Imagine how different politics would be if debates were conducted in Tariana, an Amazonian language in which it is a grammatical error to report something without saying how you found it out – as Alexandra Aikhenvald tells us its speakers tell her. Tariana is in danger of dying. With each such disappearance we risk losing insights into different ways of thinking. Aikhenvald told Adrian Barnett about the race to record languages.
When Alexandra Aikhenvald was 11 she told her parents – using the Estonian she had learned on holiday – that she didn’t want to go to her Moscow school. Then…
