Kyra Hall
The world’s most endangered language has only one person left who can speak it.
It’s estimated that there are over 7,000 languages worldwide, with the most spoken being Mandarin, Spanish, and English.
Languages allow people to connect to their cultures and show the history of humanity, but unfortunately, some are dying out.
N|uu is considered ‘critically endangered’ and its last known speaker fears it will go extinct.
Katrina Esau, who is in her nineties, is on a mission to prevent this from happening.
It’s unclear when the click language developed, however, it’s believed to be ‘one of our last linguistic links to the earliest humans,’ per BBC Travel.
N|uu, which has 112 distinct sounds, was once spoken by hunter-gatherer groups that populated Southern Africa before European colonizers arrived, reports Reuters.
Lorato Mokwena, a linguist from South Africa’s University of the Western Cape, tells the outlet: “During colonialism and apartheid, Ouma Katrina and other (indigenous) groups were not allowed to speak their languages, their languages were frowned upon, and that is how we got to the point where we are with minimal speakers.”
In an interview with the BBC, Esau explained that as a child, she only spoke N|uu and that there were ‘good times.’
Yet sadly, this changed.
Esau recounted: “We would get beaten up by the white man if we were caught speaking our language.
“Because of our history, people today do not want to speak the language anymore, there is so much pain around it.”
She added: “We abandoned the N|uu language and learned to speak Afrikaans, although we are not white people – that has affected our identity.”
Esau’s late sister, Ouma Hanna Koper, told The Sunday Times: “We were told not to make noise, and the baas would shout at us if we spoke the language because they believed we were gossiping.”
Matthias Brenzinger, director of the Centre for African Language Diversity at the University of Cape Town, told The Guardian that N|uu was wiped out by white settlers, sometimes with the support of locals.
He explained: “Very often they kept the young girls, but they killed all the men.
“Genocide is the major reason for these languages in southern Africa to be extinct now and then forced assimilation.
“Farmers were taking their land so there was no subsistence for them anymore.”
For a long time, linguist experts believed N|uu was an extinct language. This changed in the 1990s when 20 elderly speakers shared that they were competent in the language, per Sheena Shah.
But now, only Esau remains.
Esau is dedicated to saving the language and in a small wooden hut, she teaches N|uu to local children.
“I want to pass on as much of it as I can but I am very aware that we don’t have a lot of time,” she told the BBC.
Esau has been running the school in her home for over 10 years.
The language was passed on orally for generations but to preserve it, it is now being recorded. Esau and linguists are creating an N|uu alphabet and basic grammar rules for teaching purposes.
In Esau’s 2017 interview with the BBC, she shared that one of her students showed great promise and hoped they’d teach the class one day.
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