The world's rarest language that only one person knows how to speak
This critically endangered language is on the cusp of being completely wiped out, with just one person left who knows it.
Top 10 Facts About Languages
There are only 195 countries in the world, yet more than 7,000 languages exist.
This number has rapidly declined with nationalism and globalisation.
With it, many languages have been lost and will likely never be spoken again, while others are holding on for survival.
There is one that, while ancient and once spoken by thousands, is down to its final speaker.
Taushiro, also known as Pinche or Pinchi, comes from the Peruvian Amazon near Ecuador, and will in the next few years become extinct.
Amadeo Garcia Garcia is the last person on Earth to know the language, the last survivor of his tribe.
He lives in the village of Intuto, Peru, on the banks of the Amazon, and may well be the loneliest man in the world.
Taushiro is a mystery to linguists and anthropologists alike, a language spoken by a tribe that disappeared into the jungles of the Amazon basin in Peru decades ago.
The tribe retreated at a time when industrialists were making unprecedented headway into the jungle and ancient traditions risked being completely lost.
They found a spot deep in the jungle and protected their settlement with a ring of deep pits, hidden by leaves and sticks so that any intruder would fall to their demise.
They kept dogs and trained them to attack in the event of outsiders coming near, and by the end of the 20th century, few outside the tribe had seen the Taushiro or heard their language.
In the end, however, the tribe slowly died off. Whether that be from illness or wild animals such as pumas and snakes, the Taushiro didn't fare well. Eventually, Amadeo and his brother, Juan, were the only remaining members of their tribe. Then, Juan died from malaria.
Don't miss...
The 88 countries in the world where English is one of the languages [REPORT]
The UK city that speaks the most languages in the entire world [LATEST]
World's most 'linguistically diverse' country where 820 languages are spoken [INSIGHT]
The New York Times spoke to Juan in 2017 and found a man who was destitute and lonely.
Tomás Villalobos, a Christian missionary who was with him when Juan died, noted how "quiet" Amadeo was when his brother passed away. "I asked him, ‘How do you feel?’ And he said to me: ‘It’s over now for us.'"
Amadeo could speak in Spanish but only in broken sentences. He had lost the ability to fluently express himself to the world.
Taushiro is a unique language both in the way it is formed and the place it is derived from.
Its word order is verb-subject-order, and though it has been linked to the Zaparoan languages, it shares greater similarities with Kandoshi and especially with Omurano.
It has a simple numbering system which only goes up to ten, and speakers would indicate the numbers they were communicating by holding up their finger and saying the corresponding word.
For numbers higher than ten they would say "ashintu" and point to their toes.
Amadeo told the publication: "At any moment I might disappear, my life will end, we don’t know how soon,”
"The Taushiro don’t think about death. We just move on."
He said he knew there was no future for Taushiro, something that at times left him exasperated and wondering whether the extinction of his tribe really mattered. "Sometimes I don’t care anymore," he said.