It's said there are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world today, but about 2,000 of them have fewer than 1,000 speakers. Miguel León-Portilla, a Mexican anthropologist and historian, was particularly instrumental in preserving the Nahuatl language, an Uto-Aztecan language spoken by about 1.5 million people in Mexico, making it one of the most widely-spoken indigenous languages of the Americas.
For today's Song of the Day, Guadalajara, Jalisco-based duo Ampersan have taken León-Portilla's poem "Cuando Muere Una Lengua" (translated: When a Language Dies) and set it against a foreboding electronic beat while Rubén Albarrán of Café Tacvba recites the lines. Formed in 2007, co-founders Kevin Garcia and Zindu Cano fuse traditional and ceremonial music with contemporary styles, crafting a sound that's uniquely theirs.
