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A researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has been awarded $1.2 million by the National Science Foundation to document the endangered languages of Alaska and other areas of the Arctic.

“If it’s ever going to be done, it has got to be done now,” said Michael Krauss, professor emeritus of linguistics at UAF. “Making a record, as much as we can, of a language while it is still there is vital to the future of the language and the people.”

On Jan. 21, Marie Smith Jones died at the age of 89. Her death, Krauss said, marked a “tragic new phase of history” in Alaska because she was the last remaining speaker of Eyak. The language may be extinct, but Krauss will continue his work to document it. The grant, funded from the National Science Foundation, will enable the detailed documentation of Eyak and 10 other languages. A number of linguists will be working with speakers of various languages from across Alaska and the Arctic.

“These languages are the essence of the thinking of uniquely Alaskan people, who have the right to help retain their language,” Krauss said. “(They are) the result of millennia of experience in these environments, the wisdom of the ages, you could call it. Not only that, they represent different ways of seeing — of understanding — our common human experience.”

At the end of the three-year project, Krauss said he hopes to have a wealth of archived information documenting 11 languages: Han Athabascan, Upper Kuskokwim, Eyak, Tlingit, Southern Tsimshian, North Slope Inupiaq, Central Alaskan Yupik, Central Siberian Yupik, Alutiiq, Atuuan Aleut and Kodiak Russian Creole.

Some of the languages, such as the Atuuan dialect of the Aleut language, are on the verge of extinction. Others, like Central Yupik, are thriving, with thousands of fluent speakers and children still being taught the language today in villages across Alaska.

But even Yupik needs to be documented, Krauss said, in order to help ensure it stays alive into the next century.

“We’ve already got a good dictionary of the language — a good heavy book,” Krauss said. “But we are trying to make one that is much bigger still.”

The various researchers involved in this project will collaborate heavily with language speakers in communities across the state. All of the researchers’ data, including detailed field notes and audio recordings, will be gathered together into an archive at UAF.

“It guarantees that, at the very least, the archiving of the material, a safekeeping for prosperity,” Krauss said.

The ultimate goal, he said, is to create dictionaries and grammars of the various languages and then make those dictionaries available not only to researchers but to schools and children interested in learning to speak the language.

Other collaborators on the project include Willem de Reuse, Andrej Kibrik, Jeff Leer, Edna Ahgeak MacLean, Osahito Miyaoka, Steven Jacobson, Evgenii Golovko, Moses Dirks and John Ritter.