Language
Their numbers dwindled precipitously to the point where there are fewer than 300 remaining and only a handful who speak their native language. Most speak Quichua, some speak a patois of Kichwa and Záparo. The oldest surviving Zápara is a woman, about 70 years old, Ana Maria Santi. She refuses to drink alcoholic chicha or to eat spider monkey meat, which most Zápara now hunt and eat because they can get no other meat. To Ana Maria, this seems cannibalistic. "When we are down to eating our ancestors, what is left?" She and her family live in the hamlet of on the river, home to some forty people, about a seventh of what remains of their nation.
- In 2001, their population numbered no more than 300 (200 in Ecuador and 100 in Peru), of whom only five, all aged over 70, still speak the Záparo language.
The UNESCO declared the Záparo language as an "Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity" in 2001
Read more about this topic: Zaparo People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“He never doubts his genius; it is only he and his God in all the world. He uses language sometimes as greatly as Shakespeare; and though there is not much straight grain in him, there is plenty of tough, crooked timber.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)