Dalmatian was a Romance language of the eastern Adriatic coast, in the historical region of Dalmatia in what is now Croatia. Descended from the Latin once spoken along that shore, it occupied an unusual position within the Romance family, standing between the Italo-Romance languages to the west and the Eastern Romance branch that includes Romanian. Its best-recorded variety was Vegliote, the dialect of the island of Veglia, today known by its Croatian name, Krk.
Dalmatian was squeezed for centuries between two stronger neighbors. Along the coast and in trade, Venetian and Italian carried prestige and commercial weight; in the hinterland and increasingly in the towns, Croatian — a Slavic language — dominated daily life. Caught between them, Dalmatian gradually lost ground in a slow process of language shift, retreating to a few coastal and island communities until it survived only in scattered, aging speakers.
By the late nineteenth century the language had essentially one remaining link to its past: Tuone Udaina, known by the nickname Burbur, on the island of Veglia. He was not a fluent native speaker in the ordinary sense; he had learned the language as a child from listening to his parents, had not used it conversationally for some twenty years, and was elderly, deaf, and toothless when scholars reached him. Yet he was the principal source for the linguist Matteo Bartoli, who recorded what he could remember.
Udaina was killed on 10 June 1898 by an explosion during road construction. With his death, Dalmatian is generally considered to have become extinct. Bartoli’s documentation, published in 1906, preserved a substantial body of words, texts, and grammar, ensuring that a language already nearly gone would not vanish without trace.
Cornish (Kernewek) is a Southwestern Brittonic language of the Celtic family, descended from the Common Brittonic once spoken across the island of Britain. Its closest living relatives are Welsh and Breton, with which it shares a common ancestor; the three diverged as the Brittonic-speaking peoples of the west and southwest were separated from one another by the expansion of Old English. For roughly a millennium Cornish was the everyday speech of Cornwall, the long peninsula that forms the southwestern tip of England.
The language retreated westward over centuries under sustained pressure from English, which advanced as the language of administration, commerce, and religion. The Reformation proved decisive: the imposition of an English-language liturgy after 1549 denied Cornish the prestige and standardisation that a vernacular Bible and Prayer Book gave to Welsh. By the eighteenth century, fluent Cornish survived only in a handful of fishing communities at the far west of the peninsula.
Tradition assigns the role of “last native speaker” to Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole, who died in 1777. The claim is a simplification — semi-speakers and people retaining fragments of the language persisted well into the nineteenth century, John Davey of Zennor (d. 1891) among the most often cited — but the broad outline holds: as a community language transmitted from parent to child, traditional Cornish fell silent in the late 1700s.
What distinguishes Cornish from most entries in this file is what came afterward. Beginning with Henry Jenner’s Handbook of the Cornish Language in 1904, a deliberate revival reconstructed and re-taught the language from its written record. Cornish today has several hundred speakers, a standardised orthography, and children learning it; it is recognised under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. It is, in the precise sense, a revived language.
Wôpanâak — also called Wampanoag or, in older scholarship, Massachusett — is an Eastern Algonquian language of the Southern New England Algonquian group, spoken across southeastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. It was the language of the people who watched the Mayflower arrive in 1620, of the Pokanoket sachem Ousamequin (Massasoit), and of Tisquantum (Squanto), the Patuxet man who served as interpreter between the Wampanoag and the Plymouth colonists. At contact the language was spoken by tens of thousands of people across dozens of communities.
What sets Wôpanâak apart from most silenced languages is the depth of its written record. In 1663 the Puritan missionary John Eliot, working with Native translators including the Nipmuc convert Job Nesutan and the printer’s assistant James Printer (Wowaus), published the Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God — the first complete Bible printed anywhere in the Americas, set entirely in the Massachusett language. Around it accumulated a remarkable archive: catechisms, primers, and thousands of pages of deeds, wills, petitions, and letters written by Wampanoag people themselves in their own language and Roman-alphabet orthography.
The loss of fluent speech was gradual, the product of two centuries of dispossession, epidemic disease, the devastation of King Philip’s War (1675-76), confinement to praying towns, and relentless pressure to assimilate into an English-speaking colony. By the middle of the 19th century there were effectively no fluent speakers left; the language survived longest on Martha’s Vineyard, where Tamsen Weekes, who died in 1890, is often named among the last to have spoken it.
For nearly a century and a half the language was dormant, alive only on paper. Then in 1993 Jessie Little Doe Baird, a Mashpee Wampanoag citizen, launched the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project. Drawing on the very documents the colonial project had produced, and trained in linguistics at MIT, she reconstructed the language and in 2004 raised her daughter Mae as its first native speaker in seven generations. Wôpanâak is today a language with children growing up in it again.