Languages go extinct when not enough people find value in continuing to teach it. In the case of Siletz and other American Indian languages, a big part of the languages' demises was that Indian children were sent to government boarding schools where they were not taught the language. This also happens because certain languages are more popular and useful to learn such as English or Spanish. When a language dies, it takes a lot of effort on the part of native speakers in order to preserve it. In the case of Siletz, one speaker took it upon himself to create an online dictionary for the language with thousands of recordings of himself saying the words. By crossing into the digital world, it makes it easier for a language to persevere; it won't necessarily die with the native speakers, it can be accessed online even after native speakers are nearly gone. K. David Harrison talks about his job as a linguist to document languages, as a large portion of the 7,000 languages that exist will go extinct with their last native speakers. So, he can make recordings of these last speakers to try to preserve parts of the language. It is very difficult to bring a language back to life because it takes a lot of effort and commitment; many people simply don't care enough about small languages to put in the effort to revive them. Siletz is an example of a tribe who went from non-existent to federally recognized, and with this the language had a better chance of surviving. With the digital age, it is increasingly possible to preserve a dying language by documenting it online, but it is very unlikely that a dying language would be revived to the point that it is widely spoken.
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