Dead Languages

Assimilation The first language ever written down, it outlived its own speakers by two thousand years as a dead tongue of priests and scribes.

Disaster A Bronze Age Canaanite tongue with the world's first alphabet in cuneiform form, buried when its harbour city fell to the Sea Peoples.

Conquest The oldest written Indo-European language, lost when its empire burned and forgotten until clay tablets gave it back its voice.

Conquest The tongue of the Mitanni kings, which left behind the oldest written melody on Earth before it slipped into silence.

Assimilation The voice of pre-Roman Italy, still half-unread, drowned out by the Latin of the empire it helped to shape.

Assimilation The lingua franca of the ancient Near East for two millennia, finally elbowed aside by Aramaic and left to the scribes.

Conquest The language of the Kingdom of Kush, written in its own script that we can read aloud but still barely understand.

Conquest The Celtic speech of Vercingetorix and the druids, conquered by Caesar and worn away by the Latin that became French.

Conquest The sailors' tongue that gave the world its alphabet, silenced in its Carthaginian form when Rome ground its great rival into dust.

Assimilation The only East Germanic tongue left to us in writing, preserved in a silver-lettered Bible while its speakers melted into the nations of Europe.

Assimilation An Indo-European language stranded at the edge of China, whose Western words on Silk Road manuscripts startled the scholars who found them.

Conquest The state language of a vanished empire, written in thousands of fiendishly intricate characters and silenced by Genghis Khan's last campaign.

Conquest The first American language Europeans heard, it gave English 'hurricane' and 'canoe' before its speakers were swept away.

Conquest · Assimilation The only West Baltic tongue that ever reached writing — conquered by crusaders, then printed its own catechism so its speakers could be converted away from it.

Assimilation A pocket of the Gothic tongue that survived in Crimea a thousand years after Gothic died everywhere else, known from one diplomat's word list.

Conquest The language of Newfoundland's first people, gone with the woman who was the last of her nation.

Assimilation The Norse of Orkney and Shetland outlived the Vikings by seven centuries, then fell silent in the mouth of a single fisherman on Britain's northernmost isle around 1850.

Assimilation Its last speaker was not even fluent — and he died in 1898 when a road-builder's explosion went off near where he stood, deaf, unable to hear the warning.

Conquest A whole family of island tongues wiped out within a single lifetime of British settlement, leaving barely enough words to know how many there were.

Conquest · Assimilation A language related to no other on earth, written down from its last two speakers just in time, and silent since 1940.

Assimilation The southernmost Samoyedic tongue, presumed dead for years until one woman in a Siberian village was found still speaking it; she died in 1989.

Conquest · Assimilation It had around 80 consonants and barely two vowels — one of the most intricate sound systems ever spoken. The last man who held it died in a Turkish village in 1992.

Forgotten · Assimilation When Marie Smith Jones died in 2008, a language that had been spoken on the Alaskan coast for centuries went silent inside a single human being.

Conquest · Forgotten A tongue of the Andaman Islands, perhaps tens of thousands of years old. Its last speaker, Boa Sr, spent her final years unable to speak it with anyone.

Assimilation When Hazel Sampson died in 2014 at the age of 103, the Klallam of the Strait of Juan de Fuca lost the last person who had grown up speaking it — its first dictionary finished only two years before.

Forgotten · Assimilation The southernmost language on Earth, from the tip of Tierra del Fuego. It gave the world 'mamihlapinatapai' and, in 2022, lost its last fluent speaker.