Endangered Languages Challenge : The Aleut Language
The Aleut language is known to the rest of world as simply “Aleut”. The name comes from Russian алеут [ɐlʲɪˈut] and is believed to come from a native Aleutian word allíthuh (“community”). Speakers of the language refer to their language as Unangam Tunuu - Унáӈам тунуý [uˈnaŋam tuˈnuː].
Aleut is the only representative of its branch, Aleut, which belongs to the bigger Eskimo–Aleut language family, also referred to as Eskaleut languages, or Inuit-Yupik-Unangan languages, depending on what terminology is less controversial.
Aleut is spoken on very scattered lands; namely in the Aleutian Islands, Pribilof Islands, Commander Islands, and the Alaskan Peninsula. The Aleutian Islands are composed of 300 different islands and are spread over 1 765 kilometres. Incidentally, the name “Alaska” comes from the Aleut Alaxsxa.
Aleut doesn’t have many speakers left alive today. According to Ethnologue, there is a total of 155 speakers alive today based on Dorais’s 2010 work, when the ethnic Aleut population is estimated at 2,300 people; that is a total of 6,73% of the population. Figures from 2015 have the numbers of fluent speakers around 96.
The University of Washington reports:
The number of Alaskans who speak Aleut has fallen to around 100 from 620 just two decades ago. That’s a far cry from the estimated 20,000 people who once spoke Aleut in the Aleutians and Pribilofs.
The fall in population is absolutely drastic. Before prolonged contact with Europeans, the population of the Aleutian Islands was believed to have reached around 25,000 people. The very low number of speakers is a tremendous problem, made even worse by the fact that these native speakers are all senior citizens.
The Alaskan public state radio KUCB published an article in 2015 about the Aleut-speaking community of Saint Paul island, where Aquilina Lestenkof of the Aleut Community of St. Paul's Office of Cultural Affairs said:
The youngest fluent speakers are about 75 years old. [...] At the beginning of this year, we had 18 fluent speakers, and I think we've lost like three or four. They've passed on. So when you have those types of numbers, you start to chew your fingernails.
Aleut’s EGIDS level was estimated as 8a, meaning that the language is moribund: “The only remaining active users of the language are members of the grandparent generation and older.”
The number of speakers has been brought low because of many factors: diseases brought over by Europeans, men killed and women forced to marry Europeans, lack of resources because of Russians’ overwintering. The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that:
in 1745; members of the party were later convicted of atrocities in the Russian courts. In subsequent decades, Russian trading companies treated Aleuts as they did their own rural population—as serfs, albeit serfs whose labour was tied to fur production rather than agriculture.
By the 1830s the Aleuts’ traditional ways of life had been heavily disrupted. Further disruptions occurred in the later 19th century, when discoveries of gold in Alaska drew prospectors to the region. The Aleut population declined drastically under foreign domination: at the time of first contact there were approximately 25,000 Aleuts, but by the end of the 19th century they numbered only about 2,000.
Aleut began declining significantly after the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867. Government policy and the schools, which for many years didn’t teach Aleut and only used English, were major contributors to this decline. Other factors were economic pressures and what the people themselves considered to be unfashionable.
Conservation and protection endeavours
Despite very little help from federal and local governments, speakers of Aleut have undertaken various endeavours to keep their language alive and potentially expand the number of speakers in the future. For instance, in the aforementioned Saint Paul island, in the summer of 2015, the first-ever Aleut language intensive programme was organised. This programme aims at training teachers who will themselves teach pupils as much Aleut as they can. This initiative received a $286,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
This language revitalisation effort is coupled with Aleutian culture revitalisation, to keep local traditions alive, such as crafts, and subsistence-oriented hunting and gathering practices. Universities have also reached out to these communities to help record and write everything they could about Aleut before the language could entirely disappear.
Aleut dancers in traditional ceremonial dress.
Despite borrowings from Russian and English, Aleut shows no sign of structural damage in its syntax. In this regard, the language is still vivid.
After years of battle, Aleut has managed to obtain a legal status in Alaska. Aleut has been recognised as an official language in the state of Alaska (along many other local languages) since 2013. As Rosita Kaahaní Worl, Ph.D. noted in her address prepared for the Alaska State Legislature in 2012:
In the 1990s, Alaska Natives began to advocate in earnest for the revitalization of indigenous languages. Sealaska was successful in advancing an amendment to the Native American Languages Esther Martinez Act of 1992 that provided for language revitalization programs in Alaska based on the status of our language restoration efforts at that time.
Yes, fortunately, thanks to native speakers fighting to preserve their language and the help of academics, Aleut enjoys a fairly large collection of works and dictionaries documenting its inner workings.
Saving Aleut: Linguist begins new effort to preserve native Alaskan language (University of Washington, 2003)
Remote Alaskan Island Revives Aleut Language, Culture (KUCB, 2015)
Aleut (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Aleut Native Tribe (Alaskan Nature)
OLAC resources in and about the Aleut language
Alaska Native Language Revitalization ( Rosita Kaahaní Worl, Ph.D. 2012)
