Alaska Native Languages
There exist in North America two major language families comprising a total of twenty separate languages that were born or cradled in Alaska. More people now speak these languages than at any time in history. Yet, in Alaska, these languages are only holding even or are declining.
One language family, Eskimo-Aleut is spoken by 95% of the 18,000 Canadian Eskimos and by essentially all 42,000 Greenlander Eskimos. But in Alaska, only about 70% of 34,000 resident Eskimos and Aleuts speak the Eskimo-Aleut languages.
Even more striking is the decline in Alaska of the other language family called Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit or Na-Dene. Today about 90% of the 23,000 Athabascans living in Canada speak this language family, as do more than 96% of the 170,000 Apaches and Navajos who live in the American Southwest. In Alaska only 31% of 8,000 Athabaskan Indians speak the language family.
According to Professor Michael E. Krauss of the University of Alaska's Alaska Native Language Center, the reason for the decline of native languages in Alaska is severe suppression of native languages during the first six or seven decades of this century. Before 1900, outside influences helped the native languages by developing written versions and teaching Natives to read and write them. Russian Orthodox priests developed written Eskimo and Aleut languages and missionaries of the Anglican Church operating near the Alaska-Canada border developed written Athabascan languages. Other missionaries, particularly Catholic, Episcopal and Moravian, joined the task in later years.
By 1910, the trend reversed. In all schools administered by the United States Bureau of Education and in many of the mission schools, children were prohibited from speaking their native language. Their parents were urged to speak only English at home in order to prevent the native language from being learned. The suppression worked well.
In 1972, the Alaska Legislature passed a bill giving Alaskan children the right to use and cultivate their native language in school. In a school having eight or more students whose primary language is other than English, Alaska law requires the school to have a teacher fluent in that language. This law does not extend to schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which operates the schools where about 75% of children speaking Native languages are enrolled.
Those interested in learning more about Alaskan languages will enjoy reading a new publication by Dr. Krauss entitled Alaska Native Languages, Past, Present and Future available from the Language Center in Fairbanks. His estimate of the future of many Native languages is grim. Of the twenty languages spoken, Dr. Krauss expects only five to live into the second half of the 21st century.
The first to go will be Eyak, now spoken by only two or three residents of the Cordova region. None is younger than sixty. All speakers of Alaskan Tsimshian, Alaskan Haida, Holikachuk, and Tanana are past forty. No one under twenty speaks Tlingit, Ahta, Ingalik, Koyukon or Han.
Each of these languages differs from the other and each has a rich vocabulary, soon without anyone to speak it. However, each language will be preserved in written form as a result of linguistics work already accomplished or still underway at the Alaska Language Center and elsewhere.
