dead languages


Languages that are no longer spoken.

Notes for dead languages

Some dead languages, such as Latin, ancient Greek, and Sanskrit, may nevertheless be studied by large numbers of people because of their literary or historical importance.

The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

How to use dead languages in a sentence

  • Why should we deem the dead languages no longer a practical study, when Latin can gain for a Frenchman an Irish wife!

    In Madeira Place | Heman White Chaplin
  • She could never understand how a girl of healthy mind could care for mathematics, exact science, or dead languages.

    The Fat of the Land | John Williams Streeter
  • Irrepressible and hot-tempered John could not sit down quietly to study dead languages.

  • He was therefore not ashamed to instruct young men in the rudiments of the dead languages.

    The Life of Philip Melanchthon | Karl Friedrich Ledderhose
  • I wished they were not so far away, those eyes, so absorbed with books and dead and gone people and dead languages.

    The Story of Bawn | Katharine Tynan