This chapter focuses on the most common outcome of language endangerment: language dormancy – that is, language death, unless and until the language is brought back to life. In the end stages of a slow decline that leads to endangerment and disappearance, children no longer learn their heritage language as a first language, so that the number of fluent speakers shrinks over the next few generations until none are left. Meanwhile, the domains in which the dying language is used contract, until it is likely to be strictly a home language; often, at the very end, it is used only by, and when talking to, grandparents. In the Salish–Pend d'Oreille community in the U.S., for instance, the elders who work with me on our dictionary project have told me that the only time they now speak their language is during our weekly sessions in the summer and, during the rest of the year, at monthly elders' meetings. A few of them also speak bits of the language with their great-grandchildren, but otherwise it is apparently no longer used even as a home language; the last couple who spoke it at home was broken when the husband died in 2001 at the age of ninety-two. (Recently, however, revitalization efforts have made limited progress in reversing the decline of the heritage language, in this as in numerous other endangered-language communities.) A growing number of case studies detail the kinds of linguistic changes that occur in language death, and I will discuss some of the most salient changes in this chapter, in particular attrition, the net loss of linguistic structure and stylistic richness.