Manuel Segovia is one of the last surviving speakers of Ayapaneco. Ayapaneco is an indigenous language that has been spoken for centuries in the land now known as Mexico, a land that has seen the conquest of the Spanish, wars, revolutions, floods and famines. Ayapaneco has managed to survive all this, but now, like many other indigenous languages, Ayapaneco is now at serious risk of extinction.

Manuel Segovia still speaks Ayapaneco to his wife and son. They can understand him, but they only speak a few words of it themselves. In fact, there is just one other living person who can speak Ayapaneco fluently: Isidro Velazquez. However, Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, refuse to speak to each other despite living a mere 500 metres apart, or perhaps it's because of this.

The two last living speakers of Ayapaneco live in the village of Ayapa in the southeastern Mexican state of Tabasco, in the Gulf of Mexico. Whether or not it is familiarity or proximity that breeds contempt, or some long-held argument or grudge, according to the opinion of the people of the village, Segovia and Velazquez have never enjoyed each other's company.

Linguistic anthropologist Daniel Suslak of Indiana University agrees that the two have little in common. Suslak is involved in a project which aims to produce a dictionary of Ayapaneco. The dictionary forms an important part of a race against time to save and revitalise the language before it's too late. If these efforts fail, Ayapaneco could well die out with the passing of Segovia and Velazquez.