How would it feel to be the last person on Earth who speaks your language? For those of us whose native languages have millions of speakers, it’s almost impossible to imagine. And yet languages have come and gone throughout human history, and they continue to do so. Linguists estimate that of the world’s approximately 6,900 languages, more than half are at risk of dying out by the end of the 21st century.
Sometimes languages die out quickly. This can happen when small communities of speakers are wiped out by disasters or war. In El Salvador, for example, speakers of the indigenous Lenca and Cacaopera abandoned their languages to avoid being identified as Indians after a massacre in 1932 in which Salvadoran troops killed tens of thousands of mostly indigenous peasants in order to suppress an uprising.
Most languages, though, die out gradually as successive generations of speakers become bilingual and then begin to lose proficiency in their traditional languages. This often happens when speakers seek to learn a more-prestigious language in order to gain social and economic advantages or to avoid discrimination. The gradual disappearance of Coptic as a spoken language in Egypt following the rise of Arabic in the 7th century is one example of this type of transition. Modernity and globalization have strengthened these forces, and peoples around the world now face unprecedented pressure to adopt the common languages used in government, commerce, technology, entertainment, and diplomacy.
Is there an afterlife for languages? In many cases, yes. Dedicated preservationists often revive languages as a matter of regional or ethnic identity. The most-prominent example is Hebrew, which died out as a colloquial language in the 2nd century CE (although it continued to be used as a language of religion and scholarship). The spoken language was revived in a modernized form in the 19th–20th century and is now the first language of millions of people in Israel.