Are there any languages besides Hebrew which were once conversationally extinct and are now used by a large community?

by Gamesst

There was a TIL today about Hebrew being only a religious language from 200 CE to ~1880. If that's accurate, are there any similar instances?

geniice

The general term is language revival and no. There is simply nothing else on the scale of Hebrew.

The details hit a bunch of 20 year rule issues but the closest is probably Cornish with maybe 350 speakers. The last meaningful Cornish faded out by about 1900 although it was largely supplanted by English by the late 17th century. The 18th and 19th century consist of fewer and fewer older and older people speaking less and less Cornish.

Oh make no mistake Cornish died well. "My ny vynnav kewsel Sowsnek!" not one language in a 100 gets a dying myth like that.

The revival movement is usually dated to 1904 and after various splits and arguments we have maybe a few hundred speakers.

Manx never really died out but came pretty close in the early 90s (last first language speaker died in 1974). It has maybe a bit under 2000 speakers.

Other language revival movements exist but they generally start from rather less dead languages or have even few speakers than Cornish.

Language revival (and languages in general) tends to be really rather political. This means that questions like “is it actually dead?” and “how many speakers are there?” or “how much does what you are speaking have in common with the dead language in question?” can be highly contentious (in both directions I should make it clear).

For the record the other language revival movements within the mainland UK (Northern Ireland has its own issues) are Welsh, fairly successful although it never really died out, and Scottish Gaelic which is being rather less successful although again it never really died out.

yodatsracist

As /u/genlice points out, there is no case of language revival anything like Hebrew. I think the Irish attempt is most interesting: almost all Irish school children learn Irish, but mainly as a written language and very few end up comfortable in speaking with it. Why? They can all speak with each other in English. When Hebrew was adopted in Israel, 1) there was some knowledge of it preserved generally, and 2) it was originally just an idealistic curio like Esperanto, but 3) as people settled in Israel, Hebrew became both useful and necessity, as Jewish immigrants from lots of different language communities were forced to communicate together. I can't find it now, but I once saw a statistic of how many languages orders were given in during the Israeli War of Independence and it was surprisingly high. Minimally, we'd expect: Hebrew, Yiddish, English, Polish, Russian, Romanian, German, French, possibly to probably Hungarian, Dutch, Judeo-Spanish, Lithuanian, maybe even Arabic, Greek, Italian. Hebrew's revival arose from unique conditions, being implemented on a diverse polity right as the polity was forming. The Israeli government also took steps to minimize the public role of Yiddish (Hebrew's main rival in early Israel), further cementing Hebrew's prospects.

So in language revival/revitalizatoin, Hebrew stands alone in terms of success. Other languages are having some more limited success at revitalization or preservation. Several indigenous minority languages that looked like they were doomed to disappear, from Crimean Tatar in Ukraine/Russia to Maori in New Zealand to Welsh in the U.K., seem to have at the very least stemmed their losses, mostly by becoming a language of instruction in schools. These often still suffer the problems as Irish does, namely that there's another language that's likely more convenient to speak even to other in-group members.

In addition to language revival, there were several cases where the pre-nationalist elite of an-area-that-later-become-a-country (people tend to act as if our current states were always there). These are often not thought of as "language revitalizations" but "language reforms".

During the Ottoman empire, elite Turkish life was conducted in Ottoman (a Turkic language with not just lots of Arabic and Persian vocabulary, but a shocking amount of Arabic and Persian grammar borrowed). There was extensive language reforms in the early 20th century that sought to align elite speech with "kaba Türkçe" the "rude/rough Turkish" dialects spoken by peasants across the country's (while simultaneously standardizing the peasant dialects into one national language). This was presented as a revival but it was, well, complicated how much this new language ("Öztürkçe", Pure Turkish) related to Old Turkish, the language spoken before the Turks encountered heavy Arabic and Persian influence. I have a long piece from a year ago about language reform and language purity movements here (read down the thread, or just skip to the comment with gold if you're impatient), that starts with language purism and the Turkish language reform, but also discusses language purism more generally and in English.

The elites-speaking another language and gradually adjusting to the language of "the people" (with changes) is common. Hungarian elites traditional spoke a Romance language sometimes called "Dog Latin" before switching over to Hungarian as nationalism took off, and Finnish elites likewise mostly spoke Swedish until nationalism took over as the dominant ideology/identity-structure. From an older post:

Yes. Miroslav Hroch argued that nationalist movements generally go through three "phases". His Phase A was a cultural revival which sought to "return a nation to its roots" in certain ways. His Phase B was the creation of an elite political movement that sought some for national autonomy. His Phase C was the transition of this nationalism from an elite movement to a mass movement. Now, the exact sequencing of this all varies (which is a point that Hroch himself emphasized--he was a comparative historian looking at similarities and differences, rather than merely similarities like a historical sociologist or political scientist in search of a "model"), but many national movements had cultural aspects that sought to "revive" national culture, particularly the "pure" culture of the peasants. You can see it in language--Finnish and Hungarian elites, for example, generally spoke Swedish and "Dog Latin" respectively until surprisingly late. The Czech national revival had a similar early emphasis on elites speaking Czech rather than German.

One thing that characterized these 19th century revivals was a perceived need for a "national epic". The Greeks already had the Odyssey and the Iliad. This is why Wagner wrote about the Nibelungen. It seems like Václav Hanka just straight up forged what he purported to be the ancient Czech national epic. It seems that James Macpherson did the same thing with Ossian, an attempt at a Scottish national epic. The Finnish "reconstruction" of the Kalevala was done by a folklorist, but he combined several different version into one national epic (and also he collected at least half the information from Karelians). Other national epics were genuine texts that had been mostly forgotten, but brought back to the national conscious (for example, Beowulf). The Brother's Grimm work collecting German fairy tales isn't quite a search for a national epic, but it is a similar attempt to use stories to record and revive the up-that-point mostly unwritten folk culture. I'm not very musical so I don't know much of the details about music specifically, but this was often part of the national revival--collecting folks music (this era is the birth of what we'd call ethnomusicology) and writing new music "in the style" of the folk tunes (like Bartok) or using the themes of traditional folk tales (like Wagner). This was common among Central and Eastern European composers in the second half of the 19th century (I'm sure, thinking about it, you can come up with other examples), but I don't know too much more information about it. There's a wikipedia page on musical nationalism that might be of interest to you.

Post-Norman English Elites for centuries spoke a dialect of Norman-French as their court and native languages, before eventually abandoning it for English. Only, the English they adopted was not the mostly Germanic Old English, but Middle English, which had already undergone a heavy Normon-French influence.

While there's been no language revival like Hebrew, there have been other cases of language revitalization that have stopped and in some cases reversed the loss for minority languages, as well as language reforms which greatly shifted language and instances where a part of the population adopts a reformed and modernized version of a language that they had generations ago abandoned.