The lesser-known story of world’s most endangered language – Times of India

Somewhere around 7000 languages are spoken across the world with 90% of these languages only spoken by a hundred thousand. Languages are not ot only a means of communication, but also a way to keep a community together and alive. A tribe or community is bound together by common factors and it can be anything- language, art, religion, caste, color and gender.Language is a way through which old cultures and traditions are preserved. But there exists a language which has only one surviving speaker, struggling to keep it alive through her.
N|uu is one of the most endangered languages in the world with only one fluent speaker alive. It is a click language, historically spoken by some factions of the ǂKhomani people from the southern Kalahari, a large semi-arid sandy savanna in Southern Africa. The ǂKhomani people are the branch of the San people who existed 20,000 years ago and are considered one of the earliest hunter-gatherers in southern Africa.
The language consists of 112 distinct sounds including 45 characteristic “clicks” which have been passed down orally. Hence there is a lack of written record of such language existing and how it originated. But the records from recent times indicate what was the reason for its extinction. Different countries arrived in South Africa with an aim to colonize the region and extract natural resources. The areas and regions were divided as per the convenience of the colonizer countries and no thought was given to how the communities of natives were uprooted.
Prior to colonization, movement was free and cultures mingled together peacefully which meant that there was much scope for languages to spread and ensured its longevity. The political and the literal fences stopped all that. Further there was an active attempt to ‘humanize’ the Africans and to do that they enforced their languages, their religion and their lifestyle. There are reports after reports that claim that the colonizers went as far as killing people who rebelled or chose not to adapt to the lifestyle enforced upon them.
The ethnic and cultural identity of the natives was slowly left to die and by the time these regions claimed back their freedom, many cultures and languages had died. In the mid 1990s with the help of United Nations, 25 fluent N|uu speakers were identified. But since then many have passed away taking with them the language. Today only one such speaker survives. Ouma Katrina has dedicated her life to create a digital N|uu language dictionary. She has been working on this project for 20 years now and hopes to bring to life a repository that will keep the language alive.
In May 2024, Katrina started teaching young children the basics of her language, reviving the language. She knows that the children will never be fluent, but they will be able to greet, sing songs, and take the N|uu names of animals. The language will never be a mother tongue and in a few years it will join the list of languages who were subdued and strangled by cultural homogenisation.