Language
The Eyak spoke a distinct language closely related to the Athabaskan languages. Pressure from neighboring ethnic groups and the spread of English resulted in a decline of the Eyak language. Marie Smith Jones (1918–2008) was the last native speaker.
Read more about this topic: Eyak People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“It is silly to call fat people “gravitationally challenged”Ma self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.”
—Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)
“He had not failed to observe how harmoniously gigantic language and a microscopic topic go together.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)