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Language Lineage

Eyak

A single language, the only sister of the whole Athabaskan branch. Its last first-language speaker died in 2008.

c. 1st millennium BCE – 2008The Copper River delta around Cordova, south-central Alaska
On this page
  1. The Last Speaker
  2. A Language on Paper
  3. Where it's spoken
  4. Turning points

01

The Last Speaker

Eyak was spoken in a few villages near the mouth of the Copper River, between Tlingit to the east and the Alutiiq (Sugpiaq) to the west, and was already declining when it was first recorded. Michael Krauss worked with its last speakers from the 1960s and produced a dictionary and a large body of texts. The last, Marie Smith Jones, died in 2008, and her death drew worldwide attention to language loss.

Thanks to Krauss's documentation Eyak can still be learned, and since the 2010s a small group of learners, including a Frenchman who taught himself from the materials, has worked to bring it back into use.

02

A Language on Paper

Everything now known of Eyak comes from a small number of speakers recorded over about forty years. De Laguna and the Danish ethnologist Kaj Birket-Smith described the Eyak people and their culture in The Eyak Indians of the Copper River Delta, Alaska (1938). Krauss's later work was far more detailed: a large dictionary file, grammatical analyses and a body of texts.

The most substantial texts are the stories of Anna Nelson Harry, told in Eyak and published by Krauss with translations in In Honor of Eyak: The Art of Anna Nelson Harry (1982). They include traditional narratives and her own reflections on the end of the Eyak world, and they are the main record of Eyak as a literary language.

Structurally Eyak is recognisably close to Athabaskan in its verb, with prefixes in fixed slots and the same 'classifier' prefixes, but its sounds differ: it has no tone, and much of its basic vocabulary differs from Athabaskan, so that cognates have to be found through regular correspondences rather than by eye. By the time it was studied most Eyak families also spoke Tlingit or English, and the Eyak shared many Tlingit social and ceremonial customs, a sign of the long pressure from their larger neighbours that preceded the language's end.

On the map

Where it’s spoken

Formerly spokenShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. United Statesformerly

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Writing1930s – 1970s

    Recording Eyak

    Frederica de Laguna records Eyak in the 1930s, and from the 1960s Michael Krauss documents it with its last speakers, producing a dictionary, grammar notes and texts.

    Figures · Michael Krauss (1934–2019)

    Sources (1)
    • Krauss, Michael E. 2006. A history of Eyak language documentation and study: Fredericæ de Laguna in memoriam. Arctic Anthropology 43(2): 172–217.
  2. Extinction2008

    Marie Smith Jones

    Marie Smith Jones, the last first-language speaker of Eyak, dies in Anchorage on 21 January 2008.

    Sources (1)
    • Moseley, Christopher, ed. 2010. Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, 3rd ed. Paris: UNESCO Publishing.