Náhuatl and Mayan Language Renaissance Occurring in Mexico

I always pay attention to efforts of restoration for endangered languages. Unfortunately, it seems to be an awfully difficult thing to do. In my home country, Ireland, we have been trying for around a century to restore/preserve Irish. But it has gone fairly poorly. It seems that falling below a critical mass of speakers, the language is nearly always considered 'useless'/'ancient'.

It seems to be very common across countries to have a bi-lingual population. But this is almost always the case where the native language is globally uncommon. So the population see the value of learning English/Spanish etc.

It also appears to be possible to keep languages healthy, active when there are many competing, but regional languages, not used anywhere else.

But it seems near impossible to revive a language where the majority already speak a globally useful language.

The alternative, unfortunately, seems to be to force the language through authoritarianism, like in the case of hebrew.

A counter to this that I'm aware of is Ukrainian and Polish. The soviet union tried to exterminate both during its heyday yet they've mostly completely revived despite the effort.

Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate yet it has seen a pretty decent resurgence.

I don't think any of these languages really stayed around via force. They simply had a critical mass of speakers that never went away.

For Irish and Welsh, the British empire arguably committed a genocide to eliminate them. It similarly happened to native american tribes in the US and canada.

By my estimation, the two things that kill a language is the death of the native speakers of that language (discussed above) and the evolution of a language past what native speakers would recognize (Old/proto english and Latin for example).

> Ukrainian and Polish. The soviet union tried to exterminate both

Poland was not in the USSR. Polish remained the working language in the Polish People's Republic

> Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate

Hindi-Urdu was never exterminated by the British. In fact, it was the British that helped make it the de facto language in most of South Asia.

Before the British, Dari was the working language of administration. When the British began co-opting local administrations in the 19th century, Hindi-Urdu was used as the primary register, and my family has ancestral documents showing this change (Dari/Farsi to Urdu/Hindi to English for land documents).

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The only dead language that I can think of that was revived was Hebrew, but modern Hebrew is entirely different from that which was spoken millennia ago, and is a mixture of litigurical Hebrew, Arabic (plenty of Mizrahi influence along with the Sabra movement during the start of Israel), Russian (heavily used for mechanical terms), and German (heavily used to scientific terms).

Parts of Poland were annexed by the soviets and became part of Ukraine and Belarus.