What makes a language dead?
According to some definitions an extinct language is a language which no longer has any speakers, whereas a dead language is a language which has stopped changing in grammar and vocabulary. Hebrew is an example of a formerly extinct spoken language that became a liturgical language that has been revived to become a living language. There are other attempts at language revival. For example, young school children use Sanskrit in revived language in Mathoor village (India). In general, the success of these attempts has been subject to debate, as it is not clear they will ever become the common native language of a community of speakers. The process of language change may also involve the splitting up of a language into a family of several daughter languages, leaving the common parent language “dead”. This has happened to Latin, which (through Vulgar Latin) eventually developed into the family of Romance languages. Such a process is normally not described as “language death”, because it in
