Aka-Bo, often called simply Bo, was one of the Great Andamanese languages of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, part of India. The Great Andamanese peoples are among the oldest continuously resident human populations on earth, thought to have lived on the islands for tens of thousands of years, and their languages are commonly regarded as a deeply ancient and isolated lineage with no established relatives elsewhere.
The catastrophe that overtook Bo and its sister languages was colonial. In 1858 the British established a penal colony in the Andamans. Within decades the Indigenous Great Andamanese population was devastated by introduced diseases — measles, syphilis, influenza — alongside violence and displacement, collapsing from several thousand people to a few dozen. Whole languages disappeared as the communities that spoke them were destroyed.
By the late twentieth century Bo survived in a single person, Boa Sr. For years she had no one with whom she could hold a conversation in her own language; other members of the small surviving Great Andamanese community could not fully understand the songs and narratives she carried. She lived through the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, reportedly surviving by following the warnings of her elders, and continued to share her language and songs with the linguist who recorded her.
Boa Sr died on 26 January 2010. With her the Bo language fell silent, and a thread reaching back across an immense span of human history was cut. Her recordings, made in collaboration with the linguist Anvita Abbi, remain as testimony to a tongue that colonization had reduced, over a century and a half, from a living community language to one elderly woman’s solitary inheritance.
Yaghan — also called Yámana — was the language of the Yaghan people of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, around the Beagle Channel at the far southern tip of South America. For thousands of years these were the southernmost human beings on Earth, a canoe-going people of the cold channels and islands, and theirs was the southernmost language ever spoken. It is a language isolate, with no demonstrated relationship to any other language on the planet.
The Yaghan had adapted to one of the harshest inhabited environments anywhere, moving by bark canoe through the freezing waterways and keeping fires burning even at sea — the smoke of which gave Tierra del Fuego, the ‘Land of Fire,’ its name. Their population in the mid-nineteenth century is usually estimated at a few thousand. Their language was rich and precise, famous in later popular accounts for single words that pack whole human situations into a breath.
Colonisation destroyed them with terrible speed. European, Chilean and Argentine expansion, missions, and above all introduced epidemics — measles, and other diseases against which the Yaghan had no immunity — collapsed the population from a few thousand to near nothing within a few decades. The language contracted with the people, surviving in fewer and fewer mouths into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The last full-blood Yaghan and last fluent speaker, Cristina Calderon — ‘Abuela Cristina’ — died in Chile on 16 February 2022, aged 93. With her, fluent Yaghan ended, and the status is extinct. But she spent her last decades working to record the language and pass on what she could, and her granddaughter and others continue documentation and teaching, so that the southernmost language is not entirely lost to memory.
Wôpanâak — also called Wampanoag or, in older scholarship, Massachusett — is an Eastern Algonquian language of the Southern New England Algonquian group, spoken across southeastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. It was the language of the people who watched the Mayflower arrive in 1620, of the Pokanoket sachem Ousamequin (Massasoit), and of Tisquantum (Squanto), the Patuxet man who served as interpreter between the Wampanoag and the Plymouth colonists. At contact the language was spoken by tens of thousands of people across dozens of communities.
What sets Wôpanâak apart from most silenced languages is the depth of its written record. In 1663 the Puritan missionary John Eliot, working with Native translators including the Nipmuc convert Job Nesutan and the printer’s assistant James Printer (Wowaus), published the Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God — the first complete Bible printed anywhere in the Americas, set entirely in the Massachusett language. Around it accumulated a remarkable archive: catechisms, primers, and thousands of pages of deeds, wills, petitions, and letters written by Wampanoag people themselves in their own language and Roman-alphabet orthography.
The loss of fluent speech was gradual, the product of two centuries of dispossession, epidemic disease, the devastation of King Philip’s War (1675-76), confinement to praying towns, and relentless pressure to assimilate into an English-speaking colony. By the middle of the 19th century there were effectively no fluent speakers left; the language survived longest on Martha’s Vineyard, where Tamsen Weekes, who died in 1890, is often named among the last to have spoken it.
For nearly a century and a half the language was dormant, alive only on paper. Then in 1993 Jessie Little Doe Baird, a Mashpee Wampanoag citizen, launched the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project. Drawing on the very documents the colonial project had produced, and trained in linguistics at MIT, she reconstructed the language and in 2004 raised her daughter Mae as its first native speaker in seven generations. Wôpanâak is today a language with children growing up in it again.