Supported by a $9,000 2011 grant awarded by the Alaska Humanities Forum, the Eyak Language Project has launched a website as part of its determined new effort to preserve the endangered language of the Eyak people of the Cordova region. The last known fluent Native Eyak speake, Chief Marie Smith Jones, passed away in 2008. (post continues below)
Eyak was spoken by indigenous people along the Gulf of Alaska coast from what's now Cordova east to Yakutat. There were never more than a few hundred Eyak speakers in known history. The new Eyak Language Project website is designed to begin the process of helping Eyaks and other interested persons learn the basis of this supposedly “lost” or “extinct” language.
The website is one integral component to document, preserve and distribute Eyak learning materials to individuals and institutions throughout Alaska and beyond.
“We called this project, q’aayaa tl’hix, which, in Eyak, basically means to start something once again,” said Anchorage filmmaker Laura Bliss Spaan, the project director. “It’s a hopeful and inspiring way to begin a new year - and a new era.”
The website will feature a "Word of the Week” selected from the archival recordings of the language with Marie Smith Jones, along with new recordings of words and phrases modeled by Dr. Michael Krauss, the linguist who has spent nearly 50 years documenting the language in writing.
Every Sunday, visitors will find a new Eyak word or phrase to listen to, practice and learn.
The website will also include lessons designed by Guillaume Leduey, a 21-year-old man from France who taught himself how to speak the language from online materials when he was just twelve. Guillaume will be helping design lessons on the new website, especially those with difficult pronunciations.
“We have been given a rare, second-chance to revive our language,” said Sherry Smith, the project’s Cultural Coordinator and granddaughter of Marie Smith Jones. “This isn’t just about saving recordings of words and phrases to become archival artifacts. It’s about making the words, and the unique view of the world that Eyak provides, have real meaning again today in peoples’ lives.”
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