Rare ‘Secret’ language used by 4 people worldwide
There are approximately 7,130 spoken languages in 195 countries around the world, some widely used like Mandarin and English, while others are spoken by only a few individuals.
According to a report published by the Daily Express, there are numerous languages on the verge of extinction, spoken by only a few elderly individuals. One such language is Njerep, spoken by a handful of individuals and considered endangered according to UNESCO’s index of endangered languages.
Njerep is one of the 12 Mambiloid languages spoken by the Mambila people, residing between East Nigeria and Northwest Cameroon. Little is known about this language used in the Adamaoua region, Northern Cameroon, despite information about words and rules from the last speakers.
More precisely, the language is believed to have been recently used in the village of Ba Mambila in Sumi. It is thought that the Njerep people in this area moved from nearby mountains to the village, with a population of 2,500.
The Endangered Languages Project states that only four individuals in the world speak Njerep, all of whom are elderly, and the youngest speaker is believed to be over 60 years old.
However, Njerep might be in a better state than “Badeshi,” a language once widely used in the Naina Valley in the northern mountainous region of Pakistan. Now extinct, only three elderly men can still speak Badeshi.
One of these men says, “For generations, Badeshi was used throughout the village. But we brought women from other villages who spoke Torwali, and the children began speaking their mothers’ language, so our language started dying.”
Adding to the list is Kata Kolok, the sign language meaning “deaf talk” in Indonesian, which has become the primary means of communication for only 44 people worldwide.
The three Pakistanis who speak Badeshi
The emergence of this language is attributed to a significant number of residents in the village of Bangala being born deaf, inheriting deafness for about six generations. While villagers attribute the spread of deafness to a curse on the village, scientists have recently discovered a rare gene causing hereditary deafness in about one in 50 children in the village.
In the Arab world, all endangered languages are concentrated in Sudan, especially in the states of South Kordofan in the south (especially the Nuba Mountains) and the Blue Nile state bordering Ethiopia, in the extreme southeast of Sudan.
There are four Sudanese languages at risk of severe disappearance, with each having fewer than a thousand speakers: Hujariyat spoken by 50 individuals, Molo with about 100 speakers, Aka with a few hundred speakers, and Lwoffo spoken by approximately 600 people.
