A Mission To Save A Language Spoken By Three People

There are three people left in the world who speak the Dusner language found only in the Papua jungle in Indonesia. Researchers from the Faculty of Linguistics at Oxford University have been sent to Indonesia to try to save the language from complete extinction. They will record the vocabulary and grammar of the language and document it before it dies out completely.

'The reason the language has dwindled is that many locals now teach their children Malay as they consider it more useful to go to university or to get jobs'.

There are around 6,000 languages in the world, and it is predicted that 50 per cent of them will have vanished by the end of this century.

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