2 - The flux of language

Summary

Languages sometimes die out, usually because of competition from another language. For example, it is only during the past few centuries that English has become the universal language in Cornwall. Formerly there was a Cornish language, a Celtic language related to Welsh and Breton, but this was gradually displaced by English, and finally died out. The last known native speakers of Cornish were a few old people in the village of Mousehole, near Penzance, in the 1770s. A language can also become dead in another way. Nobody today speaks classical Latin as spoken by Julius Caesar, or classical Greek as spoken by Pericles, or the Old Icelandic spoken by the heroes of the Norse sagas. So classical Latin and classical Greek and Old Icelandic are dead languages. But, although dead, they have not died: they have changed into something else. People still speak Greek as a living language, and this language is simply a changed form of the language spoken in the Athens of Pericles. The people who live in Rome today speak a language that has developed by a process of continuous change out of the language spoken there in the time of Julius Caesar, though modern Italian developed out of the everyday language of the ancient Roman market-place and of the common soldiery, rather than out of the upper-class literary Latin that Caesar wrote. And the people who live in Iceland today speak a language that has developed directly out of the language of the great Icelandic sagas of the Middle Ages.