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This is a list of extinct languages of Asia , languages which have undergone language death, have no native speakers, and no spoken descendant.
There are 183 languages listed. 16 from Central Asia, 29 from East Asia, 22 from South Asia, 25 from Southeast Asia, 25 from Siberia and 66 from West Asia.
This is an incomplete list. You can help by adding missing items, correcting wrong information and adding reliable sources. (March 2024)
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.
A pidgin, or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the country in which they reside.
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.
An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead language". If no one can speak the language at all, it becomes an "extinct language". A dead language may still be studied through recordings or writings, but it is still dead or extinct unless there are fluent speakers. Although languages have always become extinct throughout human history, they are currently dying at an accelerated rate because of globalization, mass migration, cultural replacement, imperialism, neocolonialism and linguicide.
Karelian is a Finnic language spoken mainly in the Russian Republic of Karelia. Linguistically, Karelian is closely related to the Finnish dialects spoken in eastern Finland, and some Finnish linguists have even classified Karelian as a dialect of Finnish, though in the modern day it is widely considered a separate language. Karelian is not to be confused with the Southeastern dialects of Finnish, sometimes referred to as karjalaismurteet in Finland. In the Russian 2020–2021 census, around 9,000 people spoke Karelian natively, but around 14,000 said to be able to speak the language. There are around 11,000 speakers of Karelian in Finland. And around 30,000 have atleast some knowledge of Karelian in Finland.
Portuguese creoles are creole languages which have Portuguese as their substantial lexifier. The most widely-spoken creoles influenced by Portuguese are Cape Verdean Creole, Guinea-Bissau Creole and Papiamento.
Nigerian Pidgin, also known as Naijá in scholarship, is an English-based creole language spoken as a lingua franca across Nigeria. The language is sometimes referred to as Pijin or Vernacular. It can be spoken as a pidgin, a creole, dialect or a decreolised acrolect by different speakers, who may switch between these forms depending on the social setting. In the 2010s, a common orthography was developed for Pidgin which has been gaining significant popularity in giving the language a harmonized writing system.
The Mansi languages are spoken by the Mansi people in Russia along the Ob River and its tributaries, in the Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug, and Sverdlovsk Oblast. Traditionally considered a single language, they constitute a branch of the Uralic languages, often considered most closely related to neighbouring Khanty and then to Hungarian.
The Ob-Ugric languages are a commonly proposed branch of the Uralic languages, grouping together the Khanty (Ostyak) and Mansi (Vogul) languages. Both languages are split into numerous and highly divergent dialects, more accurately referred to as languages. The Ob-Ugric languages and Hungarian comprise the proposed Ugric branch of the Uralic language family.
Spanish is the language that is predominantly understood and spoken as a first or second language by nearly all of the population of Argentina. According to the latest estimations, the population is currently greater than 45 million.
This page is a list of lists of languages.
The official language of Estonia is Estonian, a Uralic language of the Finnic branch, which is related to Finnish. It is unrelated to the bordering Russian and Latvian languages, both of which are Indo-European.
The Harappan language is the unknown language or languages of the Bronze Age Harappan civilization. The Harappan script is yet undeciphered, indeed it has not even been demonstrated to be a writing system, and therefore the language remains unknown. The language being yet unattested in readable contemporary sources, hypotheses regarding its nature are based on possible loanwords, the substratum in Vedic Sanskrit, and some terms recorded in Sumerian cuneiform, in conjunction with analyses of the Harappan script.
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.
The evolution of languages or history of language includes the evolution, divergence and development of languages throughout time, as reconstructed based on glottochronology, comparative linguistics, written records and other historical linguistics techniques. The origin of language is a hotly contested topic, with some languages tentatively traced back to the Paleolithic. However, archaeological and written records only extend the history of language into ancient times and the Neolithic.
1200 - 800 BC.
300 BC - 1000 AD.
13th century AD.
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.
This lect is the descendant of the Fergana Kipchak language that went extinct in the late 1920's.
Hence, Gurgani must have died out sometime after the fifteenth but certainly before the nineteenth century
time period:Fourth to fifth century c.E.
6th - 12th century AD.
300 BC - 1000 AD.
9th - 14th Centuries AD.
300 BC - 1000 AD.
Andreev explains that 100 years ago there was an ancient Vanji language used by people of Vanj valley. He then provides as example that in 1925, when travelling to Vanj Valley, him and his travel companion met an old man who told that, when he was 11 years old, he was speaking Vanji language. Unfortunately, the old man could remember only 20-30 words, but even then, he was not sure if they were all correct.
... "Two ... Wot (Wotapuri - Katarqalai). Of the latter we can witness how the process of extinction has moved on inexorably in the course of the twentieth century. In the 1940's Morgenstierne reported that Wot was spoken in two villages in the Katar valley, one at Wotapuri at the confluence of the Pech river with the streams coming from the valley, one further up the valley in Katarqalai. 15 years later Budruss (1960) visited both villages found no speakers of the language in the lower village, Pashto having completely replaced it, and in the upper one only a few passive speakers who remember having spoken the language in their earlier years.
c. 7th - 10th centuries AD.
Taokas and Luilang might also be associated with this FPS subgroup, but available data on these now-extinct languages are too limited to determine this with any surety.
5th to 7th centuries AD.
Present state of the language: EXTINCT probably in the early 20th century, no exact date available
Kiautschou Pidgin German, which was spoken in the German colony Kiautschou on the coast of China in the early 20th century.
1st century to mid-8th century A.D.
916 - 1125 AD.
c. 7th - 10th centuries AD.
Pazeh, an Austronesian language of Taiwan thought to have lost its last speaker in 2010.
the Khüis Tolgoi inscription must have been erected between 604 and 620 AD.
Siraya is a Formosan language spoken until the end of the 19th century by the indigenous Siraya people of Taiwan.
c. 11th - 16th centuries AD.
A pidginized variety of Japanese called Yokohamese or Japanese Ports Lingo evolved during the reign of Emperor Meiji from 1868 to 1912, and largely disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century.
7th - 10th century AD.
... The Aka-Kol tribe of Middle Andaman became extinct by 1921. The Oko-Juwoi of Middle Andaman and the Aka-Bea of South Andaman and Rutland Island were extinct by 1931. The Akar-Bale of Ritchie's Archipelago, the Aka-Kede of Middle Andaman and the A-Pucikwar of South Andaman Island soon followed. By 1951, the census counted a total of only 23 Greater Andamanese and 10 Sentinelese. That means that just ten men, twelve women and one child remained of the Aka-Kora, Aka-Cari and Aka-Jeru tribes of Greater Andaman and only ten natives of North Sentinel Island ...
The inscriptions of Asoka - a king of the Maurya dynasty who reigned, based in his capital Pataliputra, from 268 to 232 BC over almost the whole of India - were engraved in rocks and pillars, in various local dialects.
... the Kharosthi script was used as a literary medium, that is, from the time of Asoka in the middle of the third century B.C. until about the third century A.D.
2500-1900 BC.
A second more dramatic example is P.R. Gurdon's 1904 article 'The Morans' in the same journal. ... The census returned 78 speakers in 1901, 24 in 1911 and none in 1931.
Most of the material in this language originates from the 3rd to 10th centuries AD, though it was probably spoken as early as the 5th century BC.
Most of the material in this language originates from the 3rd to 10th centuries AD...
SIL linguist Richard Roe contacted this group in 1957 and took a word list of 291 words. They lived on the Dicamay River on the western side of the Sierra Madre near Jones, Isabela. Roe told me that there was only one family there then. In November 1974, after talking with Roe and with a copy of his wordlist in hand, I went to Jones to see if I could find the Agta who spoke this language. I was unable to find them. We talked to many Filipinos in the area, but they all said they had not seen any Negritos for several years. Some people whispered to me that migrant Ilokano homesteaders had killed a number of the Agta a few years ago.
While the Katabangan of Catanauan exists in name as a group, a visit to the group in 2006 confirmed that none of the Katabangan speak any language natively other than Tagalog, nor is there any recollection of their ancestors speaking any other language.
The last speaker of the Leliali dialect died in 1989
Last speaker died in 1974.
c. 5th? - 12th century AD.
Reportedly the last speaker of Taman died in the 1990s.
...the language, along with its speakers, was lost in a gigantic volcanic eruption, the most cataclysmic in historic times in April 1815.
...that was spoken in Bidau, an eastern suburb of Dili, East Timor until the 1960s
Survived until the 18th century AD.
Languages that have become extinct since being linguistically described include Mator (Samoyed, in the 1840s), Kott (Yeniseic, in the 1850s), Arman (an archaic variety of Even, in the 1970s)
Survived until the 18th century AD.
Survived until perhaps the 18th century AD.
Present state of the language: EXTINCT since the late 18th century
Maksim Sivtorov passed away in early 2018, and Eastern Mansi is thus the latest Uralic language to become extinct.
These are the Norwegian-Russian pidgin known as Russenorsk, Chinese Pidgin Russian and Taimyr Pidgin Russian (TPR). Brief remarks in travel accounts and elsewhere indicate the existence of other Russian pidgins, such as Chukotka Pidgin Russian and Kamchatka Pidgin Russian. None of these, however, have been documented or described. In the case of the documented pidgins, the extent of the text samples is far from being exhaustive. With the exception of TPR, further documentation seems no longer possible, however, as the pidgins in question are extinct by now.
Survived until middle of 19th century AD.
Unfortunately, Kuril Ainu, which is absolutely indispensable for the reconstruction, disappeared in the late 19th century with just few old documents left.
With the dissolution of the Russian emigré community in Harbin starting with the foundation of Manchukuo in 1932, and the expulsion of the Chinese from the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, CPR lost its remaining functional domains and went extinct.
Mator or Motor was a Uralic language belonging to the group of Samoyedic languages, extinct since the 1840s.
Survived until perhaps 18th century.
including Kott/Assan, Arin, Pumpokol, all extinct between about 1800 and 1860
In 1994, Take Asai died at the age of 102. She was the last native speaker of Sakhalin Ainu
In January 1997 the last native speaker of the language, a woman named Vyie (Valentina Wye) died.
Southern Mansi, whose aboriginal territory covered a vast area including parts of easternmost Europe, is undoubtedly the Mansi language that was first to become extinct. When that happened can only be estimated on the basis of the records of Kannisto and others, which show that shift to both Russian and Siberian Tatar was progressing rapidly at the beginning of the twentieth century, leading to the conclusion that the language probably survived until the middle decades.
Although we do not know the time of the death of the last speaker of Western Mansi, it does indeed seem certain that there were none left by the end of the twentieth century
18th - 20th century AD.
Yurats was another Samoyedic language replaced by the eastward advance of Tundra Nenets, extinct during the nineteenth century, with meager documentation
Survived until around 100 AD.
The echoes of native Cappadocian could be heard into the sixth century and perhaps beyond.
1st-2nd centuries AD.
7th to 3rd centuries BC.
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
Dadanitic was the alphabet used by the inhabitants of the ancient oasis of Dadan, probably some time during the second half of the first millennium BC.
According to the Assyrian annals Dūma was the seat of successive queens of the Arabs, some of whom were also priestesses, in the eighth and seventh centuries BC.
3rd Millenium BC.
Earlier half of the 1st Millennium BC.
3rd millennium BC - 8th Century BC.
An ancient language of Cyprus, up to 4th C BC.
Perhaps from the late 1st millenium BC, and spoken until the 6th century AD, according to Greek Historians.
100 BC - 600 AD.
They are thought to date from the first two centuries AD.
2nd Millennium BC.
Its attribution to the tribe of Ḥimyar led to the designation of this idiom as"Ḥimyaritic". According to the sources, this language must have been in use in the Yemeni highlands up to the Xth century and even later,
i.e. first century BC to fourth century AD
1500–1180 BC
2nd - Ist Millennium BC.
Beginning in the middle of the second millenniumBC the region had fallen under the control of the Hittite empire and from that point until at least the end of the sixth century AD its inhabitants continued to speak a branch of Hittite now called Luwian.
The Kaška first appear on the territory of the Hittite empire in the 15th c. B.C. and are mentioned till 8th c. B.C.
Kassite (Cassite) was a language spoken by Kassites in northern Mesopotamia from approximately the 18th to the 4th century BC.
2nd-1st Millennium BC.
500 BC to about 200 BC.
8th to ? 3rd century BC.
Even towards the end of the Mamluk period, during the reign of the last sultan al-Ghawri (1501-1516), the Mamluk, called Asanbay min Sudun, copied the religious Hanbali tract of Abu al-Layth in Kypchak language for the royal library.
500 BC - 100 AD.
First millennium BC.
100 BC - 600 AD.
Circa 1800 and 1450 BC.
Ibrahim Ḥanna was the last speaker of the Mlaḥso language, as the village was destroyed in 1915 during the Armenian genocide. He died in 1999 in Qāmišli in Syria
Earlier half of the 1st Millennium BC.
... no tablets or any other inscribed vessels were found from ca. 1200 BC onwards.
Before 1st Century AD.
2nd Millennium BC.
The earliest dated Palmyrene inscription is from the year 44 BC and the latest discovery has been dated to the year 274 AD.
Thereafter, accordingly, over a period of approximately two centuries, this culture became increasingly influenced by the local, Levantine cultures until somewhere in the IA IIA (sometime after 1000 BCE), the unique, foreign attributes of the Philistine culture disappeared.
2nd - 1st Millennium BC.
8th century BC to 2nd century AD.
2nd-3rd century BC.
100 BC - 600 AD.
100 BC - 600 AD.
A minority of dated texts suggest that the practice of carving Safaitic inscriptions spanned at least from the second century BCE to the third century CE.
820-730 BC.
3rd - 2nd centuries BC.
The language continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language until the 1st century AD.
Therefore, at least part of the Taymanitic corpus can safely be dated to the second half of the 6th century BCE.
These inscriptions are concentrated in northwest Arabia, and one occurs alongside a Nabataean tomb inscription dated to the year 267 CE.
15th to 13th Century BC.
Ist Millennium BC.