The Last Speakers, Endangered Indigenous Languages in North America

by Paul Adams and Jordan Layton, Emergence Magazine

This visual essay features tintype photographs of the remaining speakers of endangered languages in North America, highlighting the critical state of Indigenous language loss and celebrating the Native speakers whose voices embody resilience and revitalization.

AROUND THE WORLD, one language dies every fourteen days. By the next century, it is predicted that nearly half of the roughly seven thousand languages spoken on Earth will disappear, as dominant languages such as English, Mandarin, and Spanish exert their influence in an increasingly homogenized linguistic era, in which technology and world commerce push regionalized languages towards extinction.

In North America alone there are more than 280 vulnerable and endangered languages spoken within Indigenous communities. Fluent speakers of these languages are often over seventy years old. Who are these language keepers of North America? What is lost when their language goes silent?

The purpose of this series is to honor and share the work of the remaining fluent speakers of North American languages. In these photographs, each language keeper portrayed represents the gravity of all that is at stake when a language becomes endangered, as well as resiliency and the hope of revitalization.