Language death, modality, and functional explanations

The article is an in-depth review of Petar Kehayov’s monograph The Fate of Mood and Modality in Language Death: Evidence from Minor Finnic (De Gruyter Mouton, 2017). The book investigates the development of mood and modality in four moribund Finnic languages spoken in the Russian Federation: Votic, Ingrian, Central Lude, and Eastern Seto. After a detailed summary of the book, I discuss a number of issues relating to (a) the semantic map used to analyze the modal meanings; (b) the difference between language death-related changes and “regular” language change; and (c) the explanation of the observed patterns in terms of conceptual complexity. On the last point, I suggest that usage frequency may provide a better explanation for some of the observed changes.