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Lost Languages

Think of all the languages that have been spoken at different points of human history, but are now extinct. For instance, the pre-Indo-European (not counting the Uralic languages) languages of Europe which were pushed out due to Indo-European migrations. Only one of these has survived into modern day, Basque, but during antiquity there were a few more: Etruscan, Rhaetic, Iberian, Aquitanian (either an ancestor to or early relative of Basque), Tartessian and a few more whose classification is unclear. These listed and named languages are not lost per se in that regard as there exists inscriptions from all of them, but none is very well understood as of now.

There are also hypotheses regarding unknown substrate languages that may have affected different branches of the Indo-European family vocabulary-wise, such as the Germanic substrate hypothesis and the Pre-Greek substrate, but these are obviously not attested.

It feels sad knowing these are gone forever, but that's just something that happens with languages. Languages are still going extinct today (at a much faster pace even) and that's extremely scary as well. Having something that's totally unique for humans, that has developed for thousands of years or more, and that has held or still holds extremely large cultural importance for large groups of people disappear is heartbreaking. 


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Reply by Hamed M.

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What makes me more scary is how with Globalization, we tend to find new words from other languages taking places over the ones in our language, anyone who doesn't use English as his native language might notice that, that's normal i get it, most popular places use English phrases due to international companies and world economy, but yet it's low key sad.




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Reply by Danika x3

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I hear you! in Spain there is this language called caló spoken by the local gypsy population. I remember occasionally hearing elder women speak it, but nowadays its rapidly agonising!!!:( the pueblo gitano (gypsy people) has a trend of having very young parents a lot of times, which means generations get separated from each other faster than usual and elders just aren't teaching the language to the young anymore. There are close to zero documented cases of youths fluent in it and the old-age population that DOES speak it (65K speakers across france spain AND portugal!!) is, well... dying. It is a deeply heartbreaking matter to me because gitanos have always been a heavily marginalised and ostracised group... a huge part of spanish culture comes from their roma costumes and natives willfully ignore it (unsurprising when you see how they react to being told we're practically white arabs who married christians and started cosplaying as romans) The language is not protected by any of the 3 countries its spoken in. In spain this is because for it to be protected it needs to be declared by a community (or autonomous city) as an endangered, or simply official, language of their own and... no one does that! :((  I am learning it because I am desperate for a happy ending for this neglected beautiful language... but resources are scarce.... and im not in touch with local gitano communities that would speak it... so my pronunciation wont be very good if i attempt to teach it myself... ;^;


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Reply by escrupuloxd

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BASQUE MENTIONED !!! im from argentina but both my last names are basque. i tried learning it a while ago, its very interesting !

and to add to a different reply i saw, theres a lot of gitanos here too, mostly in buenos aires, but i never heard them speak their language. i never even thought abut it, its sad


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