And Then There Were None

Calderon sat by the window waiting for her son to return. It was dark, and the hunting party had not yet returned. The others in the village were preparing for the celebrations. At 85, as a village elder, she just had to be present to grace the occasion.

There was a knock, and a little girl peeped into the hut. She said something that Calderon did not understand. The new generation had stopped using their language, Tanglang, completely. Even those who were middle-aged had long stopped speaking the language for its complexity. They used Portuguese which had by now taken over all the tribes.

Calderon was the last living person to be speaking the language of the ancients. After her husband's death, she spoke it only with herself, for even her son had not shown interest.

Fifty years after Calderon's death, a group of philologists arrived in the village, to study and record Tanglang. Some of the villagers recalled that there indeed was such a language that their forefathers spoke. They took the visitors to the hut of Calderon's son, now an old man himself.

After a brief conversation, the philologists stepped out of the hut and wrote in their report, a single word: Extinct.