Talk:List of revived languages

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Histories of these languages always fascinated me. Unfortunately I am neither linguist, nor historian, so please excuse me for my clumsy efforts to present these amazing feats, outstanding in the sea of hundreds of extinct and dying languages. Mikkalai 00:58, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Rename Article

While a list of languages that were formerly reduced but have regained some status or use is a good idea, it simply isn't possible to 'survive oblivion'. A better name would be List of Revived Languages.

You probably mean List of revived languages. It was late night when I wrote this aricle, and I had no good title, but I really wanted to start it. Let us wait 5 days. If no one suggests anything even smarter, then I will move to this title. Mikkalai 08:41, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I think this entire article needs to be rewritten or removed. Read below and many of the "revived" languages listed in the article are still continuing towards extinction (Provencal, Irish), while others (Czech) were never in a position needing revival in the first place.
This article could stand improvement but scarcely deserves deletion as proposed by the preceeding anonymous [!] writer (I'm appalled by people's readiness, eagerness, to dispose of other people's work.) It should be renamed, and it's been nearly three years beyond the abovementioned five days. I'll wait five days more and then truncate the name to "Revived languages" if there is no objection. Robert Greer (talk) 21:38, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Improve conciseness

I just finished cleaning-up the grammar in the paragraph on Mirandese, but the paragraph is still a bit long-winded. It seems like a lot of this information belongs in the main article on Mirandese. The same could probably be said of Belarusian. --InformationalAnarchist 28 June 2005 14:21 (UTC)

I removed Welsh from the list, as I think it's more accurate to say Welsh has been preserved rather than revived. Everyking 06:33, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

Welsh should not be on this list. Although the number of speakers dropped to a small percentage of those in former times it never died, unlike Cornish. Both languages are growing and being reinvigorated at the moment, with the number of speakers and those with knowledge of the language increasing, and in that sense they're both revived but there is a continuity with Welsh that does not exist with Cornish. Thryduulf 12:09, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Does Irish belong here?

The Irish language may be the first official language of Ireland, but as a spoken and literary language it is widely considered to be in danger of extinction. Should a still-endangered language be on this list? RMoloney (talk) 10:37, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

If it's no longer "endangered" and now "revived", then it should be here. I would place Welsh on this list, but I don't know if it could ever have been considered "near extinction", though it was certainly surpressed and declined. The Jade Knight 21:17, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Provençal

Neither the article on Provençal nor the entry here show that it was ever endangered and has since made a revival. Why is it listed here? The Jade Knight 21:17, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't understand why occitan is here! It's almost extinct and there's no revival!KekoDActyluS 18:18, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The Czech language

I really don't think Czech belongs to this list. For one thing, it hasn't had, as far as I know, less than 2 million speakers for centuries. Germanisation was present, at least to a limited degree, but was never successful. The Czechs have had their university (in Prague) longer than Slovaks, and a written standard of the Czech language has existed for a very long time. In fact, no effort needed ever be made to revive the language. I think Slovak would be more relevant in this context, because huge efforts were made by the Hungarian government to magyarise the Slovak population in the past. Many people were magyarised, but this was put to an end by the early 1900s. Well, so much for the Czech "revival". —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Michal Tomlein (talk • contribs) 09:18, 5 April 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Galician

I stumbled across this article by chance, and upon reading the Galician section, stopped to pause. It needed some polishing by a native speaker of English (which I did), but there appears to be some serious POV-pushing in the section, which is why I tagged it. I am not qualified to address the factual content of the article; could we have someone who is take a look at it and fix it? There are a number of redlinks that I cannot decipher, and the first sentence of the section is saying that Galician is the same language as Portuguese. I think what the writer was attempting to convey was that modern Portuguese and Galician share a common source language, but I'm not sure about that either. Horologium talk - contrib 23:51, 27 May 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Definitions

Should there be a distinction between (1) languages that have had no native speakers for some considerable period, and then been revived on the basis of written records, comparative linguistics etc, and (2) languages which have been brought back from the verge of extinction when there were still some native speakers, or at least recordings of recently deceased speakers? The point being that (1) is a lot harder to do than (2) and gives rise to special technical and sociolinguistic problems. For instance Cornish falls into class (1) since there were around 100 years when nobody could converse in the language, whereas Manx comes under (2) since there have always been fluent speakers although intergenerational transmission broke down towards the end of the nineteenth century. If (1) are "Revived Languages" what should (2) be called? Mongvras 22:36, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Btw shouldn't Maori be on this list, the Hawaiians got most of their methods from the Maori I believe.

[edit] Bias and scope

At best, this article is highly biased toward languages in Europe. More critically, this isn't really a list and (as noted above by User:Mongvras) there don't seem to be any criteria for inclusion here. The cases of Czech and Cornish really have nothing in common. A rigorous definiton would limit the list to the extreme cases of true revival of dead languages in which case it would be a short list; maybe only Hebrew, Cornish, and Manx. Since language revival isn't a particularly long article, another possibility is to merge relevant portions of this article (ideally ones that aren't duplicated at the individual language articles) into it and make this a redirect. — AjaxSmack 05:26, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Catalan

Catalan was never a death language, it was banned in some period, but never a death language. I don't think that Catalan belongs to this list. --Enkiduk (talk) 05:45, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Reposted from above 1 Rename Article

... It should be renamed, and it's been nearly three years beyond the abovementioned five days. I'll wait five days more and then truncate the name to "Revived languages" if there is no objection. Robert Greer (talk) 16:26, 23 December 2007 (UTC)