Endangered Languages

Ket is the last living member of the Yeniseian language family, spoken by the Ket people along the middle Yenisei River and its tributaries in the Turukhansky District of Krasnoyarsk Krai, central Siberia. Its sister languages — Yugh, Kott, Arin, Assan and Pumpokol — are all extinct, the last of them (Yugh) lingering into the late twentieth century. Ket therefore carries an entire branch of human language on its own.[^1][^3]

Livonian (Līvõ kēļ) is a Finnic language of the Uralic family — a close cousin of Estonian and a more distant relative of Finnish. For centuries it was the language of fishing communities along the Livonian Coast of Courland in present-day Latvia, a string of villages facing the Baltic Sea. Though the Livonians gave their name to the historical region of Livonia, the people of Latvian and German speech long ago became the majority, and Livonian retreated to the coast.[^1]

Manchu (autonym Manju gisun) is a Tungusic language of northeast Asia and the heritage language of the Manchu people. For nearly three centuries it was anything but obscure: it was the court and administrative language of the Qing dynasty (1636–1912), the empire that ruled China and inner Asia. Millions of pages of Qing memorials, treaties, dictionaries and translations survive in Manchu, making it one of the best-documented languages on this list — and a key that historians still use to read the Qing archive.[^1]

Tlingit (autonym Lingít, 'human/of the people') is a Na-Dene language of the Pacific Northwest Coast, spoken by the Tlingit people across the islands and inlets of southeastern Alaska from Yakutat to Ketchikan, and inland into northern British Columbia and the southern Yukon. Within Na-Dene it is a distinct branch, related more distantly to the large Athabaskan family (Navajo, Dene, Apache) and to Eyak.[^1]

Wymysorys (native Wymysiöeryś), also called Vilamovian, is a West Germanic language spoken in a single town: Wilamowice (Wymysoü) in southern Poland, near the border of Silesia and Lesser Poland. Most scholars trace it to twelfth- and thirteenth-century Middle High German, carried east by settlers said to have come from Flanders, Friesland and Holland, and then reshaped by eight centuries beside Polish. The result is a Germanic language that a German speaker cannot simply understand.[^1]

Yurok is an Algic language of the far northwest of California, traditionally spoken along the lower Klamath River and the Pacific coast of present-day Humboldt and Del Norte counties. Its family relationships are remarkable: Yurok and its neighbour Wiyot are the only Algic languages spoken outside the Algonquian heartland of central and eastern North America, making Yurok a distant western cousin of languages like Cree, Ojibwe and Cheyenne.[^1]