Eyak

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.