A man was the last native speaker of his language and died, taking an entire way of communication into extinction.

Wild Planet (@WildPlanet)

When Marie Smith Jones died in 2008, Eyak (an Alaskan indigenous language) died with her. She was the last fluent speaker. Languages encode unique ways of understanding the world—Eyak captured concepts that no other language preserved. With her death, thousands of years of linguistic evolution vanished. Language extinction is cultural extinction: entire worldviews become inaccessible. Hundreds of languages die every decade.

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