Friends Reunite, Save Dying Language

Like most of us, you've probably had one or two friendships over the years that ended with a falling out. Perhaps you can't even remember or explain what you fell out over. But it's unlikely you've ever experienced a severed bond that threatened to make a 1,000-year-old language extinct.

That's what happened decades ago, back when Manuel Segovia, now 78, and Isidro Velazquez, now 72, stopped talking. The elderly residents of Ayapa in the state of Tabasco, Mexico — yes, where the peppers come from — had a long-standing disagreement as hot-tempered as the sauce.

Nobody else in Ayapa could quite understand what the dispute was about, except that it had something to do with the finer points of Ayapaneco, also known as Tabasco Zoque, a pre-Columbian Mexican language. It all but died out thanks to centuries of compulsory Spanish education, and Segovia and Velazquez are its last-known speakers. But to the despair of linguistics professors, nobody could convince the two former friends to have so much as a single conversation in the ancient tongue.

That's why it was a significant coup for Vodafone, the European cellphone operator, when it managed to get Segovia and Velazquez talking again as part of a marketing campaign called Vodafone Firsts. A one-room schoolhouse named after the old friends was built where they now teach children the ancient tongue, and Stanford linguistics professor James Fox was flown to Tabasco to compile a dictionary.

Vodafone also put together a website, Ayapeneco.com, where visitors can "adopt" words from the language, and learn translations for social-media terms such as "like" and "share." Then there's the video, above, for which you might want to have a hankie ready.

Indeed, you might even be inspired to reconcile an old friendship of your own. You and your estranged pal may not be the keys to saving a language, but you do share a set of experiences that no one else on the planet knows about. And if there's anything this little Tabasco tale tells us, it's that you're never too old to bury the hatchet.