Miami-Illinois / Myaamia — myaamia

• People / language: Myaamiaki (Miami people) and the related Illinois Confederation peoples (Kaskaskia, Peoria, Tamaroa, Cahokia, Wea); Miami-Illinois language (endonym myaamia), Central Algonquian
• Region: Historically Illinois, Indiana, western Ohio, Michigan and adjacent areas along the Mississippi and Wabash rivers; today centred on the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Miami communities in Indiana and Ohio, USA

STATUS

Dormant → Reawakening — do NOT call this language simply extinct. The community's own term is "sleeping": many Miami members describe the language as sleeping rather than extinct, because it was not irretrievably lost. Ethnologue (Gordon, 2005 ed.) classified Miami-Illinois as extinct, but Miami linguist Wesley Y. Leonard — a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma — argues in print that it "is not and never was extinct; it was merely sleeping," and that with reclamation efforts begun in the 1990s "it might now be said to have been awakened." UNESCO-derived listings carried in secondary summaries describe it as "Revitalized," and on the EGIDS scale as "Reawakening." This register follows the community and Leonard: status = Dormant (sleeping), now Reawakening.

THE COUNT

• Early 1960s: the last fluent first-language speaker died. Leonard (2008): "With the passing of the 'last' fluent speaker in the early 1960s, Miami really was a sleeping language for about thirty years." A commonly repeated specific year is 1962 for the last full first-language speaker (secondary summaries).
• A conflicting date, flagged not resolved: some reference mirrors give the last native speaker's death as 1989. The sources disagree; Leonard's scholarly account (early 1960s) is the one anchored to a named author and date, and this register gives it precedence while recording the conflict.
• 2016: an estimated ~500 tribal members used the language on a regular basis (estimate carried in the Miami-Illinois reference literature, 2016). This is a count of users/learners in the revival, not of first-language speakers, and must not be quoted as the latter.
• Baldwin's children were raised as native speakers of Miami — the first new first-language generation of the awakening (Myaamia Center record).

WHAT HAPPENED

• Forced division and removal: language shift to English only "had been occurring since the nineteenth century and was driven by the forced division of the Miami community in 1846" (Leonard 2008) — part of the community removed west under the Indian Removal era, part remaining in Indiana — "and English-only practices in the federal Indian boarding school system, among other reasons."
• By the time the last fluent speakers died in the early 1960s, transmission to children had already ceased; what remained was documentation and heritage, with "no individuals with substantial knowledge of the language" — Leonard's defining criterion of a sleeping language.

WHAT SURVIVES

• An unusually deep archive: documentation from French missionaries (late 17th–mid-18th century) through 19th- and 20th-century linguists such as Albert Gatschet — Baldwin and linguist David Costa located nearly 250 years' worth of documentation; the archive, much of it in the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives, is what the awakening is built from.
• David Costa, The Miami-Illinois Language (PhD dissertation 1994; book 2003) — the reconstruction of the language's grammar on which teaching materials rest.
• Daryl Baldwin, who taught himself Myaamia from the historic documents and raised his children speaking it, and the Myaamia Center (est. 2001) — a joint venture of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, which Baldwin directs; 2026 marks the Center's 25th anniversary. Its outputs include the Myaamia dictionary (myaamiadictionary.org), children's books, audio materials, apps, and a compilation of traditional stories recorded in the early 20th century from the last native speakers.
• Heritage education at scale: the Center reported 26 full- and part-time staff, 46 students, and around 120 graduates of the Myaamia Heritage Award Program at its 25th anniversary (2026 reporting) — programme figures, recorded as such, not speaker counts.

SOURCES

• Wesley Y. Leonard, "When Is an 'Extinct Language' Not Extinct? Miami, a Formerly Sleeping Language," in Indigenous Language Revitalization in the Americas (2008) — Ethnologue (Gordon 2005) "extinct" classification; last fluent speaker early 1960s; 1846 division and boarding schools; sleeping-language criteria.
• Myaamia Center / Miami University — Center mission, Baldwin biography, dictionary and programme resources; Daryl Baldwin, "Baldwin Reflects on Language Revitalization Efforts," aacimotaatiiyankwi.org (2026).
• "Miami–Illinois language," reference synthesis (accessed Oct 2026) — extinct in the 1960s; ~500 users (2016); conflicting 1989 date in some mirrors, flagged in the text above.
• Oxford Free Press, "Myaamia Center celebrates 25 years at Miami" (2026) — staff/student/graduate figures; ~250 years of documentation.