What would happen if English suddenly became a defunct language and only two people on earth could still speak it? What if you had only one other person in the world with whom you could communicate in your native language? It would feel pretty lonely and probably like a big part of your heritage and culture was dying.
Luckily, I will never experience this in my lifetime. But in a small village in Mexico, that’s exactly what has happened to an ancient language called Ayapaneco. Only two elderly men can still speak the language, yet they haven’t communicated with each other in years after an argument left them estranged.
As part of the Vodafone First project, the inhabitants of this small Mexican village came together to build a new school in which to teach the children of today the language of Ayapaneco and to reunite the two men who can speak it.
This video shows the story and how it unfolds. It honestly gave me chills. I’m not sure if that’s because I still desperately miss Mexico, or because it seems so scary that a language could be on the brink of extinction like this.
The Vodafone First project has been started as a means to encourage people to try new things for the first time in their lives. They have created a personalised website for the Ayapaneco language, where you can go and “adopt” a word from the language which you learn how to pronounce, thus spreading the knowledge of it around the world and outside the confines of the village in Mexico.
Here is my word: alaaxa. It means “orange”.
By creating the website and the campaign, Vodafone hopes to show how mobile technology and social media can do the unthinkable and bring together people from all walks of life in order to realise their dreams.
I hope you’ll go and adopt your own Ayapaneco word and help spread the language across the world.
This post has been sponsored by Vodafone, but all opinions are my own.
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