French Youth Tries to Save Alaskan Language


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.”

On the Web

More about Eyak from Wikipedia

Slate had an interesting article about learning a dead language a few years back

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