When the last speakers pass away without transmitting the language, it dies. Language death is the complete cessation of use of a language as a community vernacular, resulting in its extinction as a living system.

Death often follows a period of endangerment and shift, during which domains of use shrink and children stop acquiring the language. Causes include forced assimilation, demographic collapse, and economic incentives to adopt a dominant language. Semi-speakers and rememberers may retain partial knowledge after fluent use ends.

Documentation can preserve records, and revival movements occasionally reawaken sleeping languages, but the loss of fluent intergenerational use is profound. Each death reduces the diversity of human expressive systems and the knowledge they encode.

• Extinction of a language as a living community code
• Usually preceded by shift and loss of child acquisition
• Driven by social, political, and demographic forces
• May leave only archival records behind