Youchigant worked with linguist Mary Haas-a student of Edward Sapir-to try to write down everything he remembered. A man named Sesostrie Youchigant of the Tunica tribe was considered the last native speaker of Tunica, but even he didn’t have a full grasp of the language-after his mother died in 1915, he typically spoke French and English. The Tunica language could be found in Louisiana until the 1940s. To this day, the remains of some 116,000 Native Americans can be found in museums and institutions around the United States. It would remain there until 2000, when-following passage of legislation like the National Museum of the American Indian Act of 1989 and the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990-both Ishi’s brain and his ashes were repatriated to tribes determined to be his closest living relatives. But his brain, which had been removed during his autopsy, was sent to the Smithsonian Institution in 1917. There is a sad, but all too common, side note to this tale: Following Ishi’s death, his remains were cremated and buried. Ishi’s story would later be told in several books and movies. When Ishi succumbed to tuberculosis in 1916, that was the end of Yahi the last Yana speakers in general died around 1940. Famously, one dialect-called Yahi-was spoken by a man named Ishi (which means “man”), and he was instrumental in helping linguist-anthropologist Edward Sapir preserve some of the language. The Yana language consisted of several dialects spoken by the Yana people of north-central California, whose numbers were devastated by illness and massacres brought on the influx of treasure-seeking settlers during the Gold Rush. And in 2016, the Cordova Times reported that 100 people were using it, including 40 Eyak Alaska Natives. An online project called the dAXunhyuuga' eLearning Place (“The Words of the People”) seeks to “help Eyak descendants, wherever they live, find ways to use the Eyak language and culture in a way that has meaning for them,” according to their website. Today, there’s no one who learned Eyak as a first language, but there’s work to change that. Unfortunately, the language didn’t carry on among a large group of people-not even her nine children learned Eyak, because when they were young, it was considered improper to speak anything but English. Jones tried to help preserve Eyak by helping with a dictionary and compiling the language’s grammar rules she also gave two speeches at the United Nations about the importance of preserving Indigenous languages. In January 2008, Alaska resident Marie Smith Jones, who was believed to be the last full-blooded Eyak and the only remaining person known to be fluent in the Eyak language, died at age 89. ![]() Here are 11 tongues, some extinct, some dead or dormant, and some that are finding new life. Another classification, according to Ethnologue, is dormant, for languages that, while “not used for daily life … an ethnic community that associates itself with a dormant language and views the language as a symbol of that community’s identity.” ![]() ![]() In fact, according to National Geographic, “one language dies every 14 days.”īut a dead language isn’t necessarily what you think: Per the language website Babbel, a language that is dead is “no longer the native language of a community of people” an extinct language, on the other hand, is a language that is no longer spoken at all. (often Native American tribes) have already hit the dead or extinct list, and many more are on their way out. Communication systems from a few cultures in the U.S. ![]() Word to the wise: Not all languages stick around forever.
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