Published on December 30th, 2010 1:45 pm. By ALASKA NEWSPAPERS STAFF

Eyak became the first of Alaska’s endangered Languages to be declared “extinct” when the last Native speaker, Marie Smith Jones, died in January 2008. Now, nearly three years later, there is an ambitious new effort to make Eyak the first Alaska language to be brought back to life, a news release said.

On Jan. 1, a website will be launched just after midnight to begin the process of helping Eyaks learn the basics of their “lost” language. It is just one part of the Eyak Language Project: q’aayaa tl’hix (A New Beginning) — an intensive effort to document, preserve and distribute learning materials to individuals and institutions throughout Alaska and beyond.

The website will feature a word of the week selected from the archival recordings of the language with Marie Smith Jones, along with new recordings of words and phrases modeled by Dr. Michael Krauss, the linguist who has spent nearly 50 years documenting the language in writing. The website will also include lessons designed by Guillaume Leduey, a 21-year-old man from France who taught himself how to speak the language from online materials when he was just twelve.
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By KYLE HOPKINS. Last Modified: June 29th, 2010 08:44 AM

When the last Alaska Native who could speak the Eyak language fluently died in 2008, Fairbanks linguist Michael Krauss became the only person who could still hold a conversation in it.

He just didn’t have anyone to talk to. Until now.

Even as the 75-year-old Krauss worked to preserve the language, a shy French teenager was sitting in his bedroom thousands of miles away, trying to teach himself Eyak.

Now Guillaume Leduey is here in Alaska, studying with Krauss, learning how the language works by analyzing traditional Eyak tales word by word and deciding if he wants to be the torchbearer for the effort to resurrect the language. No pressure.

“It’s strange to learn a language that is likely to be never spoken by anyone,” said Leduey, who is now 21 and visiting Anchorage from Le Havre, a city of about 180,000 people.

Eyak was spoken by the indigenous people along the Gulf of Alaska coast from what’s now Cordova east to Yakutat. There were never more than a few hundred Eyak in known history and theirs was the first of the 20 Alaska Native languages to go extinct, Krauss said.

Yup’ik, which is spoken by young people in some western Alaska villages, remains the healthiest, but they all will fade unless new generations are taught the languages, he said.
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