1350: Declaring a Language Dead Aug 22, 2018

A language can be considered dead when only one native speaker remains. This may seem like nothing more than a technicality, but the somewhat-counterintuitive idea highlights a great deal about how language is used. While that last speaker—or anyone else for that matter—could teach the language to others this wouldn't be natively learned and would therefore be approached with a level of dissonance; it wouldn't be the language of one's thoughts. Moreover, languages are principally for communication, so not only can this no longer be achieved fully, but there could be no reasonable expectation for change in the way that truly living languages morph over time.
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