“The last person who spoke fluent Quinault passed away in 1996. By using recordings of those who spoke the language in the 1960s, a handful of people in the Olympic Peninsula tribe are slowly and painstakingly piecing it back together — and teaching it to a new generation. Last year, Alyssa Johnston was the first person in recent memory to earn a world-language credit at the University of Washington by showing she had achieved “intermediate low-level proficiency” in that language.”