N|uu, The World’s Most Endangered Language, Has Just One Fluent Speaker Left

With just one living fluent speaker, N|uu is one of the most endangered languages in the world. Its story is one of pain and tragedy – but also great hope and determination. Together with her family and local linguists, the last remaining speaker of N|uu is striving to keep the dying embers of the language aflame by passing it on to the new generation. 

N|uu is a click language, traditionally spoken by some factions of the ǂKhomani people from the southern Kalahari, a sandy savannah that sits within the modern-day borders of Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa. 

They are a branch of the San people who have lived here for over 20,000 years and are some of the earliest known hunter-gatherers in southern Africa. While N|uu has evolved great distances over the centuries – no different to English or any other vernacular – the language has deep, deep roots in a part of the world that’s integral to the story of humankind.

Five primary click sounds are used in N|uu, including one unique click that’s only found in a handful of very closely related languages. Linguists call the click a “bilabial plosive”, but the layman’s term is “a kiss click” because it sounds like the clack of a lip-smacking smooch.

This was the beginning of the demise in a way because it’s started to separate people. Their families were split up.

Dr Kerry Jones

Historically, the language was spoken and heard, not inscribed. With little written evidence, it hasn’t left behind a “paper trail”, making its history and age very tricky to trace. We do know, however, that it started to fall into trouble during the unwelcome arrival of the British Empire during the 19th century. As part of their brutal attempt to control Africa, the British naively set up political boundaries, many of which cut through people’s homelands.

“People used to move through that whole region between South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana all the time. Then all of a sudden, these people came and started putting up fences and saying you had to have identification and passports,” Dr Kerry Jones, a linguist and Director of African Tongue, an organization that looks to preserve and promote endangered languages of southern Africa, told IFLScience.

“This was the beginning of the demise in a way because it’s started to separate people. Their families were split up,” she added.

Along with fracturing communities, the Empire made active attempts to quash native African languages in favor of English and Afrikaans, a language derived from the form of Dutch brought to southern Africa by European Protestant settlers in the 17th century. Some San people still speak of how their ancestors were belittled, beaten, and even killed just for speaking N|uu.

To make matters worse, people were stripped of their ethnic and cultural identity. Instead of being recognized by their real ethnic identity, such as San, people were clumsily put into main categories: White, Black, Indian, and “Coloured” (meaning people with a mixed ethnic background).

After decades of colonial rule and apartheid, many feared the language had fallen into extinction by the end of the 20th century, never to be uttered again. However, like finding sprouts of a long-lost plant in the savannah, speakers of N|uu were found.

Through the work of sociolinguist Dr Nigel Crawhall and the United Nations in the mid-1990s, around 25 speakers from the ǂKhomani community revealed they had some competence in the N|uu language. 

“The 90s was a massive turnaround point and where people were starting to feel safe to come forward,” said Dr Jones. 

“We had these elderly people who were coming forward saying, ‘look, I’m gonna die soon anyway, so it’s okay. I’m gonna let you know: I’m not actually Coloured, I’m San. And I can prove it because I can still speak the language.’ The language became key in proving their identity,” she explained.

Unfortunately, many were elderly and have since passed away, taking their knowledge of the language with them. In December 2021, the penultimate speaker of N|uu passed away, leaving behind just one person with true knowledge of the language: Ouma Katrina Esau.

Although in the later years of her life, Ouma Katrina has spent the past few years diligently working to preserve the language. Together with Dr Jones and other members of the community, she has helped to create a digital N|uu language dictionary. The project, 20 years in the making, hopes to act as a vital repository of information that will keep the language alive. 

Despite never having had the opportunity to learn to read herself, Ouma Katrina has worked with her granddaughter, Claudia Snyman, to create a N|uu children’s book called Qhoi n|a Tijho (Tortoise and Ostrich).

“Her granddaughter, Claudia can speak the language. Not fluently, but as an additional language. But she’s literate and Ouma Katrina isn’t literate, so between the two of them, it’s a good combination,” said Dr Jones, speaking to IFLScience.

In May 2024, Ouma Katrina became an integral part of a program that’s teaching local school kids the basics of N|uu. For the first time in decades, knowledge of the language is being passed on to the next generation. 

They’re not going to be fluent speakers […] but they will be able to greet, they will be able to sing songs, they will be able to understand a basic children’s story.

Dr Kerry Jones

“Children are learning to greet, they are learning to sing songs, they are learning names for animals and plants,” explained Dr Jones.

“They’re not going to be fluent speakers and be fully monolingual in N|uu. That’s not reality, but they will be able to greet, they will be able to sing songs, they will be able to understand a basic children’s story,” she added.

N|uu is unlikely to be a “mother tongue” ever again. Like many traditional languages, it has been crushed by globalization and cultural homogenization, weighty forces that have leveled many ways of life.

Under the strain of these pressures, around nine languages die every single year. Like an animal species falling into extinction, each passing is a loss of the world’s richness and beauty. The squandering of cultural riches seems somewhat inevitable in the 21st century when profits and practicality are favored over intangible wealth. Nevertheless, as the story of N|uu’s attempted revival shows, there’s a deeply human need to keep alive the languages that we use to understand the world and our place within it. Without them, we lose a little part of our story. 

“There are these codes that we use to communicate and we label these codes ‘languages.’ Your experience with one code or another code is the structure that creates your reality. That is fascinating,” Dr Jones concluded.

“Because of globalisation, we are losing access to these codes. That’s such a loss. It’s the same as saying ‘Well, why give a sh*t about animals and plants that are going extinct?’ It’s because it’s part of a bigger network – it’s important.”