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What would it be like to be the only human on the planet who understands your language?It's almost impossible to imagine for those of us whose native languages have millions of speakers.However, throughout human history, languages have changed and continue to change.More than half of the world's 6,900 languages, according to linguists, are at risk of disappearing by the 21st century. Languages sometimes perish quickly.This can occur when disasters or war wipe out small communities of speakers.After a massacre in 1932 in which Salvadoran troops killed tens of thousands of mostly indigenous peasants in order to suppress an uprising, speakers of the indigenous Lenca and Cacaopera languages in El Salvador, for instance, abandoned their languages in order to avoid being identified as Indians. However, as successive generations of speakers become bilingual and then begin to lose proficiency in their native languages, the majority of languages gradually disappear.This happens frequently when speakers want to learn a more prestigious language to avoid discrimination or gain social and economic advantages.One illustration of this kind of transition is the gradual disappearance of Coptic as a spoken language in Egypt following the rise of Arabic in the seventh century.People all over the world are under unprecedented pressure to adopt the common languages used in government, commerce, technology, entertainment, and diplomacy as a result of modernization and globalization. Is there a language afterlife?Yes, in many instances.Languages that are important to regional or ethnic identity are frequently revived by dedicated preservationists.The most well-known example is Hebrew, which, despite continuing to be used as a language of religion and scholarship, perished as a common language in the second century CE.In the 19th and 20th centuries, the spoken language was revived in a modernized form and is now the first language of millions of Israelis.