From the LA Times:
Native American languages are dying out with the elders.
By David Treuer, Special to the Los Angeles Times
February 3, 2008
Only three Native American languages now spoken in the United States and Canada are expected to survive into the middle of this century. Mine, Ojibwe, is one of them. Many languages have just a few speakers left — two or three — while some have a fluent population in the hundreds. Recently, Marie Smith Jones, the last remaining speaker of the Alaskan Eyak language, died at age 89. The Ojibwe tribe has about 10,000 speakers distributed around the Great Lakes and up into northwestern Ontario and eastern Manitoba. Compared with many, we have it pretty good.
Turtle Talk 