I don't know about you, but that clearly says "⚍∷ ᒲ𝙹ᒲ ╎ᓭ ⊣ᔑ|| ꖎ𝙹ꖎ".
"A language based on guesswork? Thanks, old dead people, you're officially the worst."
— Velvet Crowe (on deciphering the meaning of the lost Avarost language), Tales of Berseria
Language comes in many different shapes and sizes, and their range of usability can change over the course of millennia. We have modern languages, used in daily life, and dead languages, some used as Classical Tongues, others as Sacred Language and other ones are known by archaeologists studying ruins or by paleolinguists.
And then there are these languages, which have slipped into oblivion or which even the top linguists don't know. Perhaps the people's culture was destroyed in an ecological disaster. Or perhaps a tyrannical ruler killed all the people of a conquered culture and eliminated all traces of their history and language as well. Perhaps the runes are etched on a crashed alien spaceship or on a Big Dumb Object that astronauts find on the moon. Lost languages are created when no-one is able to use and understand them, whether by the loss of speakers, lack of adequate translation, or simply by not having new people willing to learn and speak the language.
Truth in Television very much applies here, given the vast multitude of languages that have emerged over the course of human history; it's exceedingly common for a language to only emerge among a small ethnic group and then die out as the people either die or adopt new languages (oftentimes by force). Most of these languages, once abandoned, become permanently lost thanks to no-one actually seeking out or archiving them, and ones that are archived may not necessarily be translatable. The Indus River Valley Civilization is one notable example of the latter: we have surviving writings, but nothing that allows us to actually decipher them. Thus, despite having easy access to the alphabet and writing methods of the extinct civilization, the language is lost by virtue of being un-translatable.
In fiction, lost languages are commonly used as a seemingly impenetrable puzzle for characters to face, with writings in this language typically containing vital clues to attaining a certain end goal. Thus, a good portion of the plot is dedicated to finding a means of deciphering these lost languages, be it through the discovery of a surviving speaker or a hidden Rosetta Stone.note
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- One Piece: The old language inscribed on the "Poneglyphs" has been lost to everyone except Nico Robin, one of the protagonists. It's because the Poneglyphs contain information about the Void Century, something that the World Government doesn't want people at large to know. The Poneglyphs are indestructible, so the WG went after people who can read them (mostly the scholars in Ohara) and then decimate them and their documents; Robin used to be an Ohara native and she's wanted by the WG because of it.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: The people of Adai village follow a religion that Father Magin preaches from an ancient holy book. At the end of the episode, it's revealed that Magin made up the entire religion to control the village and he can't even read the "holy book". He gives it to Rossiu as they leave, saying that maybe it will be of some importance. Ten years later, Rossiu returns and reveals that... there is no record of the "holy book's" language in any of Lordgenome's files on ancient Earth. Whatever the book actually says is lost to time.
Films — Animated
- In Atlantis: The Lost Empire, the Atlanteans are still able to speak their language, but have lost the knowledge to read it.
Films — Live-Action
- I Dream In Another Language: Although there are a handful of characters who speak Zikril, they are reluctant to directly tell Martín what any of the words mean. Though toward the end of the movie, he does manage to learn "upive," the word for "friend". One of the movie's central ideas is that because many dying languages don't operate on the same ideological principles as modern languages, they can never be fully understood by people who weren't born into those cultures.
- Stargate: The Abydonians speak an Ancient Egyptian dialect, and Daniel Jackson, being an Egyptologist, is able to communicate with them once he figures out the pronunciation.
- By the end of The Rise of Skywalker, the Black Speech language of the Sith is implied to have become this, with the last remaining Sith and Sith-cultists dying on Exagol and with language-proficient droids such as C-3PO being expressly forbidden to translate it.
Literature
- Area 51: The fictional high runes and real rongorongo language of Easter Island feature in the island. In both cases, characters are able to partly or wholly decipher them (how is not explained).
- Brave New World: By 632 AF (2540 CE), English has become the World State's only spoken language. The Director references Polish when discussing Ford's childhood, and after asking if anyone knows what it is, a student mentions it's a dead language just like French and German. Other languages like Spanish, Zuni and Athabascan aren't completely extinct, but are only spoken in the Savage Reservations.
- The Brightest Shadow: Many ruins around the world are covered in writing that doesn't match any modern language. Worse, most of them aren't even using similar alphabets.
- "The Double Shadow" by Clark Ashton Smith: A wizard finds a tablet inscribed with an utterly alien script, summons up the ghost of a prehistoric sorcerer to identify it as coming from a pre-human civilization, and sends the ghost back in time to learn how to translate it. It goes horribly right.
- In The Fellowship of the Ring, when Gandalf talks at the Council of Elrond about trying to find information about the One Ring in the ancient archive of Minas Tirith, he mentions how the language of Gondor has changed since the city was founded, and now even most of the lore masters cannot read the oldest documents in the archives. Naturally, that's where Gandalf finds the information that he needs.
- Immortal Guardians: Seth has lived so long that he speaks several languages that no one else on Earth does, as all of the other speakers of the language have long since died out. Some of Seth's languages went extinct so long ago that there's no record of them having existed except the fact that Seth knows them.
- "Omnilingual" by H. Beam Piper: The Martian civilisation is long dead by the time that humans get to Mars, but extensive records survive. Protagonist Martha makes a breakthrough in understanding their language when she finds a periodic table in a derelict library. It isn't much, but it's a start.
- The Stormlight Archive: Scholars have untranslatable records of Dawnchant, the language of the planet Roshar's original occupants, the persecuted Parshendi species. Dalinar's visions force him to rant in Dawnchant while he experiences the corresponding Ghost Memories in his native language, making him a living Rosetta Stone when scholars transcribe and cross-reference them.
- A Memoir by Lady Trent: The language of the setting's resident highly advanced ancient civilization (by the dates given, it's more of an equivalent to Ancient Egypt or Assyria than Greece or Rome, and it had a global reach) isn't successfully translated until the Sequel Series. Even the name used by the modern cultures for said civilization (Draconean) is explicitly noted by the narrator to be a placeholder.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who: The Doctor has described Old High Gallifreyan as the lost language of the Time Lords. The TARDIS never translates written Gallifreyan, and River Song outright says that the language doesn't translate. During the Doctor's tenure as the Last of His Kind, he was the only person in the whole universe who knew how to read either form. River could also read and write the Old High form, and possibly Circular Gallifreyan (although she's never shown doing so). In any case, the Doctor doesn't use the language to communicate with other people, and even when the TARDIS uses a form of Gallifreyan writing on her viewscreens, it's always the Circular form instead.
- Iconian in Star Trek: The Next Generation is a lost language, the Iconians having been wiped out roughly 200,000 years prior to the episode "Contagion". The language is not known by any living being, though Data is able to approximate a rough translation by comparing Iconian glyphs to three other ancient languages (Dewan, Dinasian and Iccobar) believed to be derivatives of it. Very rough.
Data: This would appear to be manual override.
[presses a control and an Iconian gateway opens]
Data: That was not manual override. - Andor: Luthen quips that since an artifact has writing from a forgotten language, it can mean whatever you want it to mean.
Tabletop Games
- Ars Magica: One story hook has the players seek out the Primordial Tongue of Adam for its potent magic. It's been lost since Biblical times, so their options are to find and gain entrance to the Garden of Eden; to find its sole surviving once-human speaker Cain; or to reconstruct it through an epic study in historical linguistics.
Video Games
- Assassin's Creed: The language of the Isu. The Assassins in the modern day portion of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla have managed to find enough to get a working translation. A storyline in Assassin's Creed: Mirage, set in 9th century Baghdad has the Order of Ancients abduct a scholar to make him translate a fragment they have, and are not willing to accept his explanation that he can't.
- The alien language in Barotrauma is completely indecipherable to humans, though the way the language works, just looking at it will cause some minor psychosis (not helped by the fact that the words are located in alien ruins, which already cause psychosis themselves). An extremely rare alien artifact allows the holder to translate and understand the language, though it's not required. Doing so reveals what happened to the aliens, though not in clear terms, and it fails to explain why. It also causes more psychosis damage.
- EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: The temple in the undersea nation of Deep Heaven has writing unrecognizable to anyone on Earth. Professor Ace does not recognize it from among his academic knowledge; Blackberry cannot identify it from among her magical knowledge. The Dream Demon King Maerd has some awareness of it, but refuses to burden his mortal companions with this knowledge. It isn't a language of this Earth, and originates from beyond the stars. It is the ancient language of Cthulu whom the Deepnoids worship, and whose connection causes Crown and Fool to go berserk.
- Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Gina's sister Laura was recruited by the Nazis (willingly or unwillingly is never clearly stated) because she's the only linguist in the world capable of translating Adamic, the first language of man that hasn't been in common use since the fall of the Tower of Babel. After finding Laura's notebook, Indy is able to work out individual words.
- In Tales of Berseria, the ancient Avarost civilization had a language that emphasized emotion, with words having different meanings depending on the emotion of the writer or speaker. The language itself was lost to time when the civilization fell thousands of years ago, with only records of it left behind in ancient books. Since the language is no longer in use with the current populace of the Midgand empire, deciphering its meaning has proven to be difficult and takes a lot of time. This becomes important to the plot since deciphering the lost Avarost language is key to defeating Innominat.
- The Elder Scrolls series has several including Dwemeris (the language of the disappeared Dwemer or "Dwarves") and Falmeris (the language of the corrupted Falmer or "Snow Elves"). Finding a means to translate them is a plot point in Morrowind's Mages Guild questline and Skyrim's Thieves' Guild questline, respectively. There is also the old Akaviri language, which is only known by a few interpreters like Esbern, and it is even more difficult to translate because the Akaviri way of conveying information is couched heavily in allegory and mythical symbolism, which makes things problematic when they're writing down important information like a prophecy regarding the end of the world.
- God of War (PS4): The World Serpent speaks a language that no one else in the game speaks except Mimir, the wisest man alive. Mimir says everyone else who speaks the language has been systematically murdered by Odin and his sons. Loki's talent with languages allows him to call Midgarsormr in the climax to ask for assistance.
- In Heaven's Vault, Aliya Elasra has to decypher Ancient, the ancient language of Nebula.
- Star Wars Legends: In Knights of the Old Republic, the Rakata language has long been lost to the Galaxy, since the Infinite Empire collapsed thousands of years ago and the civilizations that it had enslaved went to great lengths to erase any record of Rakata culture that they could find.
- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: Language drift has caused the language once spoken in Ocarina of Time to become forgotten, with only a handful of characters still familiar with it (only one of whom was actually born during the modern age, and she isn't exactly fluent).
Visual Novels
- Soul of Sovereignty: In the Mosaic's hegemony, few people remain who can read and speak Aksendi, but Loic is one of them. He struggles with it more than he'd like to, admitting his accent is poor and that he can't read a lick of the courtly script used in Erekest. He's working to prevent flower language, the now-obscure Language of Magic from which Aksendi is said to have derived, from going extinct entirely by teaching Lelia everything he knows about the art.
Web Video
- "Language Death: How do languages die?
" by Langfocus is about the different ways that languages end up being lost.
Western Animation
- Futurama:
- Implied in the pilot episode. A crowd gathered around the Eiffel Tower shouts "Neuf! (the French word for "nine") during the 1999 New Year's Eve countdown; a thousand years later, a similar crowd shouts "Seven!" in English instead.
- "A Clone of My Own" confirms this with Professor Farnsworth's universal translator, which only translates into "an incomprehensible dead language".
Machine: Bonjour!
Farnsworth: Crazy gibberish!
Real Life
- Ancient Egyptian remains a partial example. Since the discovery of the Rosetta Stone (a routine tax proclamation written in multiple languages, allowing scholars to work out a translation guide for Egyptian because they knew the sections written in languages they could understand were saying the same thing), we now know what the words mean, but we aren't entirely sure how the ancients would have pronounced them. Just for one thing, the hieroglyphic writing system didn't represent vowels at all—we only know what consonants Egyptian words included. This type of writing is known as an Abjad and is still present to this day in Arabic and Hebrew. Also, Egyptian writing spans a period of over 3,000 years, so even the pronunciation of the consonants changed over the centuries. There is however a (semi) living descendant of Ancient Egyptian in the form of Coptic, a language that still exists today, albeit only as a liturgic language spoken by a small number of Christian scholars and clergy in Egypt. Ironically, despite being all but dead itself, Coptic played an enormous role in preserving the Ancient Egyptian language as the Coptic language is written in a modified Greek alphabet that actually includes vowels.
- Like their cousin Egyptian, several ancient Semitic languages were written in scripts that don't tell us what vowels their words included. Arabic and Hebrew are spoken today, but not with the original pronunciations or accents (Hebrew, for instance, is now spoken with a simplified Sephardic pronunciation, and many loanwords from Arabic, German, Yiddish, English, and other languages).
- Except for a dozen iffily transliterated words in the Gospels, we have no idea what the native Aramaic of Jesus and the Apostles was like. ("Aramaic" isn't a single language, but a family of languages that differed greatly by region and by era. The Aramaic documents that have survived are extremely different from the version spoken in 1st-century Judaea.)
- The Byblos syllabary has still not been deciphered since its discovery in 1928. Several people have tried.
- Apart from isolated words, the few texts in the Etruscan language cannot be understood. The Romans actually wrote a Latin-Etruscan dictionary back in the day, but this text is lost.
- The Khitan scripts are likewise not deciphered beyond a few isolated words, mostly those related to the calendar.
- The Harappan script, used by the Indus Valley Civilization, has not been translated. While some have tried linking it to the Dravidian languages, now spoken mostly in southern India, many are skeptical that it even is actual writing.
- The Hebrew language is a fascinating case of a language that was lost and then successfully revived. Hebrew actually died out as a spoken language entirely somewhere in the 2-4th centuries and remained dead for over one and a half millennia after that. Hebrew only returned to life starting in the late 19th century, through a concerted effort by religious, linguistic and political figures in Europe and the Middle East. Today, Hebrew is one of the world's few successfully revived dead languages, though it must be said that Modern Hebrew does sound quite a bit different, owing to the influence from languages like Arabic and Yiddish.
- The Hunnic language. Despite the Huns' prominence in Europe during the 5th century, nothing about it is known other than a couple of individual words that are, at most presumed to possibly be Hunnic in nature. Even the infamous Attila the Hun's name is actually a Gothicized form of his true name, which also remains unknown. The core problem is that Hunnic seemingly had no written language and therefore, no physical record of the languages outside of what little was documented by others like the Greeks and the Romans. On top of this, the Hunnic Empire was very ethnically diverse, with a majority of its population actually consisting non-Hunnic peoples that spoke their own languages.
- Long ago, there existed three branches of the Germanic language family, with an extinct East Germanic branch having at various times been spoken all the way from Eastern Europe to Southwestern Europe and even in North Africa. This branch included historically significant languages like Gothic, though all East Germanic languages eventually died out. Fascinatingly, this branch almost made it to modern day, with a sparsely documented dialect called Crimean Gothic being spoken on the Crimean Peninsula up until the late 18th century.
- The Minoans civilization of Crete used many multiple scripts that are now almost impossible to decipher: Linear A, which was used as the written form of their spoken language. To date, no Linear A texts have been deciphered. The Minoans also used other writing systems, called "hieroglyphs", which are even harder to decipher. There are also the glyphs on the Phaistos disc, which look different from either Linear A or the hieroglyphs, which haven't been deciphered either.
- The last people able to read rongorongo, a unique script developed by the Rapa Nui of Easter Island, died in the 1910s. It's never been deciphered since.
- The modern Romance languages include Spanish, French, Italian, etc. ... but at one time Romance languages were also spoken throughout Central Europe, the Balkans, and North Africa; there may also have been one in Great Britain, though sources for that are even murkier. Various invasions and migrations replaced them, though, leaving virtually no written records behind. The most notable of the extinct Balkan Romance languages would be Dalmatian, with its last speaker dying in 1898.
- The Voynich Manuscript is one of the famous examples, other than that the book isn't complete, the writing is still not deciphered. It is thought to be a medical book for women on using plants and water to cure sickness, although it isn't confirmed. It has been suggested that it actually is an ancient hoax or a glossolalia, in which case it wouldn't be a lost language at all, except it appears to be confirmed that it's a natural language. We just can't tell what language.
- Nobody knows what language was spoken in Bronze age Troy, especially since for a long time, Troy was believed to be a wholly fictional place. The most plausible explanation is that it belonged to the Anatolian languages, which were an early branch of the Indo-European languages, spoken in Anatolia (present day Turkey) during the Bronze age and Antiquity: this would make the "Trojan language" related to the way more well-known Hittie and Luwian, as well as Lycian and Carian. As of 2023-2024, a new Anatolian language was discovered in a single tablet: Kalasmaic.
- The Pictish language of Early Mediaeval Scotland has been lost for centuries since it was subsumed by Gaelic. Enough survives in place names and a few scattered references in outside sources such as Irish histories for us to be fairly sure it was a Brittonic Celtic language, with its closest living relative probably being Welsh, but as the Picts left no writings of their own behind, that's about as much as we can say so far.
- The Iberian language, from ancient eastern Spain, is found only in few, sparse and short inscriptions, written in an unique offshoot of the Phoenician or archaic Greek alphabet. It's naturally very difficult to either translate, or recreate how the language sounded like; but from what little has been deciphered, and also using external sources (nameplaces of the area, and references to the people by Roman or Greek authors), it seems like the Iberian language was related to the modern Basque language. However, Iberian is otherwise so poorly known, that most linguists don't think there's enough evidence for or against a proper classification. As such, Iberian is included in the "Vasconic substrate hypothesis", held by a minority of scientists, which claim that Basque and its relatives were more widespread in western Europe, before the arrival of Indo-European speakers, perhaps dating back to even the Stone Age. It would mean that there'd be even more lost languages from Europe, but it's seen as very speculative in mainstream linguistics.
- The language, or possibly languages, of Nuragic Sardinia, have no direct attestations. They have been included in the Vasconic substrate hypothesis as well, especially after it was revealed that Sardinian people have some genetic ties to the Basque people; but even compared to Iberian, the evidence to classify the language at all is very poor.
- The Hattic language from ancient Anatolia. While its existence is confirmed by mentions in accounts of the time, and some words have survived as names of places and people, there are no surviving Hattic texts at all.
- The language of the Tamboran culture, named after the infamous volcano Tambora in Indonesia. The Tamboran language, and its people, were unfortunately obliterated by Tambora itself in 1815, during what was one of the most destructive eruptions, in all recorded history. From what little has survived, It appears that Tamboran was not an Austronesian language, like the neighbouring, and far more spoken, Malay and Philippine languages. Rather, it was either related to the languages of Papua, or a language isolate.
- The Tocharian languages. They were Indo-European languages but belonged to a strange little branch of their own, with no surviving close relatives. The languages are believed to have gone extinct in the 800s when the Uyghurs invaded the Tarim basin and took over the Tocharian city-states. A few words of Tocharian are believed to survive as loanwords in Mandarin.