1169: Cornish: Dead or Alive Feb 19, 2018

Cornish is somewhat like the Schrödinger's cat of languages, as it can be considered dead, but also living. This is because usually it is easy enough to say that a language like Ancient Egyptian is dead because there are no native speakers, and scholars didn't even know how to interpret much of it before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Oppositely, English is obviously a living language, and hundreds of millions if not billions of people use it daily, many of whom can only speak English. Cornish, like many other languages, only has bilingual speakers using it, and moreover, it is not a daily part of most of those speaker's lives. None of this is rare for languages, so what separates it is that it was revived; the last native speaker died in the 18th century, and then due to efforts in revitalization for cultural purposes, a couple hundred people learned the language recently. Hebrew has shown the word that it is possible to bring back a language from its status as dead, but students and scholars also know Latin, which does not make it a living language because it is not used natively, or habitually. Ultimately, Cornish is considered a living Celtic language, but given that it had already died, and does not have a body of native speakers, it can also be argued that it is dead. What are your thoughts?
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