The Yaaku people long ago assimilated with the majority Maasai, and few still speak Yaakunte, but there is a new determination to save their culture – and their forest – before it disappears

Words and photographs by Gioia Shah in Kori Kori

In a community centre made of glass bottles, Juliana Loshiro stands before her pupils, a group of village elders. Sitting in a semi-circle, they listen and repeat simple words and greetings in Yaakunte (also called Yaaku), the language of their tribe.

Though it might seem strange that even older people cannot speak the language, one of the pupils stands up and explains why he is in the class: his grandparents died before they could teach him Yaakunte, he says, and his mother, a Maasai, did not know the language. “So we got lost.”

Loshiro, 28, is one of the few Yaaku people of northern Kenya who speak Yaakunte fluently – and, along with one of her sisters, the only young Yaaku. In the Unesco World Atlas of Languages, the United Nations lists the language as “severely endangered”, with only nine speakers. In 2010, Unesco declared Yaakunte to be extinct. But Loshiro is determined to give the language – and her culture – a future.

At the community centre in Kuri Kuri, a village in Kenya’s Laikipia county, Loshiro teaches about 300 students, both elders and children, twice a week. But the lessons are about more than just saving a language, they are about preserving the Yaakunte culture too.