Educators work to preserve endangered Alaska languages (fwd link)

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Educators work to preserve endangered Alaska languages

By MIKE DUNHAM
mdunham at adn.com
Published: July 11th, 2011 10:00 AM

If Alaska's Native languages vanish in the next generation, it won't
be because people didn't try hard to keep them alive, says Gary
Holton.

"There are significant efforts with Yup'ik immersion schools and
teacher training programs," said Holton, associate professor of
linguistics in the Alaska Native Language Center and director of the
Alaska Native Languages Archive at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
He pointed to an ongoing documentation effort, dictionaries and
teaching of the endangered Deg Xinag and Han Athabascan dialects. Even
Eyak, technically extinct, is benefiting from a language revival
program that recently held workshops in Anchorage and Cordova, he
said.

But he admits that the situation is critical for many of the state's
indigenous languages.

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http://www.adn.com/2011/07/09/1960330/many-alaska-native-languages-endangered.html