If Threatened Languages can be Saved, then can Dead Languages be Revived?

Abstract

The sociocultural dynamics for attaining and maintaining the intergenerational transmission of 'barely living' languages are ever so much more difficult than the dynamics of eliciting them for briefer (sub-generational) periods, but they differ only in degree, rather than in kind, from the social dynamics required by the continuity of all 'partly living' and even all 'fully living' languages. These dynamics pertain to contextual control over (1) societal functional allocations, (2) the bases of institutional transmission and use, and (3) the reward sufficiency and the competitive place/time realisations pertaining to the major ongoing processes and contexts of sociocultural stability and change. Five basic questions are posited which pertain equally to 'fully alive', 'partly alive' and 'barely alive' languages. These three types of languages may be seen as existing along a continuum, differing only in the degrees to which they can be linked to the dynamics of reward processes and the institutional spill-overs that determine the likelihood of intergenerational mother-tongue transmission in general and of functional dominance most specifically.