What was a popular language that is not used anymore? (Besides Latin)

Answer 1

It depends what you mean by "used." People still use Latin- people write poetry and even letters to their friends. I'd even known people who wrote their dissertation in Latin- and defended it, orally, in Latin, too!

If you mean, a language that is not used as a cradle language anymore, then Latin indeed falls under this category- no one grows up learning Latin. There are many, many "dead" languages of this kind. Most of them are ancestors or near cousins of living languages, for example:

1. Classical Chinese, which is the ancestor of Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.
2. Sanskrit, which is the ancestor or much older cousin of Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, etc.
3. Anglo-Saxon, which is the ancestor of modern English.
4. Old High German, which is the ancestor of modern German.
5. Ancient Egyptian, which is the ancestor of Coptic.

In a sense, these languages never really died. It's not like one day people just decided to stop speaking Latin. It's just that the Latin they spoke changed, little by little every generation, until it had morphed into Spanish, French, Romanian, etc.

There are literally hundreds of dead languages, and they're a lot of fun to study. Here's a good article to get you started: https://www.rocketlanguages.com/blog/why-you-should-learn-a-dead-language