Chaos As Social Order

            There are nine different Athabascan tongues still in use in some form in the Interior of Alaska.  As a land area, the Interior is slightly smaller than the state of Texas, contains the major drainages of the Yukon, Tanana, Koyukuk, Porcupine, and Chandalar Rivers, and supports over forty villages–Tribes–whose inhabitants derive ethnically from earlier Athabascan peoples with mixtures of Inupiat and Yupik Eskimo, and Aleut Indian.  Most of the villages are accessible only by air, water, or snow covered ice.  The villages range in population from under fifty to nearly a thousand.  All of them have some kind of electronic communication with other villages and with towns and cities on the state road system and in other parts of the world.

            All of them have some kind of public school facility in which the official language is English.  English is also the official language of commerce, public affairs, and most recreational activities such as basketball and bingo.  In most Interior villages, only a small number of older people retain anything like fluency in a Native language, with a larger number being partial speakers some of whom have learned the language not in a natural family interaction but in some kind of classroom setting.

            On the basis of this situation, Michael Krauss, who has directed the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in Fairbanks, Alaska, for the past two decades, predicts that all of these languages will be extinct by 2055.  Krauss qualifies this prediction by the inclusion of only native speakers, that is, those who have learned the language as their first language from birth.  This qualification takes into

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