Eyak was spoken for centuries around the Copper River delta on the Gulf of Alaska, a language wedged between the Tlingit and the Athabaskan tongues and quite unlike either. By the 20th century it was already cornered — children were schooled in English, and the number of fluent speakers fell year by year to a handful, then to one.
That one was Marie Smith Jones, born in 1918, the last full-blooded Eyak. She spent her final decades as the sole living speaker of her own language, working with the linguist Michael Krauss to record what she carried so it would not vanish entirely. When she died on 21 January 2008, Eyak became, in the usual phrase, a dead language — though “death” understates it. For years before the end it had no one left to talk to.
Worth remembering
- Marie Smith Jones, its last speaker, was also a peace and environmental activist who once addressed the United Nations.
- Eyak sat between the Tlingit and Athabaskan languages and matched neither — its own branch on the family tree, now a branch with no leaves.
Sources
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.