Suresh Menon: Speak up, save a language

How can we get 75-year-old Manuel Segovia and 69-year-old Isidro Velazquez to speak to each other? And why?

The second question first. These two Mexican gentlemen are the last speakers of Ayapaneco, a language spoken for centuries that has survived wars and revolutions, Hollywood and the Spanish conquest. It is on the endangered list - so endangered that only two people in the whole world speak it. And they don't, if you know what I mean. They turn their faces and walk away every time they approach each other, a legacy of a long-forgotten feud.

They don't sit down and discuss the great Ayapaneco writers or the wonderful Ayapaneco movies they watched as children or the scientific name in Ayapaneco for animals. OK, so they don't have a lot in common, and here we enter the realm of guesswork. Perhaps Segovia loves Seinfeld while Velazquez is more a House fan. Perhaps neither understands the problem.

Once a language is lost, translators lose a portion of their regular incomes, screenplay writers who hope to become millionaires by writing successful sitcoms in English and one other language, perhaps Ayapaneco (to take a random example), have nowhere to turn. And ultimately only Mandarin and English will remain, which is not so good for those who speak only Tamil or Swahili.

And so to the second question. How do we get these gentlemen to speak to each other? And what if they only care to trade insults in the world's fastest-disappearing language? Or what if their memories of certain words do not match the current usage? You know how usage changes, even if there hasn't been much usage. For example, remember when ‘awesome' meant ‘large' or its variants? Now it means anything from ‘I don't know' to ‘It's the finest action thriller I have seen since the first part of the same movie'.

Or remember when ‘cool' meant ‘stylish, with-it, admirable, anti-establishment', but now is merely the opposite of hot or excited?

Perhaps Segovia once tried to tell Velazquez how cool he was in Ayapaneco and was misunderstood, Velazquez assuming that what he meant was, ‘You look a bit chilly' etc. These things happen. In any case they speak different versions of the language and may have to use pen and paper or sign language to make themselves fully understood even to each other.

So why are we worried about a language disappearing? Look at the animals that no longer exist (you can't, but you know what I mean): the woolly mammoth for one, or the dinosaur. How many tears were shed then by language enthusiasts?

Let it go, I say. Or however you might say it in Ayapaneco.