Linguist Olga Lovick took a detour while studying Russian literature at the University of Cologne, Germany, that led her to Alaska and a prestigious postdoctoral research project for the International Polar Year.

After studying Latin, classical Greek, French and even Apache, her fascination with language—how different they are, and how complex they can be—brought her to the Upper Tanana Valley to study Athabascan, which is closely related to Apache.

“The Athabascan languages have the reputation of being some of the world’s hardest languages,” says Lovick, who is undaunted as she sets out on her mission to document the effects of global change on the language.

“Then of course there are the effects of climate change, which impacts the Athabascan way of life considerably. This year they got approximately the same amount of snow that Fairbanks did, which made trapping incredibly hard, so that trapping was pretty much impossible. The caribou will have changed, so they could not hunt for caribou anymore where they used to. And there are less moose in the area. Pretty much everything has changed there.

“What I’m working on is how they talk about the change in the language.”

She’s compiling a booklet in the Upper Tanana language with English translations, describing climate change and how it impacts their lives, right down to the impacts on the language itself. “Because the language is, of course, changing. It is also dying,” she notes.

“In Upper Tanana, you have fewer than 100 speakers. Whenever somebody passes on, not only is it a person that you lose, but also one very big percentage of the knowledge that is being lost.”

Not only do fewer people speak Native languages, but there is also a wealth of vocabulary being lost, as is evident even in the tales of the well-known Dena’ina storyteller Shem Pete. If her efforts to revitalize the dialect succeed, Lovick sees her work as having the potential to raise awareness of language loss through the high-profile nature of IPY, and to inspire younger generations to start learning from elders, before it’s too late.

“There are about 6,000 languages spoken in the world, and the estimate is that maybe 600 of them will see the next century.” While she notes that a small village of speakers might not have much of a role in the big picture, she sees benefits to individuals and communities that can have a positive ripple effect.

“IPY benefits communities by getting attention, by getting publicity, because there is definitely a sense of powerlessness,” she says. “These people are facing not only language loss but also cultural loss, and that has very big impacts on their identity.”

Admittedly, it’s a big project with historic implications. “There is a high chance that my research from today is going to be a major part of everything that exists about Upper Tanana language, so then it may become one of the few sources to learn about the language.” In a happier scenario, she says, it could be used to continue teaching the language and, hopefully, the part that deals with climate research will be used to document how things were in 2007.

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