"This is probably one language that cannot be brought back, but at least we made a record of it," Anderson said, noting that the Aborigine who spoke it strained to recall words he had heard from his father, now dead.
Many of the 113 languages in the region from the Andes Mountains into the Amazon basin are poorly known and are giving way to Spanish or Portuguese, or in a few cases, a more dominant indigenous language. In this area, for example, a group known as the Kallawaya use Spanish or Quechua in daily life, but also have a secret tongue mainly for preserving knowledge of medicinal plants, some previously unknown to science.
"How and why this language has survived for more than 400 years, while being spoken by very few, is a mystery," Harrison said in a news release.
The dominance of English threatens the survival of the 54 indigenous languages in the Northwest Pacific plateau, a region including British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. Only one person remains who knows Siletz Dee-ni, the last of many languages once spoken on a reservation in Oregon.