eli5 how do languages like Aramaic, latin, ancient greek, etc just die out?
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They turn into other languages. Latin turned into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanche. Ancient Greek turned into Modern Greek. Aramaic is still spoken by some Jewish people in remote regions and also contributed to Arabic.
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Read a day or two ago that Belarusian is sliding to Russian usage IN BELARUS. Lots of natural and non-natural factors (war, shared economies, eased border access, immigration)
Languages get replaced by other cultures. If I understand correctly, the spread of Islam with Arabic, seems to have replaced Aramaic in some areas.
Classical Greek became Koine Greek (*a more simple version of Greek spoken on the streets 2,000 years ago and the Gospels of Jesus were written in Koine Greek*). Koine Greek eventually became Modern Greek.
Latin became Italian and Spanish and French and Portuguese and the Romanian language. There are other Latin-based languages such as other Spanish languages that are less popular like Catalan. There was Classical Latin (*professional, like how the Caesars and Philosophers spoke*) and there was Vulgar Latin (*informal, the way people spoke it in the street*). This Vulgar Latin was more of an influences on those languages evolving.
Mostly they evolve over time, changing over hundreds of years. However, sometimes there are active campaigns to erase languages. In the area today called France, at one point 40% of the population spoke a language called Occitan, but active government campaigns to create a more solid national identity had a strict one language policy. It was literally illegal to speak languages other than French. Spain did the same thing. Languages like Basque, Catalan, Valencian, Gaulish, all used to be spoken there, and two separate waves tried to unify the country into speaking one language. The first was from the same people who did the Spanish Inquisition which also kicked out Jews and Muslims from the country, which is why today the Spanish language is often called “Castillian” or “Castellano”, because at one point in history it was only the language of the small region of Castille. The second wave was the fascist dictator Franco. Both waves were very successful but neither *completely* killed the languages.
Languages are like species. Some “die out” because they evolve into new forms. The three you mentioned all did that. Latin became the Romance languages. Greek is Greek. Modern Aramaic exists in parts of Iraq and Iran.
Others like Cornish (“Kernewek”) were *driven* to extinction (~250 years ago for Cornish), for several reasons: loss of “habitat,” “depredation” by colonizers, “competition” from other tongues, loss of “breeding ground” (young people not caring to learn). Modern Cornish is a reconstruction–and it’s only possible because it died out *recently,* so lots of useful literature survived (e.g. rhyming poetry.)
So, TL;DR: Languages *don’t* “just die out.” They linger. They evolve. Or they get slowly killed off. Unlike species, some languages even infect *other* languages. English uses a HUGE amount of vocab from Latin and Greek, despite being a Germanic language.
I came from Vietnam. About 1,000 years ago, our nation’s writing was very similar to Chinese, but after the French invasion, we used Latin characters.
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