Their ancestral Algonkian language has been extinct for many years.
The comparative method uses information from two or more languages and allows reconstruction of the ancestral language.
Not that anyone hopes to find some Rosetta Stone for the earliest ancestral language.
Scholars in the 19th century made the first leap back in hypothetical ancestral languages.
Their ancestral language was part of the Algonquin family.
Some people of Chinese and Korean descent are still able to speak their ancestral languages.
However, far fewer can still speak their ancestral language, after centuries of language shift.
Romanian has inherited a number of about 2000 lexical items from its ancestral language, Latin.
He taught himself to speak Lakota, his ancestral language, as a young adult.
The minorities speak Spanish and maintain their ancestral languages as well.