Language Death

Language death occurs when a language loses its last native speaker, and language extinction follows once the language becomes entirely unknown even to second-language speakers. About half of the world's spoken languages are not being taught to new generations of children, and once a language stops being passed on as a first tongue, transmission ends and it will not survive past the generations who still speak it. Education plays a central role in this process: the decline of the Ainu language in Japan is attributed in part to compulsory education conducted in Japanese, which enforced linguistic assimilation among Ainu children. The anthropologist Akira Yamamoto identified nine factors that can help prevent language death, including establishing school programs that are both bilingual and bicultural and ensuring native speakers receive teacher training, both aimed at keeping intergenerational transmission of an endangered language alive. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/