 | This article is missing information about the extinction dates of some of the languages and dialects.(November 2023) |
| Language Endangerment Status | |
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| Extinct (EX) | |
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| Endangered | |
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Related topics | |
 UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger categories | |
This article is a list of languages and dialects that have no native speakers, no spoken descendants, and that diverged from their parent language in Europe.
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| Language/dialect | Family | Date of extinction | Date of revival | Region | Ethnic group |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cornish | Indo-European | 1700s AD [123] | 1900s | Cornwall | Cornish people |
| Livonian | Uralic | 2 June 2013 [124] | 2020 | Livonian Coast | Livonians |
| Ludza | Uralic | 2006 [125] or 2014 | 2020 | Latgale | Ludza Estonians |
| Manx | Indo-European | 27 December 1974 [126] | 1970s | Isle of Man | Manx people |
| Old Prussian | Indo-European | 1700s AD [127] | by 2021 | Prussia | Old Prussians |
| Wangerooge Frisian | Indo-European | 22 November 1950 [128] | by 2020 | Wangerooge | Wangerooge Frisians |
Armenian is an Indo-European language and the sole member of the independent branch of the Armenian language family. It is the native language of the Armenian people and the official language of Armenia. Historically spoken in the Armenian highlands, today Armenian is also widely spoken throughout the Armenian diaspora. Armenian is written in its own writing system, the Armenian alphabet, introduced in 405 AD by Saint Mesrop Mashtots. The estimated number of Armenian speakers worldwide is between five and seven million.
There are over 250 languages indigenous to Europe, and most belong to the Indo-European language family. Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. The three largest phyla of the Indo-European language family in Europe are Romance, Germanic, and Slavic; they have more than 200 million speakers each, and together account for close to 90% of Europeans.
In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rules, a subject that includes phonology, morphology, and syntax, together with phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to study grammar: traditional grammar and theoretical grammar.
The Italic languages form a branch of the Indo-European language family, whose earliest known members were spoken on the Italian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. The most important of the ancient Italic languages was Latin, the official language of ancient Rome, which conquered the other Italic peoples before the common era. The other Italic languages became extinct in the first centuries AD as their speakers were assimilated into the Roman Empire and shifted to some form of Latin. Between the third and eighth centuries AD, Vulgar Latin diversified into the Romance languages, which are the only Italic languages natively spoken today, while Literary Latin also survived.
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the languages of the northern Indian subcontinent, the overwhelming majority of Europe, and the Iranian plateau. Some European languages of this family—English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish—have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; another nine subdivisions are now extinct.
Scandinavia is a subregion of Northern Europe, with strong historical, cultural, and linguistic ties between its constituent peoples. Scandinavia most commonly refers to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. It can sometimes also refer to the Scandinavian Peninsula. In English usage, Scandinavia is sometimes used as a synonym for Nordic countries. Iceland and the Faroe Islands are sometimes included in Scandinavia for their ethnolinguistic relations with Sweden, Norway and Denmark. While Finland differs from other Nordic countries in this respect, some authors call it Scandinavian due to its economic and cultural similarities.
The Turkic languages are a language family of more than 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia (Siberia), and West Asia. The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning from Mongolia to Northwest China, where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium. They are characterized as a dialect continuum.
Finns or Finnish people are a Baltic Finnic ethnic group native to Finland. Finns are traditionally divided into smaller regional groups that span several countries adjacent to Finland, both those who are native to these countries as well as those who have resettled. Some of these may be classified as separate ethnic groups, rather than subgroups of Finns. These include the Kvens and Forest Finns in Norway, the Tornedalians in Sweden, and the Ingrian Finns in Russia.
The Finnic or Baltic Finnic languages constitute a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by the Baltic Finnic peoples. There are around 7 million speakers, who live mainly in Finland and Estonia.
The Eastern Iranian languages are a subgroup of the Iranian languages, having emerged during the Middle Iranian era. The Avestan language is often classified as early Eastern Iranian. As opposed to the Middle-era Western Iranian dialects, the Middle-era Eastern Iranian dialects preserve word-final syllables.
Swedish is the official language of Sweden and is spoken by the vast majority of the 10.23 million inhabitants of the country. It is a North Germanic language and quite similar to its sister Scandinavian languages, Danish and Norwegian, with which it maintains partial mutual intelligibility and forms a dialect continuum. A number of regional Swedish dialects are spoken across the country. In total, more than 200 languages are estimated to be spoken across the country, including regional languages, indigenous Sámi languages, and immigrant languages.
The Iranian peoples, or the Iranic peoples, are the collective ethno-linguistic groups who are identified chiefly by their native usage of any of the Iranian languages, which are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages within the Indo-European language family.
The Baltic Finnic peoples, often simply referred to as the Finnic peoples, are the peoples inhabiting the Baltic Sea region in Northern and Eastern Europe who speak Finnic languages. They include the Finns, Estonians, Karelians, Veps, Izhorians, Votes, and Livonians. In some cases the Kvens, Ingrians, Tornedalians and speakers of Meänkieli are considered separate from the Finns.
The Sámi languages, also rendered in English as Sami and Saami, are a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Indigenous Sámi peoples in Northern Europe. There are, depending on the nature and terms of division, ten or more Sami languages. Several spellings have been used for the Sámi languages, including Sámi, Sami, Saami, Saame, Sámic, Samic and Saamic, as well as the exonyms Lappish and Lappic. The last two, along with the term Lapp, are now often considered pejorative.
Common Brittonic, also known as British, Common Brythonic, or Proto-Brittonic, is a Celtic language historically spoken in Britain and Brittany from which evolved the later and modern Brittonic languages.
Pre-Finno-Ugric substrate refers to substratum loanwords from unidentified non-Indo-European and non-Uralic languages that are found in various Finno-Ugric languages, most notably Sami. The presence of Pre-Finno-Ugric substrate in Sami languages was demonstrated by Ante Aikio. Janne Saarikivi points out that similar substrate words are present in Finnic languages as well, but in much smaller numbers.
Hunters in Transition: An Outline of Early Sámi History, by Lars Ivar Hansen and Bjørnar Olsen, is a major English-language study of the history of the Sámi peoples of Fennoscandia. The study partly translates and partly expands and updates the authors' 2004 Samenes historie fram til 1750.
5th to 3rd centuries BC.
Survived until the early 1st millennium AD.
12th - 15th centuries AD.
... Séamus Bhriain Mac Amhlaigh, last native Irish speaker in the Glens of Antrim who died on the 25th February, 1983.
The reputedly last native speaker of Arran Gaelic, Donald Craig (1899–1977)...
The last native speaker of Alderney French, a Norman dialect spoken in the Channel Islands, died around 1960.
...translation of two manuscripts written in Iceland in the seventeenth century. Since the contact situation was interrupted in the first part of the eighteenth century and was of intermittent nature, the contact pidgin probably never developed much further than the stage recorded in the manuscripts.
In Central Europe, the extermination in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was so thorough that the Bohemian Romani language became extinct.
13th century AD.
Survived until the second half of first millennium BC.
Circa 175 BC to 100 AD.
The development of the Classical tradition on the subject of the Cimmerians after their disappearance from the historical arena, no later than the very end of the 7th or very beginning of the 6th century BC
ca. 150-50 BC
István Varró, a member of the Jász-Cuman mission to the empress of Austria Maria Theresa and the known last speaker of the Cuman language, died in 1770.
1st Millennium BC - 500 AD.
2nd half of 1st Millennium BC.
An ancient language of Crete, 4th-3rd centuries BC.
An ancient language of Cyprus, up to 4th C BC.
650 - 100 BC.
The last native Gaelic speaker was said to be Margaret McMurray of Cultezron, near Maybole, who died at an advanced age in 1760
Two inscriptions identified thus far, dating to first millennium BC.
time period:Fourth to fifth century c.E.
2nd half of 1st Millennium BC - 1st half of 1st Millennium AD.
...the Istrian-Albanian language "died" in the nineteenth century
15th century AD?
It's estimated that it was still used until the beginning of the 19th century.
...the Jewish-Venetian dialect that survived into the 20th century.
...Kainuu Sámi (used until 16th–18th century in the area of the Forest Sámi people in central Finland and in the Republic of Karelia).
Extinct now for over 100 years, few written examples of Kemi Sami survive.
6th - 12th century AD.
c. 700 - 1600 AD.
...the last speaker of Kraasna most likely died before World War II.
Material from 15th-19th centuries AD.
Indeed, by 1994, reportedly only 12 people used some 200 Lachoudish words. The dialect Lachoudish had its day; it is now extinct
The speaker Anton Bok was born in 1908. He lived in Pajuçsilla village. He was recorded in 1971 by Paulopriit Voolaine. His mother tongue was Leivu and he acquired Latvian at school. He has been called the last Leivu speaker; he died in 1988.
An ancient language of the Greek island of Lemnos. Until perhaps 400 BC.
c. 600 BC - 1 BC.
Roman period.
300 BC- 100 AD.
4th - 9th century AD.
2nd Century AD.
300-150 BC.
The tablet seems to have dated to the mid 3rd century BC.
time period:Ninth to 16th century c.E.
Circa 1800 and 1450 BC.
... no tablets or any other inscribed vessels were found from ca. 1200 BC onwards.
An ancient language, spoken in the Balkans from the 4th century BC - ca. 100 AD.
1st millennium BC.
Datable between the end of the 6th and the beginning of the 5th century B.C., the inscription from Tortora is an Oenotrian text,
the 11th century, to the end of the 15th century
Very few inscriptions exist, all from the 1st century BC.
7th - 12th centuries AD.
The last mention of Phrygian in use dates from the fifth century AD.
...and Pre-Samnite (500 BC).
1st Millennium BC - 600 AD.
Magrè-alphabet finds dated to the middle and/or late La Tène period, apart from the above-mentioned ones from the area of Verona, are the Magrè antler pieces, the inscriptions from Bostel, IT-2 from the Inntal, and the Trissino bones. IT-4 is dated by context and may be older than the 1st century BC.
Mid-first millennium BC, perhaps surviving as late as the 3rd or 2nd century BC.
Survived until 16th century.
Pre-Roman times.
Solombala-English, first investigated2 by Broch (1996), probably developed during the "English period" in the history of the city of Archangel, from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century.
6th century BC to 4th century BC.
Until 16th century?
c 700 BC - 100 BC.
1st Millennium BC - 500 AD.
Mid-first millennium BC, surviving as late as the 1st century BC.
Today, Vermland's Savo dialect is dead. The last forest Finns who spoke Finnish well were Johannes Johansson-Oinoinen aka Niittahon Jussi and Karl Persson. They died in 1965 and 1969.
250-100 BC.
3rd century BC.
Welsh Romani is a variety of the Romani language which was spoken fluently in Wales until at least 1950.
Until 14th century.
After a period of decline, it was replaced entirely in the early nineteenth century by general Irish English of the region.
The last speaker of Lutsi, Nikolājs Nikonovs, died in 2006.
