Lingva Revigligo

...de Slate:

Last week, Chief Marie Smith Jones, the only remaining native speaker of the Eyak language, died in her home in Anchorage, Alaska. Chief Jones' death makes Eyak—part of the Athabascan family of languages—the first known native Alaskan tongue to go extinct…

…For almost 2,000 years Hebrew was extinct, but Jews around the world continued to use it daily in a limited capacity in prayer, religious ceremonies, and writing. The rise of Jewish nationalism in the 19th century spawned the movement to revive Hebrew as a native language…

…Sometimes linguists must borrow liberally from a family of languages. Cornish, the language of Cornwall, England, went extinct in the 18th century. It was revived starting in the 1920s using only a collection of Cornish passion plays and words and pronunciation borrowed from Breton and Welsh—two closely related Celtic languages. A few hundred people now speak Cornish, and some children are raised with it as a first language.

When filming The New World, a movie about the founding of Jamestown, Va., director Terrence Malick hired a linguist to recreate Virginia Algonquian, which had died nearly 200 years ago. Using a skimpy 550-word vocabulary that settlers had recorded, and borrowing heavily from other Algonquian languages, the linguist recreated enough of the Virginia Algonquian for the actors to perform.