Linguist Roberto Zariquiey has been meeting with Nelita Campos for more than a decade to record all she knows of the Iskonawa language.
CALLERÍA, Peru — It’s a ritual that Roberto Zariquiey and Nelita Campos have engaged in for more than a decade.; Campos, the last lucid speaker of her Indigenous language — sit at the roughhewn kitchen table of her raised cabin, overlooking a muddy stream in the village of Callería, deep in the Peruvian Amazon.“No, you’re the one that never stops complaining,” cracks back Campos, barefoot, with long jet-black hair that defies her 75 or so years.
Around the world, researchers are fighting a losing battle to save the world’s linguistic diversity. The most optimistic estimates suggest that, from Siberia to the Australian Outback, Africa to the Amazon, could vanish by the end of the century. The U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs warns that as many as 95 percent could be “extinct or seriously endangered” by 2100.
That was until six decades later, at the other end of her life, when this white stranger showed up. Instead of sneering at her language, Zariquiey told her it was beautiful and valuable. And more: He“When he offered, and said he would write it down, I almost didn’t accept,” Campos says. “But now it gives me such happiness when I hear the recordings of my voice and see that the children want to learn.
That’s partly because the world’s most influential languages, starting with English, have already been the subject of the vast bulk of linguistic research. But it’s also because the most logical way for Western researchers to understand the outer limits of human language, culture or ways of seeing the world is to study the languages most alien to our own.
No ecosystem is more biodiverse — and therefore has more medicinal potential — than the Amazon, says Mark Plotkin, the ethnobotanist who heads the U.S. nonprofitHe cites a single Amazonian species, the giant leaf frog, used in hunting rituals by tribes in Peru. Its proteinsthe permeability of the blood-brain barrier to allow medication to be delivered directly to the brain — a holy grail of modern medicine.