Across the 195 countries in the world there are more than 7,130 spoken languages.
Some, like Mandarin, English and Spanish, have been adopted by millions of people. Others, on the other hand, are shared by a very small pool of speakers.
Moreover, there are many languages that are on the brink of extinction as are spoken only by a few, ageing, people.
Among them is Njerep, a language with so few speakers that is considered hugely at risk of disappearance by the UNESCO language endangerment index.
Njerep is one of the 12 existing Mambiloid languages spoken by the Mambila people, who are located between eastern Nigeria and northwest Cameroon.
Little is known of this language spoken in the Adamawa Region, northern Cameroon, despite information about words and grammar being collected from its last remaining speakers.
More precisely, the language is believed to have been used most recently in the Ba Mambila Village of Somié.
Njerep people in this area are believed to have moved to the 2,500-strong village from nearby mountains.
As reported by the Endangered Languages Project (ELP), it is believed there are only four people left in the world who speak Njerep.
And the number is dwindling, as the language is primarily used by the elderly, with the youngest speaker believed to be aged over 60.
Even those who can speak Njerep no longer use it on an everyday basis. Rather, the language is still spoken by its users “for joking or if they don’t want to be understood by others”, the ELP reported.
In recent decades, Njerep has been replaced for daily conversations by another Mambila language called Mvop.
Scholars started making intense efforts to record and characterise Njerep in 2000. But by that year, the language was already in its terminal decline, with only six speakers remaining – and only one conversant in Njerep.
While a complete record is unlikely to ever be created due to the lack of fluent speakers, experts have been able to create a guide to Njerep vocabulary and grammar.
