In an article from the January 7 issue of the New York times, Kimiko Tamura tells the story of a nearly extinct language. Linguists estimate that the are only 700 remaining speakers. Of those, 100 now live in New York City – half of those in the same building.

The article [HERE] tells a fascinating story of families from a remote region in Nepal. They are some of the last speakers of Seke, a rare, unwritten language from Nepal that linguists worry could disappear within a generation, if not sooner.

Seke is spoken in just five villages cloistered by craggy cliffs and caves in a part of Nepal called Mustang, a region close to the border with Tibet. And fifty of the remaining speakers live in a nondescript, seven-story brick building in Flatbush. 

Those of us who have an interest in missions do our best to stay attuned to the needs. We hear that there are still 6,825 Unreached People Groups in the world today. Many of these are categorized as Unengaged Unreached People Groups (UUPGs) meaning there is no active church planting ministry among them. Many of these live in remote and hard to access locations around the world. But some of them may be just around the corner from where you live.

I am not saying that tomorrow when you find your way to an immigrant neighborhood that you will meet someone from a remote village near Tibet who speaks an almost extinct language. With the world the way it is, I am not saying that you won’t either. But if you don’t go into that neighborhood, you’ll never know what you may be missing.

The Unreached do not all live in isolated villages far, far away. Some of them may live right down the street.