With all the recent attention given to issues of language endangerment, we tend to forget that endangerment is not a new phenomenon. Though ignored for many years by mainstream linguists (who were perhaps distracted by "colorless green ideas"), field workers have been aware of endangerment issues and the need for documentation for quite some time.
Sifting through some old correspondence today I ran across a memorandum from Professor Michael Krauss to then President of the University of Alaska, William Wood, proposing the establishment of a "Permanent Linguistics Program in Native Languages in Alaska." The first two paragraphs of background information, reproduced below with annotations, evidence an acute awareness of the extent of language endangerment in Alaska and the urgent need for documentation. The memo is dated December 1960.
We have come a long way in the past 49 years. But not nearly far enough.
"Alaska is a rich and as yet largely unexplored wilderness of linguistic variety. There are two major language groups within the State. These are the Eskimo-Aleut and the Na-Dene. The Eskimo is divided into two groups, the Inuit in the north and the Yupik in the south. The Alaskan Inuit dialects are very similar to the other dialects found all the way to Eastern Greenland and are comparatively well documented, at least in Greenland and Canada. The southern Alaskan (Yupik) dialects, however, are quite different in that they are variegated, more archaic and virtually untouched by the researcher. There is one mediocre and inadequate grammar for one dialect of Aleut. The other language family represented in Alaska, the Na-Dene, includes the Athabaskan languages, Tlingit, Haida and Eyak, all remotely related.[1]
Athabaskan, once spoken throughout the whole interior of this largest of states, is still an uncharted wilderness. Evidently there are at least eight major languages or groups of dialects.[2] Little is known about their classification or relationships within the Athabaskan language family. This is a vast family, embracing languages like the Chipewyan, Dogrib, etc., in Northwestern and Western Canada, the Hupa in California, and the Navaho and Apache. Little is known about the number of speakers in the Alaskan group, but one may safely guess that some of these are in danger of extinction within another generation. The largest tribes like the Kutchin [3] and Koyukon may not number even 1,000; the smaller groups like the Nabesna [4] and Han may well be under 100. Often only the older people in these groups speak the language well or at all. The tribes are losing their identity and their pride. Their languages are falling into disuse. For the Dihai-Kutchin only one person is known to survive who remembers anything at all about the language. He is more than 90 years old. Eyak may already be extinct.[5] All those languages still await description. Haida and Tlingit have received a little more attention. It is possible that the Na-Dene language family is related to Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Burmese, etc.), and if it were possible to gather sufficient data to hold up our end of the comparison with Sino-Tibetan, which has been well studied, there then would be the first linguistic proof of the Asiatic origin of American aborigines.[6]"
--Michael Krauss (1960)
Notes:
[1] The relationship of Haida to the other Na-Dene languages has yet to be confirmed.
[2] Today we recognize 11 Athabaskan languages in Alaska.
[3] Gwich'in
[4] Upper Tanana (and Tanacross)
[5] Krauss spent much of the 1960s documenting Eyak; the last speaker died in 2008.
[6] As it turns out, Na-Dene languages may be related not to Sino-Tibetan, but to Yeniseian languages. See the Dene-Yeniseian pages.