On Monday 24 March 2008, Eyak — a branch of the Athabaskan Indian family of languages spoken in the past by the Eyak people, ancient inhabitants of the shores of the Gulf of Alaska — became extinct. It is on this date that the last native speaker of the language, Marie Jones Smith, aged 89, died at her home in Anchorage, Alaska. Although linguists worked with Mrs Smith for several years, striving to preserve her native language, Eyak will probably never be spoken again.
By the end of this century, half of the some 6,700 languages spoken worldwide today risk the same fate as Eyak. The most fragile languages are the indigenous ones, especially those in North America (where 90% of some 197 indigenous languages are in danger), South America, Siberia and Australia. These areas are home to various indigenous peoples and tribes, who often speak unique languages.
The most common cause of a language becoming extinct, as is the case with Eyak, is the demise of those who speak it. Rare languages can disappear when natural disasters strike the areas where their speakers live, or when indigenous tribes meet “white men”. This is the case for Trumai, a language spoken by a Brazilian tribe. The isolation of the Trumai tribe was broken, and in 1952 a flu epidemic killed all but 18 people. Too few to ensure the passing on of their language and culture to future generations, these survivors will be the last to ever speak Trumai — their children and grandchildren adopting instead the official language of Brazil as their own.
Different criteria can be used to define a language as “endangered”: it has to have a small number of speakers (many indigenous languages have fewer than 120 speakers), it has to lack a written form (as is the case with most tribal languages, which do not have an alphabet) and, most significantly, it has to have no children speaking it. When a rare language is lost, all the knowledge encapsulated in it is lost too, as well as the ability to fully understand those who spoke the language.
This entry was posted
on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 10:10 am and is filed under Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
