Linguist's death leaves a dream of a lost language revived

Can a language whose speakers have all died be brought back to life? The late linguist Michael Krauss, who died in August, believed it possible and worked until his final days to realize his vision with the nearly vanished Eyak language, whose last Native speaker died a decade ago.

Krauss, who founded the Alaska Native Language Center and who drew the map of Alaska Native languages that hangs in many an Alaska social studies classroom, arrived in the state in 1960 already aware of the dire plight of Alaska Native Languages, and Eyak in particular.

At the time, there were six fluent speakers remaining. The former population of speakers that was estimated around 1,400 had been eliminated through the harsh language suppression of 19th and 20th century American territorial education policies.

In 2008, the last native Eyak speaker died.

“It was the first Alaska Native language in modern history to cease to be spoken by native speakers,” said linguist Gary Holton, who worked with Krauss beginning in the late nineties, “And at that moment, Mike became the last speaker in a way. He's not a native speaker, but he was functionally fluent in Eyak and he was kind of recognized by the Eyak community as the last speaker”

Krauss had been documenting the Eyak language, a Na-Dene language related to other Athabaskan languages, but one only spoken in four villages, since the early 1960s and had developed close friendships with the people of Cordova and Yakutat, where most Eyak had been relocated during territorial days. That made documenting the language an urgent -- and herculean task. It involved more than just recording all the words that have been spoken.

Through long conversations with speakers, Krauss and his associates started recording and analyzing the ways that the Eyak language was constructed. In the days before the ubiquity of personal computers and laptops, it was a labor-heavy task.

Jenna May is an Eyak whose grandmother was one of the last fluent speakers. She recalls the piles of pages that filled the room where the papers were collected.

“The documents are from floor to ceiling, binders and binders and binders of Eyak,” she said. Arcane rules of grammar -- cases, prefixing verb structures, and morphemes -- are derived from spoken words that were originally recorded and transcribed by researchers, and then the structure of the grammar was analyzed to derive patterns and rules that would largely unintelligible to a non-expert. But they give academics the tools so that they could, theoretically, learn how to speak a language largely from letters on a page.

“The dictionary doesn't have everything that everyone has ever said before,” explained Holton, “But together with the rules of grammar, we can sit there and build new sentences. If somebody wants to say a certain thing, we can go through the rules of grammar and figure out how it should be said.”

Of course, the dictionary also needed to be compiled, complete with such untranslatable words as “a porcupine’s hole in a rocky crevasse,” as did the texts. Together, the dictionary, grammar and texts constitute what is called the Boasian trilogy, named after a pioneering 20th century anthropologist and linguist who studied the documentary elements of a language needed to know how it is spoken.

Completing those three would still only make it theoretically possible for the language to be revived -- and doesn’t yet address the practical aspects of reviving the language.

But before he died, Krauss had passed the Eyak torch to a student -- a young Frenchman, Guillaume Leduey, who while not Eyak, became the torchbearer of the language. Leduey began learning Eyak when he was 13 after stumbling on Krauss’s map of Alaska Native languages that showed Eyak with just one speaker remaining.

He went to work studying the materials, listening to recordings and following along with texts. Eventually he traveled to Cordova and met with Krauss and other researchers at the Alaska Native Language Center in Fairbanks where he had access to files that Krauss and others had collected.

When Leduey finally made it to Alaska, he inadvertently fulfilled a prophecy from Mary Smith Jones, the last native Eyak speaker. Before she died, she said that a person from afar would come and save the language.

Leduey now has a heavy responsibility on his shoulders as the most proficient speaker of a language that is otherwise lost after Krauss’ death.

“It’s hard to admit, but it’s true and I have to face it,” he said over the phone, “It’s heavy, but I am not alone on this ship: there are many linguists who are able to help.”

Now Leduey leads a sort of superhero life. In his normal day job he is an event planner in a small town an hour from Paris, but usually once a year, he comes to Alaska as the scion of a nearly-forgotten language.

It’s a strange position to be in for Leduey, who is well aware of the tragic colonial past of America that punished Native speakers well into the 20th century.

“I’m white, but I’m French, so I wasn’t part of the genocides you guys experienced -- we had our own genocides -- but I think it’s harder for me to think about that fact than it is for them. I think that they could tell when I came I was sincere and I wasn’t doing it with any sort of malice,” he said.

Now Leduey is the primary teacher of the language at the Eyak Culture Camp, an annual event now in its sixth year, where Eyak from around the state gathered for language classes, cultural activities and food. The progress in language-learning is slow, but it’s made possible by a committed group of academics and teachers, led by Leduey. So far, May says that most Eyak kids around the state are at a preschool level, but the camps, combined with online lessons that were developed with the use of Krauss’s work, are adding more knowledge and ability every year.

Leduey says that awareness of the colonial history can be tough to overcome when designing lessons and envisioning what the lessons are for.

“Do they want to become fluent? Do they want to just use it for rituals? I don’t want to tell them what they should be doing or why they should want to learn it,” he said.

With a group of linguists, Leduey has been working on developing curriculum that is engaging for the speakers and is effective at teaching. Luckily, the neuroscience of language learning lined up with his intuition, and suggests that games are the most effective way to nail down ideas.

So the researchers got together before the camp and asked community members for their favorite games, then used those to develop lessons. Leduey says the key is keeping it fun, but he regrets not having more than a couple weeks a year to teach. Leduey and May say that it’s slow, tough going.

“Each year we add onto those things and so what we're seeing now is that a lot of adults that come to the camp and that get involved in other workshops throughout the year learn additional language skills and then they pass those on to children as well, so it's an ongoing process. It's a difficult process,” said May.

But there were signs that the language could be getting new life. Holton said that while at the most recent language camp, one of the participants composed a poem entirely in Eyak; another a story.

“I don't know where that will go, or what it will lead to, but it's certainly more than I think Dr. Krauss could have ever hoped for,” he said.

In his last days as Krauss’s health deteriorated near his son’s home outside of Boston, he continued to direct the work of his proteges over conference calls with Holton, May, and Leduey, and others.

Three days before his death, Krauss asked each of them for a commitment.

“What he said over the phone was please, make sure, I want your word that you are going to finish this grant and not let the Eyak people down,” May recalled, referring to a National Science Foundation gramt that the group had been working on to finish editing the dictionary and grammar that Krauss had begun.

“It was typical of him,” said Leduey of Krauss’ commitment to the work in his last days. Leduey described how the group came up with advice they wanted to ask Krauss during his last days.

The grammar is expected to be submitted to the publisher for review by the end of the year, and then a dictionary and texts will be worked on later, according to Holton. He says, that there is still a lot of work to be done, but that students who gained knowledge of the language through their work with Krauss have been invaluable for completing the work.

“If anything, our team is even more committed now to ensuring that the legacy of Krauss’ language research and documentation is made available to future generations,” said Holton in an email.

It all goes back to Krauss’ vision that a lost language could be revitalized through rigorous academic discipline over decades -- a grand experiment being attempted in Alaska.

“What Guillaume has done is actually learned something from the archive and show that it can be done, it’s possible,” said Holton.