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I realize that this is not as important as saving the language from extinction
Hearing the sounds of a language is a very different thing from knowing the structure, the grammar of a language, knowing the way a language interprets reality. Without living native speakers a language is lost forever.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Thanks for the link, Rapunzel!  Good to be able to read the entire article and charts! It also helps to confirm how the copy-editors of the local rag in this area butcher their stories, to the decades-long disdain of folks in this region (the rag shall be left unnamed) The nuance of language never ceases to amaze me! My mother spoke what she called "Slovak," as did her parents and most of their first-generation immigrant families. But it's really a dialect of Carpatho-Russian Slavic, since they came from northern Austria-Hungary from villages in the Carpathian Mountains. An exchange student from Slovakia that stayed with my sister's family could understand some of my Mother's tongue, and the Russian student workers that spend the summers here can understand only some of it. Unfortunately, though I know a handful of words, my Mother kept it to herself, mostly, so she could converse with her sister without anyone else knowing what they were saying!...on the phone or in person!  So, as you can see, sometimes even personal reasons contribute to this loss of knowledge. 
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veteran
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Re Cornish
I read somewhere, years ago, that the last Cornish speaker was a lady who died around 1810 and that she was visited on her deathbed by language scholars eager to speak with her and take notes on the language while they still could. Maybe the reports of the death of that language were premature, like Mark Twain's obit.
Anyway, it is sad, to me at least, that the rich variety of language is being impoverished. But, as pointed out by others, a language has to be spoken by a significant number of people to be a living, viable language. Efforts to preserve a language [Latin comes to mind] like a fly in amber are never very successful. And to my knowledge, there is only one dead language that has been successfully resuscitated, that being Hebrew.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Re: samples of language on a CD...
but even if they did--there are some sounds, that unless one is expossed to them at an early age-- one never learns to hear them-- the most famous for english speakers is R/L-- unless learned early, most japanese can not hear that these letters represent different sounds..
My own sister has the problem.. her name is Tsuyuki-- which is not the same as Suyuki.. but it "sounds the same to her" -- so just as we chuckle over air line stewards saying "have a nice fright!" she does the same in japanese to her own name!
a language needs children-- to hear the sounds.. and if they don't hear them at a critical point...
Steve Pinker points out, that children known to be deaf at an early age, (before 1 year old) and then "spoken" to in sign, "speak" sign language at almost the same rate as "verbal language" children..
and children with normal hearing-- spoken to in sign-- by deaf parents, are a little slow with verbal skills, but the difference is gone by age 5-- they learned language.. (sign language) and have "primed their brains" for language.. and when with verbal children, quickly pick up the spoken language...
Unless children are listening to the CD's, and before the age of 2-- the language dies..
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Cornish is not yet dead. My great-grandmother (d 1950ish) spoke fluent Cornish, and my grandmother retains some sayings, though not much more than that. There is a large Cornish community in South Australia, and indeed Australia as a whole, descended from Cornish miners who came to Australia in the 1800's.
There are also numerous language preservation projects being established in Australia to save the languages of the original inhabitants of our country, the Aboriginal people, of who well over 100 languages and dialects exist(ed).
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is R/L-- unless learned early, most japanese can not hear that these letters represent different sounds..
and because teh Japanese pronounce them both as a sound halfway between R and L, they both are heard as incorrect by the English ear. For some reason, instead of adjusting to the correct sound, the English ear seems to adjust it even further the wrong way, hearing "R" for "L" and "L" for "R". But Helen, did you find, as I did, that after frequent exposure to the phenomenon, my ears (or the ear bit of my brain) adjusted the sound so I was no longer hearing the wrong words?
Rod
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enthusiast
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children with normal hearing-- spoken to in sign-- by deaf parents, are a little slow with verbal skills, but the difference is gone by age 5-- they learned language.. (sign language) and have "primed their brains" for language.. and when with verbal children, quickly pick up the spoken language...
It is well-documented that infants in signing homes are able to produce signs long before infants in speaking homes can talk. My son (who turns one next week) had seven signs in his vocabulary at 6 months and began signing two word sentences at 10 months. That they get "language" is clear, and because they develop motor skills before those tough larynx skills, they can produce language a bit earlier.
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Mother kept it to herself, mostly, so she could converse with her sister without anyone else knowing what they were saying!...on the phone or in person!
My parents did the same with Polish, WO'N. They wanted to be able to talk privately in front of the kids! There seems to be a different mentality today, with more people recognizing the value of multilingualism (except of course for my own kids, who were exposed to weekly Spanish lessons at school starting in kindergarten, continued the language through high school and were supremely relieved to test out of the language requirement in college!).
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