A European artist has travelled to Alaska to learn an extinct native Alaskan language that has only one fluent speaker.
Frenchman Guillaume Leduey, 21, is undecided whether he will be the one to pass on the Eyak language to future generations. The financial demands of such a course of study are a major concern.
Leduey has had a lifelong fascination with learning foreign languages. He began teaching himself as a teenager, and now knows six languages.
At the age of 18, he contacted Bliss Spaan, a film director who made a 1995 documentary about the last remaining native speaker of Eyak. Spaan sent him a series of instructional DVDs, and he has been learning the language ever since.
Now Leduey, from the city of Le Havre, France, is in Alaska, studying Eyak with linguist Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
"What's in it for him?" asked Professor Krauss, speaking to Associated Press. "He has to eat, so can he make a good living doing that?"
Krauss, 75, has been studying the dying Eyak language for decades, and has published translations of Eyak stories, as well as an Eyak dictionary.
The language was spoken along Alaska's Gulf Coast until "the advent of the canneries and the Copper River railroad did in what was left of the Eyaks," according to Krauss.
The last native speaker, Marie Smith Jones, passed away in 2008, making Eyak the first of some 20 native Alaskan languages to disappear.
"Eyak is predictably the first," said Krauss. "But the question is, who is next?"
5 July 2010
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