Languages go extinct when all the speakers and the number of those who know how to make sense and speak/use the language to communicate becomes zero. This is generally because in endangered languages, the new generations of children/adult speakers are not learning the language, which makes the language die or become extinct when the last speaker dies. The reasons for this could be that they just fell out of use or that they were replaced by other languages that were more widely used in a specific region or nation in the world. Linguists can preserve a language by either learning the language and speaking it to become like a “native speaker” or digitalizing a language onto the internet like the language Siletz Dee-ni has been. Siletz Dee-ni got digitalized with one of their language’s few speakers recording how to make sounds and essentially documenting all information, making recordings, capturing sounds, and culture known about it to be able to preserve it forever. A ‘dead’ language can be brought back to life when learners of that language learn it again and study it. A big example is Modern Hebrew, where the mother tongue was revived after centuries of people learned and studied its ancient form to bring back “native speakers” and make it a language that is known again. In order to document linguistic diversity, linguists are doing their best to learn as much about them as possible from the last native speakers alive, making videotapes, audiotapes, and written records of the language both in formal and informal settings with respective translations for learners, and analyzing the languages’ vocabulary and rules. The linguists are then writing dictionaries and grammars digitally with all videotapes, audiotapes, and written records of the formal and informal settings with translations to take advantage of technology and make sure the language/culture/community is preserved.
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