WIA LANGUAGES PROJECT

[Day 1/221]

Eyak

Eyak Language | I·ya·q

“The Eternal Echo of the Last Voice”

A quiet revolution, 221 languages’ digital archive • We’re not saving languages. We’re saving humanity.

📜 Songs of Lost Time

3,000 years ago, the Eyak people settled along the south-central coast of Alaska. Living between glaciers and sea, they sang of salmon returns and carved the flight of eagles into language. Eyak was a unique branch of the Na-Dené family, a lost link between Athabaskan and Tlingit languages.

When Russian fur traders arrived in the 18th century, there were about 300 Eyak speakers. In the early 1900s, as Alaska became U.S. territory, English education was enforced, and native language use was banned in schools. Children were punished for speaking their mother tongue, and parents chose to stop teaching Eyak for their children’s future.

Marie Smith Jones fought until the end. From the 1990s, she worked with linguist Michael Krauss to create an Eyak dictionary and record oral histories. She said: “I can only have conversations in Eyak in my dreams. When I wake up, I’m alone again.”

🌍 Between Hope and Despair

Officially, Eyak died in 2008. But something miraculous is happening. Marie’s granddaughters and young Alaska Natives have begun learning Eyak through recorded materials. Guillaume Leduey, a young man from France, self-taught Eyak online and has become the most fluent Eyak learner today.

Since 2020, the ‘dAXunhyuuga’ (Let’s speak our language) program has started. Every week, about 30 learners from around the world gather online to practice Eyak. They use over 1,000 hours of recordings Marie left behind and her dictionary as textbooks.

💎 Untranslatable Beauty

🚀 WIA’s Promise – Technology Creating Immortality

WIA is building a digital archive of existing Eyak language materials collected by linguists. The dictionary and recordings that Dr. Michael Krauss created with Marie are now becoming accessible online. These materials have become essential resources for language learners and researchers to understand and study Eyak. The digital conversion of audio materials has enabled permanent preservation of Marie’s voice.

WIA’s vision is to preserve these endangered languages in digital form and create platforms accessible to future generations. Even languages that have already fallen silent like Eyak can remain as important resources for linguistic research and cultural preservation through digital records.

“Sometimes a small beginning that no one notices
becomes a massive change that transforms all of humanity.”

🎭 Why It Must Not Disappear

Eyak was not just a communication tool. It was a treasury of 3,000 years of ecological wisdom. Eyak had words distinguishing 20 different states of salmon and 50 expressions for subtle changes in glaciers. Climate change researchers are only now discovering phenomena that Eyak elders observed centuries ago.

🌟 The Tomorrow We Will Create

WIA Languages Project

Connecting the world through 221 languages
A quiet revolution, humanity’s digital archive

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Day 1/221: Eyak
“Quietly, unwaveringly, one step at a time”

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