"Every language is a cultural asset of humanity," is how Tasaku Tsunoda expressed his motivation for costarting a project in 2002 to teach the extinct Warrongo language to the Aboriginal people of the Warrongo tribe of northeastern Australia.
Although it is believed that there were up to 600 Aboriginal languages in use in Australia when the British became the first European settlers there in the late 1700s, most have largely disappeared along with the identities of the tribes that spoke them. As a result, English became the continent's dominant language and there are only around 20 Aboriginal languages in daily use today, according to Barry J. Blake, a leading authority who is professor emeritus at multicampus La Trobe University in the state of Victoria.
Bizarrely enough, Tsunoda, a 63-year-old Japanese national, is now the world's only speaker of Warrongo — though he is the first to admit he is not fluent.