The Last Native Speaker

In the March 30 NEW YORKER, Judith Thurman discusses how some of our 7,000 human languages die out each year. I'm not sure about that number--it used to be 6,000 human languages. We may be inventing new ones faster than the old ones can disappear. Or, more likely, we keep redefining the word "language."

Thurman discussed the curious case of  Yanten Gomez, who is the last speaker of a language called Selk'nam, a tongue native to Chile. As a very young and linguistically talented person, Gomez had learned the language from its final native speaker, and he had learned it over the phone. He wanted to preserve it. Yet, at one point, Judith Thurman asked, "How can I be sure that he really spoke Selk'nam if no one else did?"

The answer is that Thurman can't be sure that Gomez is speaking Selk'nam correctly.  There's no way to check. What's more interesting is that Gomez can't be sure either. 

I don't want to exaggerate. Gomez can make tapes in an effort to fix correct pronunciations, as he remembers them, and he can write down the rules of Selk'nam grammar, including the meanings of words, and hope he recalls them correctly. Unfortunately one of the curious things about using language correctly is that it takes two. You need someone to tell you when you've made a mistake. (And this shoots down any number of weird speculations about the origins of language by major egos like St. Augustine and Chomsky.)