The last native speaker of the Aleut language in Russia, Gennady Yakovlev, has died at the age of 86 in Russia's Far Eastern Kamchatka region.
The chairwoman of the regional council of the Aleut district of the Kamchatka region, Galina Korolyova, said on October 5 that Yakovlev died in his native village of Nikolskoye on Bering Island.
Korolyov also spoke the so-called Medny dialect of Aleut.
Until recently there were only two known native speakers of the Aleut language in Russia -- Yakovlev and Vera Timoshenko. Timoshenko, who spoke the so-called Bering dialect of the Aleut language, died in March 2021 at the age of 93.
Yakovlev and Timoshenko were experts on the Aleut language, culture, and history who actively consulted Russian and foreign researchers and linguists.
Aleut, the sole language in the Aleut branch of the Eskimo-Aleut linguistic stem, used to be widely spoken by indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands, Pribilof Islands, Commander Islands, and the Alaskan Peninsula.
According to experts, there are fewer than 100 to 150 remaining active Aleut speakers.