An endangered language with a history stretching back over twenty thousand years is in danger of vanishing forever.
The world’s most endangered language, N|uu (spoken with a clicking sound between the ‘N’ and the ‘uu’), has only one native speaker, Ouma, and is therefore in extreme risk of extinction. Esau Katrina.
San people, who are part of any of the indigenous hunter-gatherer groups in southern Africa, are the ancestors of this click language.
The Khomani people, who lived in the southern Kalahari savannah on the present-day boundaries of Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa, were its original inhabitants.
The oral nature of the language and the brutality inflicted upon its speakers by the British Empire in the course of their 19th-century colonization of Africa mean that very little of the language has survived in written form.
