The Silence

Hebrew had not been anyone's mother tongue for roughly 1,700 years when Eliezer Ben-Yehuda arrived in Palestine in 1881 and refused to speak anything else at home. His son, Ben-Zion, born in 1882, was the first native Hebrew speaker in nearly two millennia. By the 1920s, Hebrew was the language of schools, newspapers, and street arguments in Tel Aviv. It remains the only documented case of a language with no living native speakers returning to full everyday use.

By the 1980s, Hawaiian had fewer than 50 speakers under the age of 18. The language had been banned in schools after the 1896 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. In 1984, a group of parents opened the first Punana Leo preschool — an immersion program modeled on Maori language nests. Today there are Hawaiian-medium schools from preschool through university, and the 2020 census counted over 18,000 speakers at home. The language is not safe, but it is no longer dying.

In the 1970s, less than 5 percent of Māori children could speak their own language. The urbanization of the mid-twentieth century had severed the chain of transmission. The kōhanga reo (language nest) movement, started in 1982, placed preschool children in total immersion environments with elderly fluent speakers. Māori became an official language of New Zealand in 1987. By 2023, Māori-medium education enrolled over 27,000 students, and the language appeared on road signs, in parliament, and across national broadcasting.

Welsh was once mocked by the British state — the "Welsh Not" punishment in nineteenth-century schools penalized children caught speaking it. By 1991, fewer than one in five people in Wales could speak the language. Then came the Welsh Language Act of 1993, S4C Welsh-language television, and mandatory Welsh lessons in every state school. The 2021 census recorded 884,000 Welsh speakers, nearly 30 percent of the population. Welsh is now the strongest Celtic language by a wide margin.

Under Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975), speaking Basque in public could result in fines or imprisonment. The language — a pre-Indo-European isolate with no known relatives — retreated to rural villages and private homes. After Franco's death, the Basque autonomous government established ikastolak (Basque-medium schools) and a standardized literary form, Euskara Batua. Today over 750,000 people speak Basque, and among those under 25 in the Basque Autonomous Community, the majority are bilingual. The oldest living language in Western Europe refused to disappear.