In linguistics, language death (also language extinction, linguistic extinction or linguicide, and rarely also glottophagy) occurs when a language loses its last native speaker. Language death is a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language variety is decreased, eventually resulting in no native or fluent speakers of the variety. Language death may affect any language idiom, including dialects and languages. Language death should not be confused with language attrition (also called language loss), which describes the loss of proficiency in a language at the individual level.