Dead Languages

Assimilation The first language ever written down, in cuneiform on clay, it outlived its own speakers by two thousand years — a dead tongue of priests and scribes long after Akkadian replaced it.

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

Conquest The oldest written Indo-European language, lost when its capital Hattusa burned around 1180 BCE and forgotten until clay tablets gave it back its voice.

Conquest The tongue of the Mitanni kings, whose Hymn to Nikkal is the oldest written melody on Earth — before the cuneiform fell silent.

Assimilation The non-Indo-European voice of pre-Roman Italy, surviving in some 13,000 inscriptions but still half-unread, drowned out by the Latin of the empire it helped to shape.

Assimilation · Conquest The language of the Samnites, a Sabellic cousin of Latin: Vesuvius buried Pompeii and, in the same ash, sealed the last graffiti anyone ever scratched in Oscan.

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

Conquest The language of the Kingdom of Kush, written in its own script — phonetically deciphered by Francis Llewellyn Griffith in 1909, so we can read it aloud but still barely understand it.

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 destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE and ground its great rival into dust.

Assimilation The only East Germanic tongue left to us in writing, preserved in Bishop Wulfila's silver-lettered Bible, the Codex Argenteus, while its speakers melted into the nations of Europe.

Assimilation An Indo-European language stranded in the Tarim Basin at the edge of China, whose Western words on Silk Road manuscripts startled the scholars who found them — until Turkic Uyghur settlers displaced it.

Conquest · Assimilation The lingua franca of the Silk Road, carried by the merchants of Samarkand and Bukhara from China to Byzantium for the better part of a thousand years. Persian and Turkic replaced it after the Arab conquest, and by about 1025 it had stopped being spoken.

Assimilation · Conquest It left no text of its own — only the names of hills and rivers like Carlisle and Penrith, and the yan tan tethera sheep-counting numbers still chanted in Cumbria nine centuries after the language fell silent.

Assimilation · Conquest The everyday Romance speech of al-Andalus, Muslim Spain — Latin's child, written in Arabic letters, surviving best in the kharjas, the little Romance refrains tacked onto Arabic love poems. Caught between Arabic and the Castilian of the conquerors, it was gone by about 1300.

Conquest · Forgotten The Old French of the Jews of medieval France, written in Hebrew script — the vernacular the great commentator Rashi used to gloss hard words in the la'azim of his commentaries. The expulsions of French Jewry broke its communities; after the final one in 1394, the language did not survive the scattering.

Assimilation · Conquest The written language of the Christian Nubian kingdoms of the middle Nile — Makuria above all — for seven hundred years, set down in a Coptic-derived alphabet and recovered largely from the dry mound of Qasr Ibrim. The kingdoms fell to Islam and Arabic, and the last dated document in the language is from 1484. After that, silence.

Assimilation · Forgotten The Slavic language of the Jews of medieval Bohemia — essentially Old Czech written in Hebrew letters, even stamped on coins. It died when Yiddish-speaking Jews moved east and the local community switched tongues, leaving only glosses — dozens marked 'in the language of Canaan' in the rabbinic compendium Or Zarua — and a handful of inscribed coins.

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

Conquest The first American language Europeans heard — the Arawakan tongue Columbus met in 1492 — it gave English 'hurricane' and 'canoe' before its speakers were swept away.

Assimilation · Conquest The language of the Jin dynasty that ruled northern China, given its own script by imperial order in 1119. Within five centuries it had evolved into Manchu and lost its name, when Hong Taiji renamed the people in 1635; the last inscription dates to 1526.

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

Assimilation The westernmost Slavic tongue died with Emerentz Schultze on the lower Elbe in 1756; its words survive only in lists made by outsiders who could see the end coming.

Assimilation A pocket of the Gothic tongue that survived in Crimea a thousand years after Gothic died everywhere else, known from about 80 words the diplomat Busbecq wrote down in the 1560s.

Conquest The language of Newfoundland's first people, gone in 1829 with Shanawdithit, the last of her nation.

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

Assimilation Its last speaker, Tuone Udaina, 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.

Assimilation Planted by Norman settlers in 1169, it held a corner of Wexford for seven centuries, then dissolved into ordinary Irish English within a generation of the Famine — Edmund Hore, one of the last speakers, died in 1897.

Conquest · Assimilation The tongue of a people who kept a covenant of peace. After the 1835 invasion of their islands killed or enslaved them, the language faded with the survivors; its last fluent speaker, Hirawanu Tapu, died around 1900. The people endure and are learning it again.

Conquest A whole family of island tongues wiped out within a single lifetime of British settlement, fading with Fanny Cochrane Smith in 1905 and leaving barely enough words to know how many there were.

Assimilation · Conquest Fidelia Fielding, last speaker of this Eastern Algonquian language of Connecticut, filled four diaries with sounds no one else could still hear by her death in 1908; the notebooks are now the only way back in.

Conquest · Assimilation A language related to no other on earth, written down from its last two speakers in 1930s Louisiana by the linguist Morris Swadesh, and silent since 1940.

Assimilation · Disaster Epidemics and war drove it into one man's memory; Sesostrie Youchigant handed it to the linguist Mary Haas in the 1940s, and then it was gone.

Assimilation · Conquest An isolate with a grammar reserved for the voices of cannibals in its winter tales — and, after its last fluent speaker Nancy Raven died in 1957, no one left to tell them.

Assimilation An Ethiopian Semitic tongue whose speakers were shamed into silence. When the linguist Wolf Leslau came looking in 1947 he found only four old people who would still speak it; within a generation it was gone, swallowed by Amharic.

Assimilation · Conquest Mbabaram's word for dog was dug, near-identical to English by pure coincidence — a standing reminder that two tongues can match without sharing a single ancestor. Its last fluent speaker, Albert Bennett, died in 1972.

Assimilation · Conquest A click language of the Angolan desert — the only Angolan branch of its family, spoken by a few dozen herders and fishermen called the Kwepe. They shifted to the Bantu language Kuvale, and by 1981 no fluent speakers could be found.

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

Assimilation Six hundred speakers in 1908, two by 1974, then none — a Cushitic tongue of central Tanzania that emptied out within a single lifetime.

Assimilation · Conquest Laura Fish Somersal told a linguist everything she remembered, then died in 1990 knowing no one was left to answer back.

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, Tevfik Esenç, died in a Turkish village in 1992.

Forgotten · Assimilation When Marie Smith Jones died in 2008, a language spoken for centuries on Alaska's Copper River delta went silent inside a single human being.

Conquest · Forgotten A Great Andamanese 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 Cristina Calderón, its last fluent speaker.