There are approximately six thousand languages in the world and around ninety percent of them are being lost. There may be only a few hundred languages left by the middle of this century. This paper examines the four categories of language death: sudden, radical, gradual, and bottom-to- top. After an analysis of the four categories, the question of whether language death is something negative is discussed with emphasis on the disagreement between Hale et al. (1992) and Ladefoged (1992). The work concludes with ways to revive / maintain languages in accordance with each type language death discussed.