When a language is only used in a small population of speakers such as in a tribe or a village, it is more likely to go extinct. Since the endangered languages are not widely used and people in the tribe do not travel across the country to communicate and propagate the language; As a result, when the population of the tribe becomes smaller, the language teeters on the brink of oblivion. If a language has died, there are no people whose primary linguistic system and tool of thought is this language, which means the dying of the knowledge written and the record of that language. Linguists help to write the dictionary by talking to the elder and listening to old recordings made by anthropologists in earlier years. A ‘dead’ language could be brought back to life, and Siletz is an example mentioned in our article.
Except for creating the dictionary, an endangered language can also be introduced to younger high school students in school as a foreign language. I remembered the Chinese government issued a similar policy as well in Shanghai recently because they found that teenagers can only understand the dialect but can hardly speak it. People around the world realized the value and importance of endangered languages so that they paid more effort into saving them.
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