As long as there are native speakers alive, however, a language can be revived by teaching it to new people, preferably young children. Are there any other living speakers of your language? And what is it?
If they live near each other, that would be enough to revive the language. There are native languages that have come back from just a few elders. It's hard, though. Many languages are going extinct because they aren't being passed on. The speakers dwindle down and die out. It's really sad.
The main reason I don't really see it expanding is that within the Sámi community it is being taken over by other varities. There is no longer a tightly knit community that speaks it. Hell, I'm a native speaker of it and never lived in an area with any others aside from the family members that spoke it around me.
Combine that with a general movement to speak more Swedish, and the general requirement to learn English... and Pite has little, if any, reason to continue fighting for itself.
That's so disappointing. When a language dies, a whole worldview dies with it. The little turns of phrase, the words for things you can't find in another language, the songs and stories that lose something in translation ... those all disappear.
It IS very sad. Over the past several years I've been collecting things on Pite, to document them properly. Including sound files and whatnot. Not sure what I'll do with them, but I feel that it's good to have them. Especially since Pite had no formal writing system.
That sounds like a fantastic book. I'm definitely going to be reading it.
It's good that you're collecting sound files and so forth. At least there will be an imprint left as a fossil language. If you talk with other linguists, you may find something to do with those materials. Many linguists are interested in documenting moribund languages.
Is there a writing system that's a decent match for Pite Sami, or is it different enough that there are sounds or changes not easily marked in extant systems?
Yeah.. I'm quite sure it will be useful to somebody. My primary interest in linguistics (and what I went to school for) is the opposite side of language - creation, not death.
Most people who write in Pite Sámi just use the Swedish system of phonetics, though sometimes Finnish accents are introduced.
I'm interested in many aspects of linguistics, but sadly it's not what I studied in school. I'm far enough along that I'm starting to wish I could take some classes in linguistics.
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