The first words uttered by a Gapun child, we learn, are not typically 'mama' and 'papa' but some variation on the phrase 'I’m sick of it, I’m leaving'
As a young anthropologist, in 1985, Don Kulick traveled to the most remote reaches of Papua New Guinea to study how a language dies. Motivating his quest was a haunting consensus then emerging among linguists that fully half of the world’s 7,000 languages are teetering on the brink of extinction.
As he made his way across the vast mangrove lagoon at the mouth of the Sepik River, wading through malarial swamps to reach a narrow slit in the jungle that would be his home for many months, he was acutely aware that every fortnight, somewhere in the world, some elder carries into the grave the last syllables of an ancient...
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