Introduction

Language death occurs in unstable bilingual or multilingual speech communities as a result of language shift from a regressive minority language to a dominant majority language. Language shift typically involves a gradual transition from unstable bilingualism to monolingualism, that is the loss or ‘death’ of the recessive language. There are two other ways in which a language may perish that are not typically referred to as ‘language death.’ One is a result of its having been transformed into a daughter language, as, for example, the replacement of standard Latin by standard Spanish. Thus a ‘dead language’ (e.g. Latin) does not necessarily arise through ‘language death.’ The other is where an entire speech community has died, as happened with Tasmanian and the Californian language Yaki (Swadesh 1948: 226ff.).

This chapter, following most work on the topic, will focus primarily on the phenomena of language decay that lead or seem to lead to language death. The most important of these are those structural and functional changes that appear to be irreversible, particularly those which cannot be halted in spite of efforts to preserve the dying form or usage. Ideally, one would wish for a comprehensive theory which would predict and explain such irreversible changes.