Life and death

Languages don’t die, they simply evolve, creating new idioms and generating new forms and variants.

The death of a language is an artificial judgement, removed from the realm of language and bathing in the cold waters of objectification. No speaker of a given language has ever witnessed the death of their language.

Languages are pronounced dead by coroners far removed from the scene of the crime.

No speaker of Latin ever woke up one day saying: Latin is dead. Instead they may have woken up one day speaking a language closer to the Romance idioms which developed out of Latin, like French, Italian or Spanish . Speakers of Latin today communicate in code, like Whatsappers using emojis to convey their feelings or programmers using code to elicit responses from a machine.

Usage keeps a language alive.

Languages evolve stealthily. They hit fast and have no patience for linguists or historians to assess their viability. They run through time to the best of their abilities, transforming their speakers and being transformed by them.