With the passing of Marie Smith Jones on January 21, Eyak becomes the first Alaska Native language to become extinct (in recorded history). This news has been widely reported in Alaska, with a nice story in the Anchorage Daily News and an audio segment on Alaska Public Radio. More national and international reports will surely follow.Though tragic, the news is not unexpected. The passing of Marie's elder sister, Sophie Borodkin, in 1992 left Marie with the somewhat unsettling title of "last speaker". At this time Eyak was said to be "on the brink", and comparisons with the closing of the millennium were inescapable. It is a testament to Marie's sheer tenacity that she survived an additional 16 years, outliving two of her own children, adding nearly a generation to the life of the Eyak language. But though Marie did much to promote Eyak language and culture, the chain of transmission was broken long before her time. Eyak was already severely endangered in the 1960's, when Michael Krauss began efforts to create comprehensive documentation of the language. It has been generations since Eyak was learned by children as a first language. The fate of Eyak was sealed long before Marie's passing. We have now the permission to mourn that fate.
The larger significance of Eyak's passing is more difficult to interpret. In some sense this moment marks "the beginning of the end" for Alaska Native languages, as Michael Krauss has said. All Alaska Native languages are endangered, and it is tempting to ask which will be next to go. But in many ways the Eyak situation differs from that of other Alaska languages. Language loss among the Eyak is further advanced, and the community is very small. But most significantly, in Eyak there seems to be a clear break between fluent speaker and non-speaker. This is perhaps due to the rapid social changes associated with increasing influx of Tlingit and white settlers in the 19th century. But in any case there appear to be few if any "semi-speakers", that is, people with imperfect but partial knowledge of the language. Certainly, there are those who remember or have learned words and phrases, but the gulf between those people and fluent speakers is wide.
For other Alaska Native languages it will be more difficult to assign a precise date of death. Rather, fluency is spectrum whose range steadily decreases as the eldest speakers pass on, and it will be difficult to determine just where in that spectrum lies the break between speaker and non-speaker. Language death will be a drawn-out process of erosion, as bits of language knowledge slowly fade. Countering this erosion will be the as yet unknown effects of current revitalization efforts such as the Ayaprun Elitnaurvik - Yup'ik Immersion school. Programs such as these -- and the students, parents, and teachers behind them -- offer a promise of hope in this new era for Alaska Native languages.