"Dead" languages

They can be considered dead because there are several words from those languages that remain a mystery. For example, the Old English word ides. Currently it is thought to mean a revered woman (glossed as Latin, matrona), but it could also mean something like the Norse Dís (Norns and Valkyries.) It could mean both, but we are not sure.

A dead language is one that is not longer growing or changing.

A dead language is one that is not used for colloquial conversation.

Classical Latin, Old English, Old Irish, Old Norse are all dead; there are modern cognates, but they are sufficiently different that the ancestor languages require modern study.

Averon 2011 said:

And also what are the chances of dead languages being revived in a spoken form? They somehow managed to resurrect Hebrew specifically so that people forming the country of Israel could have a national language, so would they be able to do that with other older/classical languages?

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New Latin is a modern artificial version of Classical and Church Latin.

Modern Irish, apart from areas of the Gaeltacht, is an artificial creation that is very different from Old Irish, Middle Irish, and Classical Irish.

Modern Cornish is another reconstructed, artificial language.

I thought dead languages is what zombies speak...

Medievalist said:

New Latin is a modern artificial version of Classical and Church Latin.

Modern Irish, apart from areas of the Gaeltacht, is an artificial creation that is very different from Old Irish, Middle Irish, and Classical Irish.

Modern Cornish is another reconstructed, artificial language.

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An ea?

The accent is artificial all right, caighdeán Irish and proper Irish in dialect sound pretty different, but the language I believe is similar.