New Hope for the Eyak Language
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE December 30, 2010
CONTACT: Laura Bliss Spaan * Eyak Language Project * (907) 250-3696
Eyak became the first of Alaska's endangered Languages to be declared 'extinct' when the last Native speaker, Marie Smith Jones, died in January 2008. Now, nearly three years later, there is an ambitious new effort to make Eyak the first Alaska language to be brought back to life.
On January 1st, 2011, a website will be launched to begin the process of helping Eyaks learn the basics of their ‘lost’ language. It is just one part of the Eyak Language Project: q'aayaa tl'hix (A New Beginning) - an intensive effort to document, preserve and distribute learning materials to individuals and institutions throughout Alaska and beyond.
The website will feature a WORD of the WEEK selected from the archival recordings of the language with Marie Smith Jones, along with new recordings of words and phrases modeled by Dr. Michael Krauss, the linguist who has spent nearly 50 years documenting the language in writing. The website will also include lessons designed by Guillaume Leduey, a 21-year-old man from France who taught himself how to speak the language from online materials when he was just twelve.
“We have been given a rare, second-chance to revive our language,” said Sherry Smith, the project’s Cultural Coordinator and granddaughter of Marie Smith Jones. “This isn’t just about saving recordings of words and phrases to become archival artifacts. It’s about making the words, and the unique view of the world that Eyak provides, have real meaning again today in peoples’ lives.”
The project, which is being coordinated by the Eyak Preservation Council in Cordova, was recently awarded a grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum. The Eyak Corporation is providing cash and in-kind support.
“We called this project, q’aayaa tl’hix, which, in Eyak, basically means to start something once again,” said Laura Bliss Spaan, the project director. “It’s a hopeful and inspiring way to begin a new year - and a new era.”
The website will go online just after midnight on January 1st at:
http://sites.google.com/site/eyaklanguageproject/