September 7, 2025
The Last Speaker of the World’s Rarest Language
How 90-Year-Old Katrina Esau Is Fighting to Keep N|uu, a 20,000-Year-Old San Language, Alive Against All Odds There are stories that remind us how fragile culture can be, how easily something can slip away if it is not passed on. The story of N|uu, one of the oldest and rarest languages on Earth, is one of those. Once spoken widely among the San people of South Africa for more than 20,000 years, it has been reduced to a whisper on the edge of extinction. And today, that whisper rests on the shoulders of one woman, 90-year-old Katrina Esau. Katrina is
