Southern Haida

The Southern Haida language is a endangered language spoken by the Haida people of the Haida Gwaii archipelago, off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. It is one of two surviving members of the Haida language family, the other being Northern Haida. Southern Haida has an estimated total of speakers. All but two of the estimated twenty Southern Haida speakers are over sixty years old. The language is not being passed on to new generations, as most Haida people now speak only English. The last fluent speaker of Southern Haida, Florence Edenshaw Davidson, died in 2008. The Haida people have occupied Haida Gwaii for over 10,000 years. The first contact with Europeans came in 1774, when the Spanish explorer Juan Pérez sighted the islands. In 1834, the British explorer George Vancouver charted the islands. The Haida people were decimated by disease and warfare in the 19th century. By the early 20th century, only about 200 Haida remained. In the 1950s, a Canadian government program forcibly relocated many Haida to urban areas, in an attempt to assimilate them into mainstream Canadian society. This program had the unintended consequence of further weakening the Haida language and culture. The Haida language is now classified as endangered by UNESCO. Efforts are being made to revive the language, through language classes and the use of Haida in print and online media.