Language Death—The Case of Akkadian

By Johannes Hackl -- Friends of ASOR, Feb. 2022, Vol. X, No. 2.

Excerpt:

The phenomenon of language death is as old as the recorded history of the world’s languages, if not as old as language itself. Languages affected by this phenomenon are usually referred to as dead or extinct languages, depending on whether or not they morphed into a different language or several daughter languages through normal development, with the historically older form left without native or fluent speakers.

The most prominent Western example of a dead language is Latin, which eventually developed into the Romance languages. Akkadian, the earliest attested Semitic language, on the other hand, is an extinct language—from which it follows that there are no known languages that descended from it. The most common explanation for the absence of daughter languages is that Akkadian, the language of the Assyrians and Babylonians, was eclipsed by Aramaic (i.e., Old and Official Aramaic) rather early during the first millennium BCE. ... 

See this article at: https://www.asor.org/anetoday/2022/02/language-death-akkadian (a PDF copy is available)