Eyak was the language of a small Alaska Native people who lived around the Copper River delta and the Gulf of Alaska coast, near present-day Cordova. It was never spoken by many — a few hundred people at most — and it sat, linguistically and geographically, between far larger neighbors: the Tlingit, the Alutiiq, and the Athabaskans. For most of the twentieth century its speakers slipped away one by one, until only a single fluent speaker remained.
That speaker was Marie Smith Jones. Born in 1918 in Cordova, she was the last full-blooded Eyak, the last fluent native speaker of the language, and the last traditional chief of her people. When she died on January 21, 2008, at the age of 89, Eyak became the first of Alaska’s twenty Native languages to lose its last fluent speaker in modern times — a milestone reported around the world.
Eyak’s importance to linguists was out of all proportion to the number of people who spoke it. It is a branch of the Na-Dené family, the closest relative of the large Athabaskan group, and its survival as a distinct language was a key piece of evidence for how those languages are related. Marie Smith Jones spent her last decades working with the linguist Michael Krauss to record, write down, and preserve as much of it as possible.
Eyak is not entirely silent. The dictionary and grammar she helped create have allowed a small revival effort to begin — including one young Frenchman who taught himself the language from the records and now teaches it. But the unbroken chain of native speakers, passed from parent to child for thousands of years, ended in a hospital in Anchorage in 2008.
Aka-Bo, often called simply Bo, was one of the Great Andamanese languages of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, part of India. The Great Andamanese peoples are among the oldest continuously resident human populations on earth, thought to have lived on the islands for tens of thousands of years, and their languages are commonly regarded as a deeply ancient and isolated lineage with no established relatives elsewhere.
The catastrophe that overtook Bo and its sister languages was colonial. In 1858 the British established a penal colony in the Andamans. Within decades the Indigenous Great Andamanese population was devastated by introduced diseases — measles, syphilis, influenza — alongside violence and displacement, collapsing from several thousand people to a few dozen. Whole languages disappeared as the communities that spoke them were destroyed.
By the late twentieth century Bo survived in a single person, Boa Sr. For years she had no one with whom she could hold a conversation in her own language; other members of the small surviving Great Andamanese community could not fully understand the songs and narratives she carried. She lived through the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, reportedly surviving by following the warnings of her elders, and continued to share her language and songs with the linguist who recorded her.
Boa Sr died on 26 January 2010. With her the Bo language fell silent, and a thread reaching back across an immense span of human history was cut. Her recordings, made in collaboration with the linguist Anvita Abbi, remain as testimony to a tongue that colonization had reduced, over a century and a half, from a living community language to one elderly woman’s solitary inheritance.
Livonian is a Finnic language of the Uralic family — a close relative of Estonian and a more distant cousin of Finnish — spoken for centuries by a small Baltic people along the coasts of what is now Latvia. Despite living surrounded by speakers of Latvian, a wholly unrelated Indo-European language, the Livonians kept their own tongue alive among the fishing villages of the Courland coast and, historically, along the Salaca River to the south.
The Livonians were a maritime people, and their language was the language of the sea and the shore. But their numbers were always small and shrinking. Centuries of assimilation into the Latvian majority steadily narrowed the domains in which Livonian was used, until it survived mainly as a home and village language on a thin strip of the northern Courland coast.
The twentieth century delivered the decisive blows. The dislocations of two world wars scattered the community, and then the Soviet Union sealed its Baltic coastline as a closed border zone, restricting movement, ending coastal fishing in the small villages and emptying them of working-age people. The Livonian Coast, the last redoubt of the language, was hollowed out by policy. Native transmission to children effectively ceased.
The last person who had grown up speaking Livonian as a mother tongue, Grizelda Kristina, died in Canada on 2 June 2013, at the age of 103. The language is best described as dormant rather than simply extinct: it is intensively studied and partly revived, with the University of Latvia Livonian Institute founded in 2018, a settled modern orthography, a body of heritage second-language speakers, and descendants who use it as a marker of identity.
Yaghan — also called Yámana — was the language of the Yaghan people of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, around the Beagle Channel at the far southern tip of South America. For thousands of years these were the southernmost human beings on Earth, a canoe-going people of the cold channels and islands, and theirs was the southernmost language ever spoken. It is a language isolate, with no demonstrated relationship to any other language on the planet.
The Yaghan had adapted to one of the harshest inhabited environments anywhere, moving by bark canoe through the freezing waterways and keeping fires burning even at sea — the smoke of which gave Tierra del Fuego, the ‘Land of Fire,’ its name. Their population in the mid-nineteenth century is usually estimated at a few thousand. Their language was rich and precise, famous in later popular accounts for single words that pack whole human situations into a breath.
Colonisation destroyed them with terrible speed. European, Chilean and Argentine expansion, missions, and above all introduced epidemics — measles, and other diseases against which the Yaghan had no immunity — collapsed the population from a few thousand to near nothing within a few decades. The language contracted with the people, surviving in fewer and fewer mouths into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The last full-blood Yaghan and last fluent speaker, Cristina Calderon — ‘Abuela Cristina’ — died in Chile on 16 February 2022, aged 93. With her, fluent Yaghan ended, and the status is extinct. But she spent her last decades working to record the language and pass on what she could, and her granddaughter and others continue documentation and teaching, so that the southernmost language is not entirely lost to memory.
Akkala Sámi — known in Russia as Babino Sámi — was an Eastern Sámi language of the Uralic family, spoken in the interior of the Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia. Its speakers lived in a handful of semi-nomadic reindeer-herding villages, principally Aʼkkel (Russian Babinsky, Finnish Akkala), Čuʼkksuâl (Ekostrovsky), and Sââʼrvesjäuʼrr (Girvasozero). Long mistaken for a dialect of neighboring Kildin Sámi, it is now recognized as a distinct language, structurally closest to Skolt Sámi, with which it shared a degree of mutual intelligibility.
Akkala Sámi was always small, spoken by at most a few hundred people, and it is one of the most poorly documented of all the Sámi languages. A handful of phonological descriptions, some archival recordings, and an 1897 Gospel translation make up much of the surviving record. There was never a stable written standard, and the community was too small and too pressured to develop one.
The language was extinguished by a century of upheaval. Tsarist Russification gave way to Soviet collectivization of reindeer herding in 1928-30, the consolidation and destruction of traditional Sámi villages, Stalinist repression, the disruptions of the Second World War, and a residential boarding-school system that removed children from their families and forbade their language. Settlement at places such as Yona concentrated survivors among Russian and Kildin Sámi speakers, and intergenerational transmission collapsed.
The last fluent native speaker, Maria (Marja) Sergina, died on December 29, 2003. The 2010 UNESCO atlas listed the language as extinct. A small number of elderly people retained partial knowledge afterward — two individuals around age seventy were noted in 2011 — and interest in Kola Sámi heritage persists, but Akkala Sámi has no remaining fluent speakers and no children learning it.
Nǁng — widely known by the name of its main surviving variety, Nǀuu — is a Tuu language of South Africa’s Northern Cape, the ancestral tongue of the ǂKhomani San. It is the last surviving language of the ǃUi branch of the Tuu family (formerly grouped under the misleading label “Southern Khoisan”), its nearest relatives, such as ǂUngkue, already extinct and its only living relative the distant Taa.
The language is famous among linguists for one of the largest sound inventories ever documented: by one count some 45 click sounds together with around 30 non-click consonants and 39 vowels, including rare click types found in almost no other language. This phonological richness makes Nǁng a treasure for the study of human speech — and made its near-silencing a loss felt well beyond the Kalahari.
Nǁng was driven to the brink by the dispossession of San peoples, the dominance of Afrikaans, apartheid-era stigma against San identity, and the scattering of the ǂKhomani community from the lands that are now Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. Linguists had presumed the language extinct until the late 1990s, when around twenty elderly speakers were located among the ǂKhomani. By then no children were learning it, and the speakers were already old.
Nǁng must not be written off as a language with a single “last speaker” who has died. Its most prominent custodian, Katrina Esau — known as Ouma Geelmeid — has taught the language to children since 2002, helped produce a dictionary and a published reader, and was honored nationally for her work. The death of her brother Simon Sauls in June 2021 left her widely described as the last fully fluent speaker, but the language is being actively taught and reclaimed. It is best understood as critically endangered and dormant in everyday use, not gone.
Cromarty fisher Scots was a distinctive dialect of Scots — a West Germanic variety closely related to English — spoken by the fisherfolk community of Cromarty, a small port at the tip of the Black Isle in the Scottish Highlands. A form of North Northern Scots, it grew among families thought to have moved north from the Firth of Forth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it developed in the relative isolation of a tight-knit fishing town into something outsiders found hard to follow.
The dialect carried a vocabulary built around the sea and the work of fishing, much of it with obscure origins — words such as amitan for a fool and belligut for a greedy person, and densely specialized fishing terms like “o the teydin” for the seventh fishing line. It was marked by a lilting, sing-song delivery and by an unusual treatment of the initial h sound, which speakers dropped from some words and added to others. Idioms could be wholly opaque to a visitor; a request for breakfast might come out as a complaint about being “sconfished wi hayreen” — fed up with herring — and a wish for ham and eggs instead.
The dialect’s fate was bound to the fishery that sustained it. As the herring and white-fishing economy contracted and then collapsed across the twentieth century, and as fishing was industrialized in the 1950s, the working life that the vocabulary described disappeared. Young people left Cromarty or shifted to broader Scots and standard English, and within a few decades the dialect contracted to a small number of elderly speakers and finally to two brothers.
Those brothers were Bobby Hogg and Gordon Hogg. Gordon died in 2011, leaving Bobby as the last fluent speaker; Bobby Hogg died on 2 October 2012, aged 92. His death was widely reported as the end of the dialect — described as the first distinct dialect lost in Scotland in living memory. Before they died, the brothers had helped researchers record a glossary and audio archive of their speech.