The ancient language, whose history goes back several millennia, may disappear in the coming years with the death of the last speaker.
The only person who speaks the native Yamana language of the indigenous community of the Yagan Indian people (South America) is 91-year-old Christina Calderon, according to The Daily Mail.
This people lived for 10,000 years in the remote areas that are now part of Argentina and Chile.
But now Christina remains the only purebred descendant of the Yagans after the death of Ursula's sister and daughter-in-law Emelinda Akunya in 2005.
“There used to be a lot of yagans, my dad and mom were yagans, so when they were born, they always spoke the language of yagans, and that's how I grew up,” recalls Ms. Calderon.
She adds that she only started learning Spanish at the age of nine. But her children no longer know the root dialect.
Now the planet is home to several dozen people, in whose veins the blood of the Yagan people flows, but they stopped learning the indigenous language several generations ago.
Christina Calderon notes that she herself is afraid to forget him - some words slip from memory, and it takes some effort to restore them.
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Previously, scientists have established that 6,000 - 10,000 years ago yagans were nomads and sailors who conquered the waters of the Americas on a canoe made of beech bark or hollowed out logs.
Men hunted seals and whales, while women dived into the cold ocean for shellfish.
It is believed that it was thanks to the Yagans that Tierra del Fuego got its name - the traveler Fernand Magellan noticed the bonfires that the representatives of the tribe burned on the shore, and decided to immortalize them on geographical maps.
But in the XIX-XX centuries, the life of this people changed. They had to leave their ancestral lands and move to the reservation allocated for them - Villa Ukika. The phased relocation was completed in 1973.
The National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples estimated that there were 90-100 Yagan descendants in 2000, but only Christina Calderon was purebred.
Chile's National Council for Culture and Arts recognized it as a “living human treasure” under the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage.