 | 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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 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 diverged from their parent language in Europe.
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| Language/dialect | Family | Date of extinction | Region | Ethnic group |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cornish | Indo-European | 1700s AD [108] | Cornwall | Cornish people |
| Livonian | Uralic | 2 June 2013 AD [109] | Livonian Coast | Livonians |
| Ludza | Uralic | 2006 AD [110] | Latgale | Ludza Estonians |
| Manx | Indo-European | 27 December 1974 AD [111] | Isle of Man | Manx people |
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.
The Celtic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, descended from Proto-Celtic. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, following Paul-Yves Pezron, who made the explicit link between the Celts described by classical writers and the Welsh and Breton languages.
The Celts or Celtic peoples were a collection of Indo-European peoples in Europe and Anatolia, identified by their use of Celtic languages and other cultural similarities. Major Celtic groups included the Gauls; the Celtiberians and Gallaeci of Iberia; the Britons, Picts, and Gaels of Britain and Ireland; the Boii; and the Galatians. The relation between ethnicity, language and culture in the Celtic world is unclear and debated; for example over the ways in which the Iron Age people of Britain and Ireland should be called Celts. In current scholarship, 'Celt' primarily refers to 'speakers of Celtic languages' rather than to a single ethnic group.
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, a 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 overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. 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.
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Maltese and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Malta, and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.
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.
Dacian is an extinct language generally believed to be a member of the Indo-European language family that was spoken in the ancient region of Dacia.
Greek is an Indo-European language, the sole surviving descendant of the Hellenic sub-family. Although it split off from other Indo-European languages around the 3rd millennium BCE, it is first attested in the Bronze Age as Mycenaean Greek. During the Archaic and Classical eras, Greek speakers wrote numerous texts in a variety of dialects known collectively as Ancient Greek. In the Hellenistic era, these dialects underwent dialect levelling to form Koine Greek which was used as a lingua franca throughout the eastern Roman Empire, and later grew into Medieval Greek. For much of the period of Modern Greek, the language existed in a situation of diglossia, where speakers would switch between informal varieties known as Dimotiki and a formal one known as Katharevousa. Present-day Modern Standard Greek is largely an outgrowth of Dimotiki, with some features retained from Katharevousa.
The Indo-Iranian peoples, also known as Ā́rya or Aryans from their self-designation, were a group of Indo-European speaking peoples who brought the Indo-Iranian languages to major parts of Eurasia in waves from the first part of the 2nd millennium BC onwards. They eventually branched out into the Iranian peoples and Indo-Aryan peoples.
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.
The Iranian peoples or Iranic peoples are a diverse grouping of peoples who are identified by their usage of the Iranian languages and other cultural similarities.
Common Brittonic, also known as British, Common Brythonic, or Proto-Brittonic, is an extinct Celtic language spoken in Britain and Brittany.
The Bantu peoples are an indigenous ethnolinguistic grouping of approximately 400 distinct native African ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages. The languages are native to countries spread over a vast area from West Africa, to Central Africa, Southeast Africa and into Southern Africa.Bantu people also inhabit southern areas of Northeast African states.
Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples or Proto-Semitic people were speakers of Semitic languages who lived throughout the ancient Near East and North Africa, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula and Carthage from the 3rd millennium BC until the end of antiquity, with some, such as Arabs, Arameans, Assyrians, Jews, Mandaeans, and Samaritans having a continuum into the present day.
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
This life of crime, or on its borderline, was called "germania" in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain.
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.
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.
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.
the 11th century, to the end of the 15th century
Very few inscriptions exist, all from the 1st century BC.
7th - 12th centuries AD.
8th century BC to 2nd century AD.
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.
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.
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.
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.
