Languages go extinct when there is no one left to speak it conversationally and documentation of the language becomes sparse. One point of interest on this is that many speakers of dying languages are elderly and the language tends to degenerate with the speaker’s health. When a language dies it is quite difficult for it to recover since oral teaching is significant when it comes to linguistics. One technique that has become prevalent for languages is to record one’s language phrases and send them online. This has happened with American Indian Languages like the one mentioned in the New York Times article. Initially the language recordings were limited to those who belonged to the tribe but by sending the audio online, the tribe and recorder learned how much of an interest there was to learn languages abroad. However, the article did note that just understanding how to say a few phrases in a language does not constitute a speaker status since competency is lacking in such a case. Although recording phrases and the language as a whole is a way for linguists to help preserve a language, it is not entirely sufficient because there are ideas that can not be expressed simply through speech. Things like grammatical rules can fall into the category of ideas that require a more complex perspective to understand than simple audio recordings. Another way linguists can help preservice languages is to create educational text alongside these audio recordings which requires significant effort and luck because many dying languages are difficult to learn in the first place because the speakers are ill elderly. One idea is that languages can consume each other to create hybrid languages but overall reduce the number of languages out there or cause language to go extinct as a result. This may be more common in more centralized areas as the need for a unified system exacerbates.
A dead language can be brought back to life given that there were resources left behind by the original speakers and enough interest or requirement to speak that dead language. The American Indian language that was supposed to die has recovered slightly but completely dead languages require those complex resources to revive them. Some efforts currently underway to document linguistic diversity would be the work of linguists like David Harrison and also the enabling of diverse foreign language options in schools. One thing that was mentioned that was quite interesting was the education system stifled the development of dying languages. Since there were fewer speakers in a language, often schools would not offer certain languages despite having a language requirement. I understand that personally as I witnessed how few options students were given in high school and middle school regarding language choices. Even here in UR, there are only a few languages that are not in the independent language student program that I am sure many students would appreciate the opportunity to learn. Thus programs like the Self Directed Language Acquisition Program also help to document linguistic diversity here.
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