I am frequently asked the question of whether or not it would be possible to revive a dead ancient language in the modern world. Many people I have talked to seem to find the idea of bringing back ancient languages fascinating, even though most people interested in this subject do not speak any ancient languages themselves.
The answer to this question is that it is certainly possible to bring an ancient language back to life, but it is extremely difficult and it can only be done if all conditions are just perfect. As far as I am currently aware, only one ancient language that was completely dead has ever been successfully brought back as a living vernacular and that was in one very particular, unique case. The vast majority of attempts to revive dead ancient languages have not been successful.
Inherent difficulties in resurrecting dead languages
In order to resurrect a dead language, you need to have all kinds of factors that line up just perfectly. First of all, the ancient language you are trying to resurrect needs to be very well-attested. There are many ancient languages that could probably never be brought back because we just don’t know enough about them to reconstruct them. It would probably be impossible to fully resurrect, say, the Etruscan language, Proto-Elamite, or Proto-Indo-European in the modern world, because we just don’t know enough about them to bring them back as living vernaculars.
Second of all, in addition to having the language itself be well-attested, you need to have an extremely large community of people with a very strong sense of affiliation with that ancient language. By that, I mean you need a group of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who would be willing to put in the years it would take to learn the language well enough to speak it in the home. If you have never studied an ancient language, you may not realize just how challenging it is to learn one. Living languages are challenging and dead languages are even more challenging in a lot of ways.
Third of all, in order to maintain the language, you are going to need a place where people who speak the language can all live together, a place where they can speak the language to each other and where it can be the primary language they speak on a daily basis. In other words, you are going to need a large city or a small country where people can live where they speak the ancient language as their primary language.
ABOVE: Photograph of the Cippus Perusinus, a stone stele dating to the third or second century BC, inscribed with forty-six lines in the Etruscan language, making it one of the longest surviving Etruscan inscriptions. We probably couldn’t bring back Etruscan because we just don’t have enough surviving writing in it.
Hebrew: the only fully revived ancient language
I am only aware of one ancient language that has actually been fully brought back and that is now spoken as a living language and that is Hebrew. By around the fifth century AD, Hebrew was extinct as a spoken vernacular and survived only as a liturgical and literary language of the Jewish people.
For over a millennium, Hebrew was liturgical and literary language like Latin that no one spoke on a daily basis. Then there was a movement that started in the late nineteenth century to bring Hebrew back as a spoken language. Now Modern Hebrew has roughly five million native speakers, most of whom live in the state of Israel, and around four million additional non-native speakers. Altogether, Modern Hebrew has around nine million speakers worldwide.
Mind you, Modern Hebrew is quite different from Biblical Hebrew in a lot of ways. Many changes have been made to adapt the language to the modern world. For instance, Biblical Hebrew obviously had no words for “car” or “airplane” or “microwave.” Pronunciation of Modern Hebrew also differs significantly from pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew. Nonetheless, the Hebrew language was successfully revived in a particular form.
Of course, with Hebrew, all of the circumstances happened to fall together just perfectly, allowing the language to be resuscitated. Starting out, Hebrew is one of the best-attested ancient languages, since a massive corpus of ancient writings in Biblical Hebrew have survived, including the writings of the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, various non-canonical scriptures, and other works.
Furthermore, the Hebrew language was already extremely closely tied to Jewish national and religious identity long before anyone proposed the idea of bringing it back. There were millions of Jews living all around the world, so there was a very large group of people with an identity that was extremely closely tied to the language. The founding of the modern state of Israel was also pivotal in the resurrection of the Hebrew language because it gave people a place where they could speak Hebrew as a primary language.
ABOVE: Photograph of the Temple Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, dating to around the second century BC or thereabouts
Failed attempts to revive Classical Attic Greek
Most often, attempts to revive ancient languages fail. For instance, to give a relevant counterexample, all efforts to bring back Ancient Greek in the modern world so far have failed. The form of the Greek language that was spoken in Athens in the fifth-century BC is known as “Classical Attic Greek.” Meanwhile, the form of the Greek language that is spoken by people in Greece today is known as “Demotic Greek.” Although Demotic Greek is ultimately derived from Classical Attic Greek, it is nonetheless very different in terms of its grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and orthography.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was a movement among Greeks—especially Greek intellectuals—to revive Classical Attic Greek, but this movement was ultimately not successful. For a while, Katharevousa, a deliberately archaizing form of the Greek language developed by the Greek Enlightenment scholar Adamantios Koraïs (1748–1833) that tried to strike a balance between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek, became prominent.
ABOVE: Portrait of the Greek scholar Adamantios Koraïs, who was extremely influential in the development of Katharevousa
Nonetheless, Katharevousa, which was mainly a literary language from the very start and not really a spoken vernacular, fell out of fashion for a variety of reasons in the early 1970s. Part of the reason why it fell out of popularity was because it was archaic and sometimes difficult to understand, but the main reason for its unpopularity was due to its close association with the brutal military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 until 1974.
In 1976, around two years after the fall of the junta, Georgios Rallis, the Greek minister of education, made Demotic Greek the official language of the nation of Greece. In 1982, the Greek prime minister Andreas Papandreou abolished the use of polytonic accents, establishing the single accent system used for the Greek language today. Today, Katharevousa is rarely ever written in or spoken.
Ironically, of course, Modern Demotic Greek is about as close to Classical Attic Greek as Modern Hebrew is to Biblical Hebrew, so one could perhaps pose an argument that Ancient Greek never really died out.
ABOVE: Photograph of an ancient Athenian decree dating to between c. 440 and c. 425 BC, written in Classical Attic Greek
The “Living Latin” movement
Today, there is a growing movement among Latin instructors to teach Classical Latin as though it were a living language. This movement is known as the “Living Latin” movement. This idea of “Living Latin” is primarily a movement dealing with how the Latin language should be taught. The idea is that, by teaching Classical Latin as a living language, instructors may be able to get students more excited about learning Latin. Not all proponents of “Living Latin” necessarily want to bring Classical Latin back as a spoken vernacular, but most proponents of it do hope to build at least a small community of Latin-speakers.
There are Latin translations of popular modern books such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (Magus Mirabilis in Oz, translated by C. J. Hinke and George van Buren), Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Superbia et Odium, translated by Thomas Cotton), Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne (Winnie ille Pu, translated by Lenard Alexander), and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling (Harrius Potter et philosophi lapis, translated by Peter Needham).
There is even a Latin-language Wikipedia, known as “Vicipædia.” According to the current version of its census page, Latin Wikipedia has 131,501 articles, 258,957 total pages (including discussion pages and redirects), and 125,386 total registered users, of whom 133 are active. Ironically, the Latin Wikipedia has more articles and more users than some of the Wikipedias for living languages.
These examples clearly show that Classical Latin is not completely dead; some people are still writing and reading in it for fun. Nonetheless, no one could pretend that all these translations of popular modern books into Classical Latin or the Latin-language Wikipedia mean Classical Latin has been successfully brought back as a living vernacular. I do not know of anyone who speaks Classical Latin as a native language and I doubt anyone will be speaking it as a native language for quite some time.
ABOVE: Screenshot of the homepage for the Latin-language Wikipedia
ABOVE: Screenshot of the Latin-language Wikipedia census, as of today, 18 November 2019
Conclusion
Bringing back a completely dead language can be done, but it is extremely difficult and—to my knowledge—has only happened successfully once. In order to bring back a dead language, circumstances have to be exactly right. You can’t just do it with any dead language. You need a language that is very well-attested and that is intrinsic to the national and/or religious identity of a large group of people.
Aside from Hebrew, Classical Latin is probably the dead language that is currently the closest to being brought back, but even Classical Latin is far from fully revived in any sense. Furthermore, I think that it would actually be very difficult to fully revive Classical Latin as a living vernacular in the modern world, because, although there are many people around the world who have a keen interest in learning Classical Latin in order to read ancient Roman texts or just for fun, there are not enough of these people for them to realistically bring Classical Latin back from the dead completely.
Of all the dead ancient languages out there, I think the one that stands the best chance of being brought back might actually be Coptic Egyptian, a late form of the Ancient Egyptian language that is still used as a liturgical language by Coptic Christians in Egypt. Currently, there is somewhere between fifteen million and twenty million Coptic Christians worldwide and the Coptic language is very closely tied with Coptic national and religious identity, just as Hebrew was for Jewish identity in the late nineteenth century.
I could see an effort to revive Coptic as a spoken vernacular among Coptic Christians in Egypt meeting with some degree of success. Whether such an effort could be as successful as the efforts to revive Hebrew have been is hard to say. Nonetheless, Coptic certainly shares many of the features that made it possible to revive Hebrew, so it is not entirely absurd to claim that it could perhaps be revived in the modern world if people were dedicated to the purpose of reviving it.
ABOVE: Photograph of a Coptic inscription from Upper Egypt dating to around the fifth or sixth century AD
