AYAPA, Mexico, April 14 (UPI) -- Experts working to preserve a dying language in Mexico said the last two fluent speakers of the tongue refuse to speak to one another.

Daniel Suslak, an Indiana University linguistic anthropologist on the team working to produce a dictionary of Ayapaneco, said the last two fluent speakers of the language, Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, live close to one another in the village of Ayapa but refuse to associate with each other, The Guardian reported Thursday.


Suslak said he and the team do not know the story behind the silence between the men.

"They don't have a lot in common," Suslak said. He described Segovia as "a little prickly" while he said Velazquez is "more stoic" and often prefers not to leave his home.

The team is working to produce a dictionary of Ayapaneco to prevent the language from becoming completely lost when the two men die.

"When I was a boy everybody spoke it," Segovia told The Guardian. "It's disappeared little by little, and now I suppose it might die with me."

He told the newspaper there is no active animosity between him and Velazquez.