Native Esperanto speakers
Via Crackmonkey, Oftaj demandoj pri denaskaj Esperant-lingvanoj (Frequent questions about native Esperanto speakers). There is a common myth that only continuously live (sc. "having communities of native speakers") languages have any native speakers at all today. This is totally untrue. Hebrew is probably the most obvious counterexample, since it was deliberately revived as a native spoken language from almost exactly the current condition of Latin, and is now spoken natively by millions of people.
But there are also native Esperanto speakers, even though Esperanto is an artificial language which had no speakers at all before the 19th century. And there are not only Latin speakers, but even native Latin speakers, and I believe that there have been native Latin speakers continually for thousands of years. (Michel de Montaigne is a famous example; although he was born in a French-speaking community, he learned Latin as his first language and French as his second language, from adults who spoke Latin as a non-native language. There is no suggestion that his Latin was awkward or inadequate or that he had any trouble communicating with other Latin speakers.)
The only reason some people say that Latin is a "dead language" is that there are no communities of native speakers who regularly teach the language to their children to produce more native speakers. (You could also claim that Latin is not the language of any community, but I think this claim is misleading.)
There are a lot of regional languages in danger of "death" in the sense that they are not being learned as native languages. I bought a book on language death (Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages, by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine), which phrases the question of what a language is in an interesting way:
After all, languages are not living things which can be born and die, like butterflies and dinosaurs. They are not victims of old age and disease. They have no tangible existence like trees or people. In so far as language can be said to exist at all, its locus must be in the minds of the people who use it. In another sense, however, language might be regarded as an activity, a system of communication between human beings. A language is not a self-sustaining entity.(p. 5)
So you can see a language as a kind of cultural practice or activity or pattern which happens between and among people -- the kind of conventional view of language and speech, the kind of unmagical view, which fairly shocked me when I ran into it for the first time in Lee Tien's account:
The relationship of speech acts to language, however, is not that speech acts must be in a language, but rather that language constitutes a system of conventions that permits speakers to perform otherwise purely physical acts like uttering sounds that hearers understand in virtue of their knowing those conventions. But because language is not the only system of conventions that makes intersubjective utterance meaning possible, nonlinguistic acts can also be speech acts.(Lee Tien, "Publishing Software as a Speech Act", 15 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 629, 642 (2000))
("Conventional" here means "consisting of conventions" rather than "ordinary" or "widely accepted".)
Back to language death: most endangered languages have not been used to create a famous literature or other recorded cultural artifacts, so they're not likely to enjoy the fate of Latin or Hebrew or Sanskrit. People are still studying Sanskrit and Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) largely so that they can read the literatures which were produced in those languages. But many of the languages dying today haven't even had a written form for most of their lifetimes.
