Laura Romig, Class of 2025, Language Ambassador
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Latin, a language with no native speakers, is the fourth most taught language in the US education system. While Latin is the official language of one country—the Vatican City—it's of course not actually spoken or written outside of church services; it's still a dead language, replaced in Italy by Italian and by English as the lingua franca of science, philosophy, and history.
Latin, Coptic, Sanskrit, Old Norse, Ancient Greek, Middle English, Old French, Classical Chinese, Gothic... these are just the most-studied dead languages, the ones with intact grammar resources, sufficient or ample texts, well-researched and recorded history, and usually also with traditional backing and funding from universities and entire academic disciplines.
The focus of learning dead languages is almost always to learn reading and writing, because speaking is either impractical or near-impossible, if pronunciation has been lost. If you've studied Latin or any of the other languages I listed, you probably know that studying the language is also intimately connected to studying literature and history—while studying a modern language is usually focused on practical conversation and existing culture. Given that the motivations behind studying a dead language are different from those behind studying a living language, should studying dead languages should be considered the same academic discipline as studying modern languages?
And maybe we should ask... should we study dead languages at all?
Maybe because I haven't studied any dead languages in the past, the answer isn't immediately obvious. Maybe it isn't to you either. Studying dead languages, specifically Latin, is normalized in the United States and around the world, but if you ask the general population why, they usually say something like: "It helps you learn vocabulary for the SAT." Clearly, the benefit of studying a dead language isn't just that it boosts your credibility for a college entry exam; otherwise, you wouldn't be able to study it at so many higher education institutions across the world. Another theory could be that dead languages, Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit especially, are holdovers from a dissipating academic world of the past, when the ancient Western world was revered as the foundation of history, and Latin was the lingua franca of academia. Even if there is some truth to that idea, it doesn't negate the question of whether there is still value in continuing to study them.
So what are the benefits of studying an ancient language without any native speakers? And do they outweigh the disadvantages? Studying a dead language allows you to read the sources of history in their original voices, like I've mentioned before. It allows you to examine and understand the evolution of not only languages, but society, culture, human behavior, human values, and more. What words and ideas, if any, are consistent across the span of time between us and the ancients? Learning ancient languages also most likely cultivates advantages in learning other languages. And finally, learning ancient languages creates opportunities for studies that span an interdisciplinary set of fields, from religion to history to philosophy. Modern languages, of course, also allow for interdisciplinary study, since many types of writing or other cultural products are produced within a language to be study, from political documents to scientific journal articles to poetry.
And the case against? Learning a dead language may, at least on the surface, not accomplish the core language-learning goal of making the world more globalized, connected, and filled with empathy. It doesn't allow you to speak or connect with individuals—even so, it does allow for intellectual connections with other students of the language and the surrounding disciplines.
Another disadvantage worth discussing is that ancient languages often have limits that make them difficult to teach, learn, and use in today's world. Latin has no word for computer or coffee or cafe, and Egyptian hieroglyphics can't be typed on a modern keyboard. But these problems also have people dedicated to solving them; for example, the Neo-Latin Lexicon is chock-full of Latin words coined to correspond with modern English words, inventions, and concepts. Are these words still part of the ancient language? What if they were created in consultation with experts on Latin language, culture, and history? The mere existence of this resources generates these and more worthwhile questions, interesting discourse about how we preserve and present our language and our society, and the questions and answers surrounding it are lost without the study of and care for ancient languages.
Lastly, some might argue that other subjects should take precedence over the study of ancient languages like Latin, specifically in K-12 public education, where citizens of a country are taught basic foundational knowledge of their history, of science, of the world, of writing and ideas. I don't fully disagree; while pursuing ancient languages in secondary education is worthwhile for the pursuit of knowledge, research, and learning, public education has a more specific purpose to teach children wha they need to know to be educated, moral, understanding people . But at the same time, wouldn't understanding cultural history and the origins of ideas and words through studying a dead language also be foundational knowledge?
Regardless of where or how ancient languages should be taught, the world seems to be in agreement about their value. At Brown, you can take courses in Sanskrit, Middle or Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, and Latin. If you do study one of these or another dead language, I would be curious to hear why, and what you value from it!
For more, check out the Mandan Language Project, which provides resources to learn Mandan, a language that originated in the region of North Dakota and which currently has 1 (just one!) fluent speaker.