Language Death
The endpoint at which a language ceases to have living fluent speakers. Linguist Michael Krauss established that the decisive predictor is intergenerational transmission, not current speaker count — a language with a million elderly speakers and no children learning it is dying, while a language with a few hundred speakers whose children are learning it at home is alive, which is why documented revitalization cases (Hebrew, Māori, Hawaiian, Wôpanâak) can reverse a trajectory that looks demographically final.