How a Language Dies
Chronicling the disappearance of a remote Papua New Guinean tongue—and everything else that goes with it
The tiny village of Gapun in Papua New Guinea is home to an equally tiny language called Tayap. No more than a few hundred people have lived in Gapun, so no more than a few hundred people have ever spoken this isolate language, unrelated to any other on the planet. Our guest this episode, the anthropologist Don Kulick, has been visiting the village since 1985, at one point living there for 15 months to document the Gapun way of life, eat a lot of sago palm pudding, and study Tayap—which, even when he arrived more than 30 years ago, was dying. Today, only about 40 people speak it, and Kulick predicts that the language will be “stone cold dead” in less than 50 years. How did that happen? Perhaps more importantly, what cultural and economic losses paved the way? The answer might lie in the backward way we’ve been framing language death.
Go beyond the episode:
- Don Kulick’s A Death in the Rainforest
- Kulick returned to Gapun earlier this year—proudly bearing a copy of his new dictionary—only to learn that all of the village’s young men had possibly rendered themselves impotent
- Explore these dazzling maps of the 851 individual languages of Papua New Guinea (including Tayap, listed as number 187)
- Watch the arduous process of harvesting sago palm, a staple food in the country
- National Geographic reports on various initiatives to save the world’s disappearing languages, including the Rosetta Project and Wikitongues
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