Someplace round 7000 languages are spoken the world over with 90% of those languages solely spoken by 100 thousand. Languages are not ot solely a way of communication, but in addition a technique to hold a group collectively and alive. A tribe or group is certain collectively by frequent components and it may be anything- language, artwork, faith, caste, colour and gender.Language is a means via which previous cultures and traditions are preserved. However there exists a language which has just one surviving speaker, struggling to maintain it alive via her.
N|uu is without doubt one of the most endangered languages on the planet with just one fluent speaker alive. It’s a click on language, traditionally spoken by some factions of the ǂKhomani individuals from the southern Kalahari, a big semi-arid sandy savanna in Southern Africa. The ǂKhomani individuals are the department of the San individuals who existed 20,000 years in the past and are thought-about one of many earliest hunter-gatherers in southern Africa.
The language consists of 112 distinct sounds together with 45 attribute “clicks” which have been handed down orally. Therefore there’s a lack of written file of such language present and the way it originated. However the information from latest occasions point out what was responsible for its extinction. Totally different international locations arrived in South Africa with an intention to colonize the area and extract pure assets. The areas and areas had been divided as per the comfort of the colonizer international locations and no thought was given to how the communities of natives had been uprooted.
Previous to colonization, motion was free and cultures mingled collectively peacefully which meant that there was a lot scope for languages to unfold and ensured its longevity. The political and the literal fences stopped all that. Additional there was an lively try to ‘humanize’ the Africans and to do this they enforced their languages, their faith and their life-style. There are reviews after reviews that declare that the colonizers went so far as killing individuals who rebelled or selected to not adapt to the approach to life enforced upon them.
The ethnic and cultural identification of the natives was slowly left to die and by the point these areas claimed again their freedom, many cultures and languages had died. Within the mid Nineties with the assistance of United Nations, 25 fluent N|uu audio system had been recognized. However since then many have handed away taking with them the language. Right this moment just one such speaker survives. Ouma Katrina has devoted her life to create a digital N|uu language dictionary. She has been engaged on this venture for 20 years now and hopes to deliver to life a repository that can hold the language alive.
In Could 2024, Katrina began instructing younger kids the fundamentals of her language, reviving the language. She is aware of that the kids won’t ever be fluent, however they may be capable of greet, sing songs, and take the N|uu names of animals. The language won’t ever be a mom tongue and in just a few years it should be a part of the checklist of languages who had been subdued and strangled by cultural homogenisation.