Revitalizing
Transmission had broken or ended, and deliberate work is rebuilding it. An editorial category, not a UNESCO grade.
This is my label, not UNESCO’s, and the distinction matters enough to state on every page that carries it.
UNESCO’s scale measures how far a language has travelled toward silence. It has no grade for one travelling the other way. Cornish and Manx both lost their last traditional native speakers and would be graded extinct — yet children are growing up speaking them now. Calling them extinct would be false; calling them merely endangered would erase the rupture that makes them remarkable.
ELCat reaches for the same missing idea with awakening, the counterpart to its dormant: a language with no living speakers can still be brought back into use. Revitalizing covers both that case and the milder one, where transmission faltered without ending.
It reports effort, not safety. A revitalizing language is not a secure one, and the label should never be read as an all-clear — only as evidence that people are working.
Where this sits
The first four run from least to most endangered. The last two sit outside that scale.