Rest In Peace Last Speaker of the Bering dialect of the Aleut Language, Vera Timoshenko, Passes Away at the age of 93

[Husky_Khan]

She apparently spent the last decades of her life doing her best to preserve as much of her dialect as possible, working with Russian and International specialists in preserving her language and culture.

A ‘treasure trove of Aleut folklore, national songs, dances and history’, Vera was the last person to preserve Bering dialect of the language unique to her remote island.

‘No-one could expect in my school time that the language we heard in every house could vanish’, she said three years ago.

One rare dialect less as the world’s last speaker of Bering dialect of Aleut language passes away

Vera Timoshenko, 93, died on her native Bering island off the Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Pacific.

siberiantimes.com

According to Wikipedia as of the 2000's a total of 7,000 natively spoken languages exist worldwide but by 2050, one study alledges that 90% of them are gone. It's already 2020 so I don't know the veracity of the study now, over a decade later but it is an interesting thing to at least read about.

Obviously all languages have changed and mutated over time, one just needs to look at English for an example and knowing in full context that lots of languages have died over the generations just from the passage of time. But preserving languages even if they are 'dead' in regards to native/fluent speakers and the cultural legacy and history that goes hand in hand with it still seems to have a great deal of value just like any of the other anthropological fields of study.

 

[Captain X]

It's unfortunate, but it seems that a lot of the youth just simply aren't interested in learning these things. It seemed to me that most of them were more interested in being "gangstas" and emulating inner city black culture than in learning and preserving their own. At least that's the experience I had on the two reservations that I've lived on.

 

[prinCZess]

There's some degree of odd duality to these stories, to me. It's disappointing to see the past and entire former peoples native thoughts become relegated to museum pieces and abstract archive-dives that might be done by someone with a bugaboo for 'dead languages'. The death of a language might be more abstract than the extinction of an animal, as easy comparison, but the impact still feels significant.

At the same time, while active use of the language is dead, the people whose ancestors spoke it remain. Vera had hundreds of neighbors who were Aleuts themselves and hundreds of others living on the island who would have brushed-up against them and encountered folklore, songs and dances referenced, along with all the other minutae of a different culture that had adopted another tongue (Russian, presumably, in this case).

On the third and fourth mutant hands, some cultures can...kind of suck for certain people within them because of baggage associated, and some of that experienced or adopted through another language can also kind of suck. Because it's all just differing mutual collection of humans who can sometimes be really shitty people, and poetic waxing about lost languages or folklores or the benefits of their replacement obscures some of that behind weird nostalgia-goggles or 'progress'-fetish.

US and Canada are going to periodically experience this same phenomenon for a decade or two/three. There's just a lot of investment to teaching language and when the populations using them are so small. It's disappointing in a way, but some of the best advice I've ever heard in reference to this general subject was to apply a different folksy wisdom to it--and that being the old saw about it not being someone's words that mattered, but their deeds. Words are part of a culture and legacy, but they aren't the total of it, or even a majority.
This is the end of prinCZess making folksy and weirdly-applied philosophizafications for the evening.