Just because a lingua franca is no longer spoken among a people (Latin, Sauk, Chickasaw, Euchee, etc.) doesn’t change the fact that it was originally acquired through sound patterns. All acquistion is sound based. There is no other way to learn a language because of how the brain is wired – it has to hear the sound, and years of it, for acquisition to occur.
If this is true, then all Latin teachers should become math teachers because that’s all they are right now. On the other hand, if people were to follow the lead currently offered by teachers like Bob Patrick and John Piazza in Latin, then what’s to keep a few people who happen to be rocking some Latin in a classroom somewhere from growing into an odd kind of country-less disparate community where Latin is spoken – a landless country?
All those people would require is some land and the language would be alive again. That’s the problem – our Latin brothers need a country, some land. Maybe they could go get an island and only let Latin speakers on it, maybe down there off the coast of Italy or something.
Let’s be clear – Latin is not a dead language. It is an endangered languaged like the Native American languages that still have speakers. To be dead a language there would have to be no speakers. There are plenty of Latin speakers around, and many are teachers. Maybe now with what we know now, they can actually teach Latin, after centuries of teaching its ghost version.
How cool would that be? And it could happen. And it would make international headlines. And it would give Native Americans hope where there now is none, although they at least already have their islands in Oklahoma. The children would grow up hearing Sauk language first and English would be their second language.
Just thinking out loud. If teachers of endangered languages were to create islands where only the language is spoken, would that not constitute a rebirth of the language?
Even if the old speakers were gone, having gone to sleep for the last time, would even a close variation of the language carried forward by speakers who now have 85% of the language not be worth the effort? Jacab Manitowa has 85% fluency in Sauk language. Kate Taluga has a lot of Myskoke. What if English were banned on Sauk land (where the Oklahoma earthquake hit last November – it was Sauk land at the epicenter)? What if Kate’s school in Florida didn’t allow kids to speak in English?