in radio broadcasts, formal discussions, etc.
In addition, literary languages have sometimes risen to the level of becoming first languages of very large language communities. An example is standard Italian, which originated as a literary language derived from the language of 13th-century Florence, especially as used by most important Florentine writers such as Dante and Bocaccio. This language existed for several centuries primarily as a literary vehicle, with few native speakers; even as late as 1861, on the eve of Italian unification, the language only counted about 500,000 speakers, many non-native, out of a total population of c. 22,000,000. The subsequent success of the language has been through conscious development, where speakers of any of the numerous Italian languages were taught standard Italian as a second language and subsequently imparted it to their children, who learned it as a first language.
Note that in the case of Italian, and similar situations such as the eventual dominance of modern German, Czech, Finnish and other languages that originated as largely or purely literary languages, is that even though these literary languages by themselves had at one point few or no native speakers, they were dialects of existing spoken languages that already had large communities of native speakers — hence the language cannot reasonably be said to have been "dead". Furthermore, many of the speakers who eventually adopted the languages were already speakers of closely related languages (e.g. other Romance languages or Germanic languages). The uniqueness of the revitalization of Hebrew is that before its revival, there were no native speakers of any variety of Hebrew, and the early community that led to its revitalization was composed largely of speakers of the unrelated Yiddish language (a variety of Middle High German).
Other than Hebrew, there are no cases of completely dead languages revived into communities of larger than a few thousand speakers (often composed largely of enthusiasts, and often not passed on from one generation to the next). The Cornish, though still used in the home into the 20th century, had spent a century extinct as a visible community language. Its revival started in 1904 and there are now a growing number of speakers, currently in the thousands, some of whom were brought up bilingually. The development of revived Prussian started in the second half of the 20th century by the work of Vytautas Mažiulis and others.
Official attempts to revitalise languages under threat from extinction, such as the promotion of Irish in both the Republic and Northern Ireland (see Gaelic revival), Welsh in Wales, Galician in Galicia, Basque in Basque Country, and Catalan in Catalonia have met with mixed success.
In China, too, a few groups of Manchu language enthusiasts are trying to revive the language of their ancestors using available dictionaries and textbooks, and even occasional visit to Qapqal Xibe Autonomous County in Xinjiang, where the related Xibe language is still spoken natively.
Some Amerindian groups have attempted to revive moribund languages.
Hundreds of rare languages have teaching materials available on the web for use by members of the community as well as anyone who wants to learn them. About 6,000 other languages can be learned to some extent by listening to recordings made for other purposes, such as religious texts, where translations are available in more widely known languages.
Often the organization reviving the language chooses a particular dialect, even standardizes one from several variants, and adds new forms, mainly modern vocabulary, through neologisms, extensions of meaning for old words, calques from sibling languages (Arabic for Modern Hebrew, Welsh and Breton for Cornish), or plain borrowings from the modern international languages. Supporters of other variants can feel that the chosen form is not "the real one", and that the original purpose of the revival has been defeated.
In recent times alone, more than 2000 languages have already become extinct around the world. Still others have only a few known speakers; these languages are called endangered languages.
The UN estimates that more than half of the languages spoken today have fewer than 10,000 speakers and that a quarter have fewer than 1,000 speakers and that, unless there are some efforts to maintain them, over the next hundred years most of these will become extinct.
The Endangered Language Fund is a fund dedicated to the preservation and revival of endangered languages.
Read more about this topic: Language Revitalization
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