Waking the Dead.

Chief Marie Smith Jones, the last full-blooded member of the Eyak tribe and the only remaining Native speaker of the Eyak language, passed away last week at the age of 89.

Slate‘s Christine Cyr discusses the labor intensive work of language reclamation.

In some cases, a language that’s classified as “extinct” is still spoken in certain contexts. Latin, for example, is considered extinct, or dead, but is taught in schools and used in religious ceremonies. A language is generally considered extinct if it’s no longer used in daily conversation. To be a living—or native—language, people must use it as a primary means of communication.

For almost 2,000 years Hebrew was extinct, but Jews around the world continued to use it daily in a limited capacity in prayer, religious ceremonies, and writing. The rise of Jewish nationalism in the 19th century spawned the movement to revive Hebrew as a native language. Because no Hebrew dictionary or grammar books existed (the only written documentation was the Old Testament and a few other pieces of literature), people had to borrow words from other languages or create new ones to fill in gaps in the ancient Hebrew. Proponents of reviving Hebrew realized that the health of a language depends on children speaking it. In the 1890s, parents in Palestine started using Hebrew exclusively at home and sending their children to schools that used only Hebrew. By the early 1900s, couples that had attended these schools started to marry, and their children became native Hebrew speakers.

How Do You Learn a Dead Language? [Slate]

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Gene "G.D." Demby is the founder and editor of PostBourgie. In his day job, he blogs and reports on race and ethnicity for NPR's Code Switch team.
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