11 Extinct, Dead, and Dormant U.S. Languages

Here’s a sobering statistic: According to UNESCO, before the end of this century, some 3000 languages could die out—that’s roughly one language every two weeks. Most of those languages will be the ones spoken by the world’s Indigenous people, and preserving these languages is so important that the United Nations declared 2022–2032 “the International Decade of Indigenous Languages,” which it hopes will “[provide] a unique opportunity for creating sustainable changes in complex social dynamics for the preservation, revitalization and promotion of Indigenous languages.”

But a dead language isn’t necessarily what you think. Per the language website Babbel, a language that is dead is “no longer the native language of a community of people”; an extinct language, on the other hand, is a language that is no longer spoken at all. Another classification, according to Ethnologue, is dormant, for languages that, while “not used for daily life … [have] an ethnic community that associates itself with a dormant language and views the language as a symbol of that community’s identity.”

Community identity is a major part of the story. The forced placement of Indigenous children in boarding or residential schools—where they were punished for speaking in their native tongues—is one reason why so many of these languages have died out. But some have an issue with that phrasing: As linguist Connor Quinn, who worked to preserve Penobscot, told The New Yorker in 2021, “‘Dead’ and ‘dying’ and ‘endangered’ and ‘extinct’ all make it sound like it’s a natural process, but this isn’t what’s happened. I think if you’re going to use the death metaphor you should talk about killing and murdering.”

Here are 11 tongues, some extinct, some dead or dormant, and some that are finding new life.

Eyak

One of the languages Ethnologue has categorized as dormant is Eyak, which lost its last fluent native speaker when 89-year-old Chief Marie Smith Jones of Anchorage, Alaska, passed away in January 2008. Jones is also believed to have been the last full-blooded Eyak. With her death, in the words of the Alaska Native Language Archive, “Eyak became the first Alaska Native language to become extinct in recent history.” 

Jones helped University of Alaska Fairbanks linguist Michael Krauss create an Eyak dictionary and compiled the language’s grammar rules. Unfortunately, the language didn’t carry on among a large group of people—not even Jones’s nine children learned Eyak, because when they were young, it was considered improper to speak anything but English. 

Today, there’s no one who learned Eyak as a first language; only around 50 people speak it, though not fluently. But if you’re interested in learning some Eyak for yourself, there’s a YouTube channel you can check out.

Yana

The Yana language consisted of several dialects spoken by the Yana people of north-central California, but their language would not see the mid-20th century. Treasure-seekers who came to the area during the Gold Rush brought diseases with them, which had a devastating effect on the Yana people. The white settlers also repeatedly massacred them, causing the Yana who remained to flee into the hills for safety.

One Yana dialect called “Yahi” was spoken by a man named Ishi (which means “man”). He helped linguist-anthropologist Edward Sapir [PDF] preserve some of the language. But when Ishi died of tuberculosis in 1916, that was the end of Yahi, and the last Yana speakers in general died around 1940.

Ishi’s story was later featured in books and movies, but there is a sad, and all too common, side note to his tale: Following Ishi’s death, his remains were cremated and buried. But his brain, which had been removed during his autopsy, was sent to the Smithsonian Institution. It would remain there until 2000, when—following passage of legislation like the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990—it was repatriated to tribes determined to be his closest living relatives. As of 2021, the remains of some 116,000 Native Americans could be found in museums and institutions around the United States.

Tunica

The last native speaker of Tunica, which was spoken by the Tunica tribe, was a man named Sesostrie Youchigant, but he didn’t have a full grasp of the language due to the fact that, after his mother’s death in 1915, he typically spoke French and English. 

Youchigant worked with linguist Mary Haas—a student of Edward Sapir—to try to write down everything he remembered, but it was far from a perfect process. Haas later wrote that “the Tunica grooves in Youchigant’s memory might be compared to the grooves in a phonograph record; for he could repeat what he had heard but was unable to make up new expressions of his own accord.” Haas made recordings of him speaking the language, but the quality is too poor for much to be understood. Youchigant died in 1948.

After that, bits and pieces of Tunica survived as phrases, and in the 1990s, Donna M. Pierite and her family became designated Tunica storytellers; they performed stories that had been dictated to Haas. In 2010, Brenda Lintinger, a councilwoman in the Tunica-Biloxi tribe, contacted Tulane University for help understanding Haas’s documentation of the language—which was written for an audience of linguists, not the layperson—so that new works in Tunica could be created. This ultimately led to the Tunica Language Project, which hosted language learning camps and worked on projects like children’s books and a dictionary.

Today, Ethnologue classifies Tunica as dormant; according to the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe’s website, “There are currently 60 Tunica speakers with proficiency ranging from beginner to intermediate level. Two of the intermediate speakers learned Tunica as a second language with reinforcement of oral traditions passed down through their family. … [T]hey rely heavily on documented linguistic resources for continued learning.”

Tillamook

The Salishan languages family is a group of 23 languages that are spoken—or were once spoken—in the Pacific Northwest along with some neighboring states and British Columbia. One of the languages in the family was Tillamook, which was spoken by an Oregon-based tribe of the same name that Lewis and Clark encountered when they made it to the area. Estimates are that at the time there were around 2200 Tillamook. By the end of the century, that had fallen to 200. The last fluent speakers collaborated with scholars to record Tillamook from 1965 to the early 1970s, but it didn’t survive. The last known speaker of the language was Minnie Scovell, who died in 1972.

Susquehannock

Susquehannock has been gone for a long time. It was part of the Iroquois language family, but almost everything we know about it is from a short vocabulary guide collected by Swedish missionary Johannes Campanius in the 1640s. Even then, the vocabulary guide consisted of only about 100 words. In 1608, explorer John Smith encountered and later described the Susquehannock people, calling them gigantic and writing that their language “may well beseeme their proportions, sounding from them, as a voyce in a vault.”

Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language

For many years, the population of Deaf people in the isolated town of Chilmark on the island of Martha’s Vineyard was so large that The Atlantic estimates it included “one in every 25 people” in the town. The population of residents who communicated with Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language was even larger, consisting of virtually everyone in both the Deaf and hearing communities. For many reasons—most of them related to Martha’s Vineyard’s relative isolation ending in the mid-19th century—the language started to decline. The last Deaf person fluent in Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language died in the 1950s. Though older non-deaf residents made it possible for people to learn some of the signs when research on the language really picked up in the ‘70s, there were no formal records of the language, which ultimately wasn’t passed down to younger generations.

Jersey Dutch and Albany Dutch

After settlers from the Netherlands landed in the Americas in the 1600s, variants of Dutch began to crop up across the Northeast. As William Z. Shetter wrote in a 1958 issue of American Speech, the North American versions of Dutch “survived a remarkably long time, but by the end of the 19th century it was in active use only around Albany, New York, and in the northernmost part of New Jersey.” According to Shetter, these languages—dubbed Albany Dutch and Jersey Dutch, respectively—were going the way of the dodo by the early 1900s, “and began attracting attention as collectors’ items.” Around 700 words of Jersey Dutch were preserved in 1910 thanks to linguist and politician J. Dyneley Prince, who noted that a dialect version of Jersey Dutch spoken by the descendants of enslaved people was still being spoken at that time.

Penobscot

Penobscot, a dialect of the Eastern Abenaki language, was once spoken over large swaths of Maine. But according to The New Yorker, by the mid-20th century, only a couple dozen elderly native speakers remained. Its last fluently native speaker died in the early 1990s.

Frank Siebert, a pathologist-turned-self-taught-linguist, began preserving Penobscot in the 1930s. He had always harbored a passion for Native American culture and languages, building up his own library of source material when he exhausted the local library’s books at the age of 15; even as he studied to become a doctor, he spent his spare time learning Penobscot vocabulary from the papers of University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Frank Speck. He eventually moved to Maine full-time to work on preserving the language.

It wasn’t until 1982, when he was 70, that Siebert hired Carol Dana, a member of the Penobscot Nation, as his research assistant. They worked together to get down as much of the language as possible, and Dana learned about the language through the materials Siebert had gathered. Though she’s not fluent, Dana knows more about the language than anyone else and is teaching it to the next generation. 

Siebert died in 1998. His legacy is a complicated one: He was a prickly man in life, and his methodology and attitude turned many Penobscot off. Anthropologist Dr. Darren Ranco, who is also the chair of Native American programs at the University of Maine and a member of the Penobscot Nation, told The New Yorker, “For communities like my own, where our language was beaten out of us, literally, and discouraged time and time again, having someone like Siebert come in, with an interest only in documenting the language, not committed to reënlivening it … this absolutely upsets me, after the hospitality so many Penobscot gave him.”

Eastern Atakapa

All we have left of the Eastern Atakapa language is 287 words written down in 1802 by a man named Martin Duralde [PDF]. The people who spoke the language lived near modern-day Franklin, Louisiana. The degree of its separation from the better-attested Western Atakapa is debated; some think they’re different enough they must be different languages, others that they’re similar enough that they’re the same. But even if they were the same, no types of Atakapa survived past the early 20th century.

Siuslaw

The Siuslaw language of the Oregon Pacific coast disappeared in the 1970s, but it’s been preserved quite well for anyone who wants to try to pick it up again. There are dictionaries, plus audio recordings, several hours of fieldwork, and a few books. Despite all of this preservation, few currently speak it fluently.

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A version of this story ran in 2009; it has been updated for 2024.