French Youth Tries to Save Alaskan Language
Monday, 28 June 2010 | by Pat's Picks
Talk about cramming. According the Anchorage Daily News, the fate of a dying language is in the hands of a 21-year-old French man. The last person who could speak Eyak, a language spoken by native Alaskans, died in 2008. But after teaching himself of Eyak the basics via the Internet, Guillaume Leduey is now in Alaska frantically studying the language with a 75-year-old linguist who isn’t fluent but has a conversational ability with the langauge. Says Leduey: “It’s strange to learn a language that is likely to be never spoken by anyone.”
More about Eyak from Wikipedia
Slate had an interesting article about learning a dead language a few years back