There is a language which only two people can speak in Ayapa, a village in Tabasco, Mexico. According to The Guardian, this language is called Ayapa Zoque(Ayapaneco), and only Manuel Segovia(1936) and Isidro Velasquez(1942) can speak Ayapa Zoque fluently. Although the distance between their houses is 500m, their relationship is not good, so they don’t talk or meet each other. This language survived when Mexico was dominated by Spain. However, it is now in danger as Mexico expanded its education of Spanish to the whole nation in the 20th century.
  The National Indigenous Language Institute tried to spread this language across Mexico. However, they gave up on it because of low attention from the people and a deficit of support funds. Accordingly, this language has almost become extinct. A characteristic of this language is lots of figurative expressions which come from nature. For example, kolo-golo-nay is translated into “gobble like a turkey.”
  Like Ayapa Zoque, there are plenty of languages in danger of extinction because many young people ignore their inherent language to learn other powerful languages, and only old people remain. While more than 90% of the people in the whole world use 100 highly ranked languages, the other 10% of the people use 6,000 languages. Minority languages, which are not included in the top 100, are spoken by some natives of the United States, Australia or the Ainu tribe in Japan. About 100 languages disappear every year, and it means that a language disappears every two weeks.
  The extinction of languages means that valuable encyclopedias are disappearing. In Korea, the subject comes first in a sentence, and then the object and the predicate come. In English, the subject comes first, and the predicate and the object come next. However, only one minority language in the Amazon River basin uses the object first in sentences among all discovered languages. We would not know that fact if that language had not been found. Many minority languages hold important data for language studies, and losing these languages means that we have to give up lots of materials.
  To understand the world, minority languages are important. A fisherman of the Republic of Palau in the Pacific knows hundreds of fish names, their habitats and the spawning cycle of various fish species by the lunar calendar. Some tribes in Mindoro, the Philippines can discriminate between about 450 species of animals and 1,500 species of plants. If these languages disappear, we will lose profitable encyclopedias.
  All languages are used intensely to understand the world, and they have their own cultures and wisdom. Each viewpoint is different, and losing one language is the same as throwing away one world. In protecting any minority language, we should not only preserve each language but also our precious cultural heritages.

By Shin So-hyeon
sh36@cbnu.ac.kr