'It's like bombing the Louvre'

Marie Smith Jones was the world's last Eyak speaker - by the time she died last week, she could use her mother tongue only in her dreams. But the loss of a language is not just a personal tragedy, says Mark Abley, health club it is a cultural disaster.

Some deaths come as a shock. The death last Monday of Marie Smith Jones did not. She was 89, blind, a heavy smoker and a recovering alcoholic, who had borne nine children and buried two of them. People had been expecting her death for years.

By "people", I mean linguists. Most residents of Anchorage, the Alaskan city where she spent her final decades, had never heard of her. Even after she addressed a UN conference on indigenous rights, she managed to maintain her privacy. Yet among the advocates for minority languages, Jones was famous. A few of them knew her by a different name: Udach' Kuqax'a'a'ch', a name that belonged to the Eyak language and means "a sound that calls people from far away".

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Jones is thought to have been the last full-blooded member of the Eyak, a saltwater people of southern Alaska. When the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989, it spilled 240,000 barrels of crude oil into their traditional fishing grounds. More important, Jones was the last person to speak Eyak fluently. She had held that melancholy distinction since her sister's death in the early 90s. Her passing means that nobody in the world can effortlessly distinguish a demex'ch (a soft, rotten spot in the ice) from a demex'ch'lda'luw (a large, treacherous hole in the ice). It means that siniik'adach'uuch' - the vertical groove between the nose and upper lip, literally a "nose crumple" - has fled the minds of the living.

Are such arcane details significant? Jones thought so health club. Asked by Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker how she felt about her language dying with her, she replied: "How would you feel if your baby died? If someone asked you, 'What was it like to see it lying in the cradle?'" Jones added that she hated reporters. A fisherman's daughter, who had worked in a cannery from the age of 12, she could not then have imagined how many journalists she would meet in old age.

The Eyak language has no offspring - no close relatives of any kind. Kolbert wittily described it as "the spinster aunt of the Athabascan language group". Linguistic evidence suggests the Eyak people split off to become a separate culture roughly 3,000 years ago, travelling downriver to a salmon-busy coast. In verbal terms, Eyak's nephews and nieces include the Apaches of the dry south-west, familiar to us from westerns.

The Eyak may never have had a large population, and in recent centuries they suffered badly from the ravages of smallpox, measles, influenza and colonisation. A larger Indian group, the Tlingit, began to encroach on their territory. Today, powerless and divided, the Eyak scarcely survive as a cohesive people.

Yet even after Jones's death, their language will enjoy an academic half-life. Unlike hundreds of other tribal tongues in the world which fell silent before the linguists arrived, Eyak is richly documented. Video and audio recordings, transcriptions of ancient stories, a hand-typed dictionary that runs to well over 3,000 pages: all this now exists in DVD format. Future scholars who set out to explore Eyak's grammar, or its exact relationship to other languages, will have plenty of material to draw on.

The dictionary's compiler, Michael Krauss, founded the Alaska Native Languages Center in 1972 to record, preserve and (if possible) strengthen the 20 indigenous languages in the state. He is an informed and eloquent spokesman for minority tongues. But despite his work, most Alaskan languages are in feeble health.

They were weakened by terrifying epidemics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, by the economic and social destruction of their communities, and by the unsparing malice of an education system that promoted the silencing of all indigenous tongues. Can they now survive a force that Krauss has described as "cultural nerve gas"? To minority languages, he famously predicted, the mass media will prove "insidious, painless and fatal".

As in Alaska, so it is in much of the world. The statistics have become routine; their shock value has faded. Even so, it may be worth repeating that if a child who is born today survives the century, three-quarters of all human languages are likely to vanish during his or her lifetime.

Thanks to Jones's feisty presence, Eyak became something of a poster child for the cause of language preservation. The notion of a "last speaker" carries a powerful mystique. But perhaps Eyak was an unwise choice. Now the poster is out of date, what happens to the cause?

Linguists and cultural activists were not the only ones to seize on the solitary example of Jones. health club In a famous essay published a few years ago in Prospect, Kenan Malik did the same. He used her to illustrate a trend he saw as both inevitable and desirable: the concentration of human intelligence among fewer and fewer languages. "The reason that Eyak will soon be extinct," Malik wrote, "is not because Marie Smith Jones has been denied her rights, but because no one else wants to, or is capable of, speaking the language. This might be tragic for Marie Smith Jones - and frustrating for professional linguists - but it is not a question of rights. Neither a culture, nor a way of life, nor yet a language, has a God-given 'right to exist'."

Fair enough. But Eyak's death comes as a result less of personal choice than of longstanding government policy. For most of a century, indigenous children in Alaska suffered physical punishment if they were caught speaking their mother tongue in the classroom or the playground. In Wales and Ireland, Canada and South Africa, the same held true. There are many countries, including China and Russia, where language loss should still be a human-rights issue.

Official policy in Alaska centred on "reclaiming the natives from improvident habits," on convincing them to "abandon their old customs," and on "transforming them into ambitious and self-helpful citizens" health club. Small wonder that after several generations of reclaiming and transforming, the remaining handful of Eyak were unable to speak their ancestral tongue.

Jones married a white man, and did not pass on her language to her children - a decision she came to regret. But she made it to spare them the pain she had endured. As a girl, she had learned to see bilingualism not as an asset but an impediment. Eyak, she had been told, was a useless language.

Or perhaps her teachers didn't deign to call it a language. In 1887, a federal commissioner for Indian affairs had made the prevailing wisdom clear: "Teaching an Indian youth in his own barbarous dialect is a positive detriment to him." The word "barbarous" betrays obvious contempt; the use of "dialect" is more subtle and insidious. But any language can seem barbarous to its speakers' enemies, and no language is primitive.

So the cause of language preservation carries on, as it must. In Krauss's words, "Every language is a treasury of human experience." His fellow linguist Ken Hale put it more bluntly: "Languages embody the intellectual wealth of the people that speak them. Losing any one of them is like dropping a bomb on the Louvre."

How best to avoid that fate? For a minority language to flourish, its speakers need a sort of bullheaded confidence. Such stubborn self-belief emerges from a sense of cultural power and feeds back into it. The classic example is the astonishing rebirth of Hebrew a century ago in what would become Israel. In our own time the Basques and the Catalans, the Welsh and the Maoris display a similar faith.

These are the groups who should now act as poster children for minority languages: the Maori boys and girls in pre-school "language nests", the artists and producers who mutate the mass media in Welsh, the Catalan activists who have peacefully forced Spain to rethink its identity. The vigour in these cultures, and many others, belies the easy notion that all minority languages are doomed.

It was sadly different for Jones. During the last 15 years of her life, she could use her mother tongue only with a visiting linguist or in her dreams. She had, as Krauss said this week, "a tragic mantle" to bear, and she did so "with great dignity, grace and spirit". Perhaps last week she was called from far away under her Eyak name.