ah! i just read this story about last alaska language speaker dies. not only was the woman the last one to be able to speak that language, but she was the last full-blooded person of her people. she was conscience of this and there were efforts to preserve the language. however much you hear about people and cultures dying, it's quite another to learn of it happening in your lifetime and to be able to put a face and name to it.

one does want to help preserve cultures in danger of dying out but if no one's willing to speak their native language or to learn it, then it dies out. there's also a matter of the population. we can't force others to procreate with their own people so that they continue to exist for another generation or two. i can't help but always compare such things to something personal, that is my own ignorance of my mother's culture. though i lived there as a kid, i don't know the local language or dialect as it's referred to these days. plus i'm mixed myself so i'm torn between continuing to live as i always have or to go back and find my roots, so to speak. i think it'll be a long while before my mother's culture dies out but yet i can't help but feel a sense of danger of the language being lost. perhaps it comes from not only the colonization by japan and the adaptation of japanese as the everyday (and in many cases only) language used but that japanese itself has changed greatly since i was a kid. that native words are being lost to foreign words. language evolves for sure but at what cost i sometimes wonder.