The language spoken by only two people

Ayapaneco, or Zoque-Ayapaneco, is a language from the Mixe-Zoquean family spoken in the municipality of Ayapa, in the state of Tabasco, Mexico. In 2011, when it came to international press attention, the two last fluent speakers of the language — Manuel Segovia and Isidro Velázquez — had not spoken to each other for years due to a personal dispute that the linguists documenting the language described as a tragic irony: the two final custodians of a language were not communicating with each other in it.

The story had a resolution: community mediators and linguists from the National Autonomous University of Mexico worked to reconcile them and create a documentation and revitalisation programme. The two men recorded vocabulary, phrases and songs that now form part of the language's linguistic archive. Teaching programmes were initiated in the community, although the intergenerational transmission of a language with only two fluent speakers is a challenge that applied linguistics recognises as almost insurmountable without a critical mass of speakers.

The Ayapaneco case is extreme but not unique. UNESCO estimates that more than half of the 7,000 languages that exist in the world today could disappear this century. Mexico's indigenous languages — more than 60 languages with their dialectal variants — are among the most threatened. The loss of a language is not just a linguistic event: it implies the disappearance of ways of categorising the world, of botanical and medicinal knowledge encoded in the vocabulary, and of cultural expressions that have no equivalent in the surviving languages.