To appear in the Annual Review of Anthropology 2004.
LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH
Salikoko S. Mufwene
Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, 1010 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637
s-mufwene@uchicago.edu
KEY WORDS: ecology, exploitation colony, settlement colony, language endangerment,
langue minorée
1. INTRODUCTION
Linguistics publications on language endangerment and death have increased since
Dorian’s (1989) Investigating obsolescence and more so since the publication of a special
issue of Language (the journal of the Linguistic Society of America) on the subject matter in
1992. Books alone include the following: Fishman (1991), Robins & Uhlenbeck (1991),
Brenzinger (1992, 1998), Hagège (1992, 2000), Mühlhäusler (1996), Cantoni (1997), Dixon
(1997), Grenoble & Whaley (1998), Hazaël-Massieux (1999), Reyhner et al (1999), Crystal
(2000), Nettle & Romaine (2000), Skutnab-Kangas (2000), Hinton & Hale (2001), Maffi
(2001), Mufwene (2001), Swaan (2001), Dalby (2002), Harmon (2002), Joseph et al (2003),
Maurais & Morris (2003), and Phillipson (2003). Experts will undoubtedly notice some
omissions, but one cannot help noticing the strong interest the subject matter has aroused
among linguists over the past two decades.
Research and publications on new language varieties have interested linguists in a less
dramatic way, despite the high visibility of Bickerton (1981, 1984), Thomason & Kaufman
(1988), and Chaudenson (1992, 2001). This asymmetry may reflect the concern among

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linguists – stated in numerous publications – about the increasing loss of linguistic materials
that should inform us about typological variation. It may also be due to the following:
although genetic linguistics has always been about speciation, researchers have typically
focused on whether or not particular language varieties descend from the same ancestor and
can thus be claimed to be genetically related – hence the central methodological role accorded
to the comparative method. Research on the development of creoles, pidgins, and indigenized
varieties – which is obviously on the birth of new language varieties – has hardly been
connected to genetic linguistics. Thus, because of the way contact is thought to have exerted
an unusually major influence on these cases of language divergence, Thomason & Kaufman
(1988), for instance, seem to have been more interested in showing how the development of
creoles, pidgins, and the like deviates from what they take to be the “normal” or “usual” kind
of language change and speciation than in explaining the process of language birth itself.
Overall, the way that scholarship on language loss and birth has developed reflects in
some ways the fact that genetic linguistics has assumed scenarios in which language contact
has played an incidental, rather than catalytic, role. Such scenarios seem so artificial when one
recognizes, for instance, that the diversification of Indo-European languages has been
concurrent with the gradual dispersal of Indo-European populations in Europe and parts of
Asia. This was a long migratory process during which they came in contact with non-Indo-
European populations. Because they did not relocate at the same pace nor along the sale
routes, they often came subsequently in contact with each other. For instance, the Romans,
speaking an Italic language, came in contact with the Celts, as would the Germanics some

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centuries later, though most of the Celts would already be Latinizing during that time. Little
has been said about how languages vanished in Europe while Indo-European was speciating
into so many modern languages.
Since the late 1980s, research on language loss has focused primarily on the indigenous
languages of European ex-colonies and to some extent on minority languages of the European
Union – such as Breton, Occitan, Basque, Sami, and Gaelic, which are still endangered by the
official and dominant languages of their nations. The almost exclusive association of language
death and birth either with the emergence of modern European nation states united by single
national languages or with the colonization of most of the world by Europe since the 16th
century has led to the illusion that both processes might be recent developments in the history
of mankind.1 The over-emphasis on world-wide economic globalization as the primary cause
of language loss has prevented any fruitful comparisons between, on the one hand, recent and
current evolutions and, on the other, what must have occurred during the earliest political and
economic hegemonies in the history of mankind. The closest thing to what I suggest can be
found in Hagège (2000).
Although current research on language birth and loss is well grounded in population
contacts, the relevant literature has hardly highlighted the fact that these processes have
1 There have indeed been attempts to compare with “creolization” the development of Romance
languages (e.g. Schlieben-Lange 1977) or that of Middle English (e.g. Bailey & Maroldt 1977), but
such studies have been negatively criticized for good and bad reasons (e.g. Thomason & Kaufman
1988, regarding English).

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usually occurred under the same, or related, socio-economic conditions identified by
Mufwene (2001) as “ecological.” For instance, the birth of creoles in the plantation settlement
colonies of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean is a concomitant of language shift among the
African populations who developed them. Likewise, the emergence of American English(es),
is a concomitant of both the gradual loss of especially continental European languages that
came in contact with English in North America and of the restructuring of English varieties
brought over from England (regardless of whether influence from the other languages is
factored in).
Below, I elaborate on the above observations, focusing especially on the concern that
scholars such as Nettle & Romaine (2000), Skutnab-Kangas (2000), and Maffi (2001) have
expressed about loss of “biodiversity” applied to the coexistence of languages. I historicize
both colonization and economic globalization to show how they are related and provide
differential ecologies for language birth and death. I highlight speakers as the unwitting agents
of these phenomena, while also questioning the adequacy of terms such as language war,
killer language and linguicide.
My approach is generally the same as in Mufwene (2001),2 largely inspired by population
genetics, with languages considered as populations of idiolects and, in respect to their
2 Readers familiar with Harmon (1996, which I was not aware of until after completing this essay)
will notice quite a few differences in our conceptions of the ‘linguistic species’ and how we apply it
to language evolution, as complementary as our positions are. For instance, my justifications here, as
in Mufwene (2001) are quite different from his (which are also repeated in Harmon 2002).

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evolutionary characteristics, as analogous to parasitic, viral species. Space limitations make
it unnecessary to justify this position here. Suffice it to note the following assumptions that
are central to most of the discussion in the rest of this essay: 1) languages are internally
variable (between idiolects and between dialects); 2) they do not evolve in uniform ways, as
changes may proceed faster or differently in one segment of a population of its speakers than
in another; 3) the same language may thrive in one ecology but do poorly in another; 4) like
biological species, their vitality depends on the ecology of their existence or usage; and 5) like
viruses, their features may change several times in their lifetime. But we should start by
articulating the meanings of language ‘birth’ and ‘death’ more explicitly.
2. THE MEANINGS OF ‘BIRTH’ AND ‘DEATH’ APPLIED TO LANGUAGES
The notions ‘birth’ and ‘death’ actually provide more arguments for treating languages
as species. Languages are unlike organisms in the way they are born or die. As well noted by
Chaudenson (1992, 2001, 2003) in the case of creoles, and Szulmajster (2000) regarding
Yiddish, languages as communal phenomena cannot be issued birth or death certificates. The
relevant processes are protracted, spanning several generations. The concept of ‘language
birth’ is in fact a misnomer of some sort. The birth involves no pregnancy and delivery stages,
and the term refers to a stage (not a point in time!) in a divergence process during which a
variety is acknowledged post facto as structurally different from its ancestor. For instance,
there is no particular point in time that can be associated with the emergence of creoles as
separate vernaculars from the colonial European languages they have evolved from. Unlike

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in the case of organisms, but like in the case of species, language birth cannot be predicted.
The recognition of separateness is made possible by a cumulative accretion of divergence
features relative to an ancestor language, regardless of whether or not contact with other
languages is factored in the account.
Language death is likewise a protracted change of state.3 Used to describe community-
level loss of competence in a language, it denotes a process that does not affect all speakers
at the same time nor to the same extent. Under one conception of the process, it has to do
with the statistical assessment of the maintenance versus loss of competence in a language
variety among its speakers. Total death is declared when there are no speakers left of a
particular language variety in a population that had used it.4
An important question nowadays has also been whether Latin – whose standard variety
(Classical Latin) is still the lingua franca of the Vatican and whose vernacular, nonstandard
variety (Vulgar Latin) has evolved into the Romance languages – is really a dead language
3 To be sure, cases of sudden language death by genocide have been attested (see, e.g., Hagège
2000 and Nettle & Romaine 2000) but they are rare compared to the other cases most commonly
discussed in the literature. They are not really part of natural evolution by competition and selection,
as explained in Part 5, and they will not be discussed below.
4 It is less clear whether a language is still alive, just moribund, or just “in poor health” when it
is used by semi-speakers, individuals who claim they speak it but mix its vocabulary and grammar
with the system of another language. Dorian’s (1981) discussion of Scottish Gaelic has made such
cases an important part of understanding language “obsolescence.”

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(Hagège 2000)? If so, what is the most critical criterion in identifying a language as dead? Is
language death predicated on the presence of native speakers and on its transmission from one
generation of speakers to another without the mediacy of the scholastic medium?5 And in the
case of the evolution of a language into a new variety, what is the relationship between
language death and language birth? Can these processes be considered as two facets of the
same process? Needless to say these are aspects of death that are untypical of organisms.
More benefits from conceiving of languages as species or populations of idiolects become
obvious below.
3. QUESTIONING SOME USUAL ACCOUNTS OF LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH
As noted above, the birth of new language varieties has been central to creolistics, to the
study of indigenized varieties of European languages, and to historical dialectology.6 The list
5 Space limitations prevent us from pursuing this issue here. Assessing the vitality of a language
variety in relation to its association with native speakers would, for instance, entail questioning the
legitimacy of identifying pidgins as languages. The status of makeshift languages such as Esperanto
would also become into problematic. Independence of transmission from teaching a particular language
in schools would call for a reassessment of the status of Irish in Ireland.
6 The foci have been different in these research areas. Most creolists have sought to demonstrate
that creoles (and pidgins) are natural and as rule-governed as other languages, whereas students of
indigenized varieties have argued that these varieties are as legitimate offspring of English as the
varieties that are said to be “native” and are spoken in former settlement colonies such as the Americas

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of titles is too long to want to include here and any choice of a representative list would be
biased. Consistent with the tradition in genetic linguistics, there has been little interest in the
birth process itself, except that in the case of creoles and indigenized varieties, language
contact and the influence of non-European languages on the European targets have been
acknowledged as important ecological factors.
As in the case of creoles, the emergence of new dialects in former settlement colonies has
hardly been correlated with the concurrent erosion and death of other European languages
that did not become the official languages of the specific colonies, for instance, French,
Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, and German, among a host of others in the United States. Works
such as Haugen (1953) and Clyne (2003) – to cite two chronological extremes – are more on
language obsolescence than on the emergence of new varieties of the dominant language. The
fact that language contact is seldom invoked to account for the divergence of these new,
colonial dialects of European languages – which has implicitly contributed to making the
development of creoles so curious – remains an intriguing matter. The topic of their birth
itself, which can very well be discussed in relation to that of indigenized varieties of the same
languages, has generally been overlooked (see, e.g., Thomason & Kaufman 1988, Thomason
or Australia, where populations of European descent are now majorities. (Creoles are associated
primarily with coastal plantation settlement colonies of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, where
populations of non-European descent and now majorities.) Historical dialectology has focused mostly
on the non-standard vernaculars of former settlement colonies, almost overlooking the fact that the
varieties spoken today in their European metropoles are just as new.

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2001, and Winford 2003). One important exception to the above bias insofar as the evolution
of English is concerned is the growing literature on Hiberno-English, as represented, for
example, by Kallen (1997).
Putting things in a longer perspective, Thomason (2001) correctly notes that history
provides several instances of language death. However, the linguistics literature of the past
two decades on language endangerment has done little to enrich discussions with comparisons
with older cases in human history. As noted above, the growing scholarship on the subject
matter has focused on the recent and ongoing attrition of the indigenous languages of former
European colonies. In the vast majority of cases, these languages (especially the indigenous
languages of the Americas and Australia) have certainly played a marginal role in the
evolution of the European varieties that either have driven them to extinction or are
threatening them. It would thus be unjustified to expect the relevant literature to have related
the topic of language death with that of language birth. It is yet justified to expect similar
scholarship about Europe to have related these processes with the experience of several
European languages that have become langues minorées.7 As I show below, capturing these
7 Hazaël-Massieux (2000) reports an important distinction made by French sociolinguists between
langue minoritaire ‘minority language’ and langue minorée ‘undervalued language’. The latter need
not be spoken by a minority population. Like Haitian Creole, it may be spoken by the majority
population of a polity but is relegated to ethnographically “low” communicative functions. If this view
is taken literally, most indigenous languages in former European colonies fall in this category, as they
are not associated with the “high(er)” communicative functions of their polities. (See Pandaharipande

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parallel evolutions would have enabled us to better understand why languages have been
dying so rapidly since the 19th century.
The literature has generally also invoked globalization to account for the loss or
endangerment of several non-European languages. Unfortunately it has seldom articulated
what globalization means. As a matter of fact, this phenomenon has too often been confused
with what is identified as McDonaldization, i.e., the spread of McDonald stores around the
world (see, e.g., Nettle & Romaine 2000). Likewise, the literature says nothing about whether
globalization is novel and how it is related to colonization. This is quite critical because the
related applied literature on the revitalization of endangered languages seldom refers to the
ecology that would be the most favorable to the revitalization process. Would commitment
on the part of the relevant linguistic communities alone do? Or would any conditions other
than the precolonial ones, under which most of these languages thrived, be supportive of the
revitalization efforts?
The vitality of languages cannot be dissociated from the socio-economic interests and
2003 regarding such situations in India.) Consistent with seemingly precocious predictions that 50 % -
90 % of the world’s languages will have vanished by the end of the twenty-first century, the approach
misleadingly suggests the same outlook onto the coexistence of languages of the powerless and of the
powerful everywhere. However, the history of the world shows languages of the powerless have often
been more resilient, or demonstrated more vitality, than those of the powerful. Pace Fishman (2003),
there is much more ecological complexity and variability that must be factored in on this subject
matter, as attempted, for instance, by Pandharipande (2003).

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