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.
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.