An estimated 6,800 languages are spoken in the world today. Linguists say that about half are endangered, and that 90% will disappear by the end of this century. The dominance of English in worldwide commerce, culture and politics and on the internet has resulted in many other languages being marginalized and even suppressed.

How Languages Die

Throughout history, languages have been born, developed and died. Only Basque, Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit and Tamil have had lives of more than 2,000 years.

Many of the world's languages are considered endangered. According to linguists, these are the languages that people no longer speak exclusively. Two Jewish languages, Yiddish and Ladino, fall into the endangered category. Linguistic death or extinction occurs when there is no one who speaks a language.

Two Jewish languages, Yiddish and Ladino, fall into the endangered categoryThe death of a language may occur slowly when a population gradually shifts its allegiance to another language until their own language is no longer used. This is the history of many now-extinct Jewish languages. Sometimes the use of a language is not considered advantageous, parents do not pass it on to their children, or its use is discouraged by society or by government. A language may also suffer sudden death by the destruction of its speakers.

The death of a language can be reversed, but the only successful large-scale revival of a language has been Hebrew. Continued attempts to reverse the drift of Irish, Scots Gaelic and Welsh have not been successful.

Among the many Jewish languages, only Hebrew is strongly entrenched despite the fact that most Jews do not speak it and use it only as a liturgical language.

Many of the Jewish languages that became extinct after the Holocaust were already endangered before the War. Yiddish, which had been considered seriously endangered because of the destruction of the majority of speakers by the Nazis, and the assimilation of Jews into the linguistic communities in which they live, seems to have reached a plateau in its decline. Any strength in the status of Yiddish is largely due to its daily use in the Hassidic community, and, to a lesser degree, the enthusiastic efforts in some quarters like that of the National Yiddish Book Center and the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. Most Jews however, have little or no interest in learning let alone using the language of their parents or grandparents.

Linguistic specialists suggest that for a language to survive requires 100,000 people to speak it. For this reason the main Sephardic language, Ladino, is seriously endangered, and can only be kept alive with monumental efforts. So few people now speak it that it can no longer be passed along from generation to generation. Like Yiddish, it too, is being actively promoted by some organizations such as the Ottoman-Turkish Sephardic Research Center in Istanbul and the Cervantes Institute.

Aramaic, which was once widely spoken among Jews is now relegated to that of a scholarly and liturgical language with rabbis and scholars knowing enough to read Aramaic, but not to speak it, and very few can write in it. Nor do many have a broad understanding of the language. (Click here for more about Aramaic)

There are about 18 other languages which could be considered as "Jewish languages" There are about 18 other languages which could be considered as "Jewish languages." How many Jews have even heard of them? How many rabbis are familiar with these languages, and how many Hebrew schools and yeshivas discuss these languages as markers of the global history of the Jewish people?

The use of the term "Jewish language" must be qualified. Hebrew as a general rule, is exclusively a language of the Jews, both historically and currently, even though many non-Jews can either speak Hebrew or read it, particularly within the Christian academic community. Aramaic in its various forms is spoken to a limited degree among various Middle Eastern peoples, and is used liturgically in some Christian denominations. Yiddish and Ladino however, are more or less exclusive to Jews, even though there is much overlap with other languages.

Other so-called Jewish languages are invariably an outgrowth of other languages in the countries in which Jews have lived. Linguistics experts consider some to be dialects of other languages rather than fully autonomous languages.

In any case, there appear to be about twenty-one languages including Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish and Ladino that would be considered as "Jewish" languages. Most of these are extinct because no one speaks them. Some however, are virtually extinct since there are so few people who speak them even as a second language, that they are not likely to survive the death of the current generation.