Language is something many of us take for granted. We use it every day, and we can almost always find people who share the same languages as us. But that’s not true of everyone.

In some parts of the world, there are only a few dozen people who still speak a language — or even only one person.

​“There’s a very unusual situation in aboriginal Australia,” says poet Bob Holman, who hosts the new PBS documentary, Language Matters. “Charlie Mangulda is the last speaker of Amurdak … When he forgets a word, there’s nobody he can ask what that word is; it’s gone. When that language is gone, it’s gone forever.”

And Amurdak is not alone. Of the 6,000 languages humans speak, half of them will be extinct in the next 50 years. Language Matters, which premiered on January 25, looks at some of these dying languages and the things that may die along with them.

Mangulda has helped keep alive Amurdak, which Holman says is tens of thousands of years old, through poetry.

“They keep their language alive through various forms,” Holman says. “While we were busy making inventions, they were busy working on their languages. One of them is a spirit language that we don’t know how to translate. All we know is that he’s talking to his ancestors in a very special way. It’s part of the way the language has survived.” More.

See: PRI

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