A language needs to develop hand in hand with and by the community that uses it. If the community withers, the language withers.
I suppose you can try to bring a dead language back to life in a new community, but that's academic, artificial and distinct from natural languages. [Edit: I don't want to say it's black or white but that the discontinuity probably leaves at least a scar in the language and in the community depending on how carefully the revival operation is performed.]
> I suppose you can try to bring a dead language back to life in a new community, but that's academic, artificial and distinct from natural languages.
How? If the evolution of language in continuous use with s community is natural, so is it's revival by one (e.g., spoken Hebrew.) Dividing human behavior into “natural” and “artificial” is arbitrary.
Hebrew seems to be an interesting example as it's claimed to be the only succesful revival. I don't know much about it but it sounds like the community dispersed to later re-unite and also that the revived language exhibits some discontinuities (which have or will fade with time).
The difference between natural and artificial (or constructed) languages is well-defined in linguistics although there may be borderline cases.
Again, I don't want to claim that e.g. Hebrew would be somehow tainted as a language now, just that it has endured something very atypical.
That seems a little circular? If all it needs is a community, and you 'bring it back to life' in a new community, then the language has all it needs to be 'natural'?
It's not a community but the community. When a language is dead, how do you learn it to native proficiency without native speakers to help you? What does it mean to a child to learn it as a mother tongue when it's not the mother tongue of the parents or anyone else alive?
I suppose you can try to bring a dead language back to life in a new community, but that's academic, artificial and distinct from natural languages. [Edit: I don't want to say it's black or white but that the discontinuity probably leaves at least a scar in the language and in the community depending on how carefully the revival operation is performed.]