What happens to a language when it is dying?

A. When a language stops being used regularly, it starts to be spoken in a way that shaves off much of the fascinating machinery that defines human language. That is, it starts to revert to a pidgin-like stage, making do with less.

B. Vocabulary. By the 1980s, the Cayuga language of New York State had a word for leg, foot, and eye but not for thigh, ankle, or cheek. The original word for enter was no longer used, with go as a substitute. This is reminiscent of the small vocabulary in such pidgins as Russenorsk.

C. Affixes. In Spanish, it is easier for an English speaker to say voy a hablar, “I’m going to talk,” instead of hablaré, using the future ending. In the same way, in dying languages, speakers start avoiding prefixes and suffixes of this kind, preferring to use separate words that are easier to remember. In Pipil of Central America, there was a future ending -s, but today’s speakers prefer to use their go verb.

D. Articulateness. In many Native American languages, rendering what we think of as sentences as single words is common, and deciding when to do it is part of truly speaking the language with nuance. In Cayuga, to say She has a big house one says “It big-houses her,” Konǫhsowá:neh. But the speakers of the dying version today tend to just say the Cayuga version of Her house is big. That is, they speak Cayuga with the soul of English.

E. The generation after the one that speaks the language on this level usually knows a few words or phrases in the language but cannot carry on a conversation at all. At this point, the language is no longer spoken.