6 Last Living Speakers of Dying Languages

by Nadia Jones
There are around 7,000 languages spoken on planet Earth. Many of these, perhaps most, are at
risk of extinction within just a few generations, as first colonialism and now technology and
globalization have homogenized the world's tongues. Sometimes language death takes place
abruptly, and in other cases a gradual merger takes place with another, politically or
economically dominant language.
Linguists often race to study a language before it dies, tracking the extinction process much as
conservationists would an endangered species. In a surprising number of cases, they have been
able to pinpoint a single remaining speaker who will in some sense take that language to their
grave. It gets a little complicated here, as this designation may indicate the last native-born
speaker, the last monoglot speaker, or simply the last fluent speaker. Here are all the known
people who currently qualify as "last speakers" of a language:
1. Edwin Benson
Language: Mandan
The remnants of the Mandan tribe were gathered with others to form the Mandan, Hidatsa, and
Arikara Nation, based on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. Benson, whose
Mandan name Ma-doke-wa-des-she means "Iron Bison," has for years been active in teaching the
language to schoolchildren.
2. Cristina Caldern
Language: Yaghan
As of 2005, when her sister-in-law died, Ms. Caldern became the last full-blooded
representative of the Yaghan people of Tierra del Fuego, famous for being the southernmost
people in the world. She lives on Navarino Island in Chile and recently published a book of
Yaghan tales entitled Hai Kur Mamashu Shis ("I Want to Tell You a Story").
3. Doris Jean Lamar McLemore
Language: Wichita
Ms. McLemore, the Oklahoman daughter of a Wichita mother and a white father, was raised by
her Wichita-speaking grandparents and is now the language's only remaining fluent speaker.
However, she has maintained a half-century-long collaboration with University of Colorado
linguist David Rood to document and preserve Wichita.
4. Charlie Mungulda
Language: Amurdag
Once spoken among Aborigines of Australia's Northern Territory, the Amurdag language was
prematurely declared extinct decades ago. Mr. Mungulda is believed to be the only living
Amurdag speaker, but has had no one to speak it to for many years, and so naturally his own
ability to recall it has decayed somewhat. Nevertheless, he has shared much invaluable lore of
the Dreaming, including animal names in Amurdag.
5. Verdena Parker
Language: Hupa
The Hupa people of northern California, like most Native American tribes, were subjected to a
process of forced assimilation and English-only education. Ms. Parker avoided boarding school,
being raised by her grandmother to speak Hupa. Nowadays she works with Stanford and
Berkeley scholars to document the language, while also revitalizing it through an immersion
program for high-schoolers that seems to have met with some degree of enthusiasm.
6. John Steckley
Language: Wyandot
Not a native-born Wyandot but a Canadian academic, John Steckley was nonetheless adopted
into the tribe in 1999 (and given the interesting name Tehaondechoren, "he who splits the
country in two") after decades of studying their language, also known as Huron. He recently
completed the first Huron-English dictionary to be published in over 250 years.
These priceless, straggling survivors of cultural conflict and attenuation have much to offer a
world that becomes more uprooted and homogenous each day. They resemble the secret enclave
in the last scene of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, except instead of a single book inside each
person, there is an entire language (and thus a worldview, a whole people, a way of life). With a
little luck and a lot of determined effort, their words will survive them. Languages like Irish and
Hebrew have successfully come back to life where political and ethnic passion existed to buttress
scholarly interest; let's hope that in each of these cases, there are younger people who care
enough to take up the torch.
About the writer
Nadia Jones is a freelance writer and blogger who enjoys sharing her knowledge on topics of
education and higher learning