Conclusion: How Do You Say “Endling” In isiZulu?

To date, the word endling only appears in English.

“When I come across ‘endling’ in Spanish, Catalan, or Aragonese literature, it’s the English word simply situated in a non-English language,” geographer Adam Searle told me. “When referencing Celia or Laña, we usually see ‘última’ used instead of ‘endling.’” (Última is “last,” “final,” or—if you prefer a cognate—“ultimate.”) Searle paused. “But ‘última’ doesn’t quite carry the same connotation as ‘endling.’”1

Other English words that are extinction-adjacent to endling (like Anthropocene) have made their way into non-English languages. “In Swedish, we use Antropocen to talk about the Anthropocene era,” environmental historian Dolly Jørgensen offered. “It’s borrowed directly from English. But there isn’t a word for ‘endling’ in Swedish or Norwegian that I know of.”2

If the word endling is only an English one—and, remember, it’s a recent word at that—it might help unpack why endling stories seem to be so heavily influenced by an English- and a Western-based literary canon. (Although it’s worth keeping in mind that many folktales and fairy tales carry with them an arguably “universal element” to their narratives3), In other words, why it’s so easy for endling stories to be framed through epic poems like Beowulf.

But new words evolve all the time—on average, for example, English adds something like a thousand new words a year to its colloquial lexicon—and in a raft of different contexts.4 The constant evolution of language and the adaptability of its structural narratives is part of how such stories have endured for millennia.

What if endling made a linguistic leap outside of English? What would that leap mean for the word, how we think about endlings, and the sorts of stories we tell about them?

There are three ways that endling could enter non-English storytelling. (This is nothing new; words and stories cross languages and cultures all the time.) If—when, rather—the word radiates from its English root, there is a potential for a multitude of storytelling and new narratives. The word gives space for character and narrative development.

First, endling could function as a “loanword” or “foreign word” the way words like café or bazaar or pasta are integrated into languages that aren’t their original French, Persian, or Italian. This approach would mean that endling is simply adopted from English and slotted into a non-English language. (“Celia fue la última bucardo; ella es una endling.” “Celia was the last bucardo; she is an endling.” Incidentally, in this instance, Google Translate offers “final” for “endling.”) Second, endling could be transformed, keeping its English base but adapting into non-English languages in flexible ways. In languages like isiZulu, for example, the prefix “i-” has become a way to deal with hard-to-translate terms; endling could be translated as i-endling. This allows languages a flexibility to incorporate new words and to then remake them into their own. (This sort of word borrowing is not a favored translation practice in isiZulu, however.) Keeping the word situated in English, for better or worse, centers the concept and endling stories in a traditionally Western canon of storytelling.

The third option is the most intriguing one. What if new words for endlings were created? The English word was invented out of need. It’s hard to imagine that, over a quarter of a century and hundreds and hundreds of species extinctions later, this need is any less or that the need is strictly confined to English. Could other “endling” words transform how people think about and talk about species that are going extinct in their own lifetimes?

In short, yes. Yes, it could. And recent work with isiZulu and decolonizing science writing shows what that might look like.

“There’s no word for dinosaur in isiZulu.” Nor are there words for Jurassic, fossilization, or evolution, South African science journalist and isiZulu-speaker Sibusiso Biyela explained to me as we talked about species, fossils, and endlings, reiterating what he had written in 2019 on the topic for The Open Notebook, a nonprofit science journalism organization.5 Biyela is part of a large research project team called Decolonise Science that plans to translate 180 scientific papers published in English into six African languages—isiZulu and Northern Sotho from southern Africa; Hausa and Yoruba from West Africa; and Luganda and Amharic from East Africa.6

In 2019, Biyela published a poignant essay in The Open Notebook about translating an English story of a new dinosaur species discovery in South Africa into isiZulu for isiZulu readers. In the piece, he described how he augmented words and phrases in isiZulu to explain the object or concept. “I translated fossil as Amathambo amadala atholakala emhlabathini,” he offered by way of example, using an example from his Open Notebook publication, “old bones found in the ground.”7

I was curious how this sort of storytelling via translation would carry over into endlings. “There currently isn’t a word for endling in isiZulu,” Biyela confirmed.8 But this doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be one.

“There are campaigns all the time to save the rhino. But they’ve never been done in isiZulu, which is disappointing,” Biyela noted.9 “I’ve seen officials who have tried all sorts of approaches to try to stop poaching, to connect with the communities in the areas where poaching happens. But I’ve never seen them use local languages to do so.” As the third most biodiverse country in the world, South Africa does have a long history of wildlife management and conservation throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, with various approaches mapping onto different periods of the country’s politics.10 Moreover, South Africa has eleven official languages. Historically, wildlife conservation campaigns have been carried out primarily in English and Afrikaans—languages that carry with them a problematic colonial legacy, to put it mildly. (And, of course, scientific publications are primarily in English.) Even a cursory internet search about specific wildlife campaigns shows the majority of information to appear only in English, without the website itself offering non-English translation options outside of Google Translate.

“In my research, I see language evolving with wildlife,” South African PhD student and isiZulu-speaker Fortunate Mafeta Phaka explained to me. His work focuses on biocultural diversity of herpetofauna in South Africa. A founder of Wildlife in Vernacular, he is also the author of A Bilingual Guide to the Frogs of Zululand. “If you look at the extinction of biodiversity, it coincides with extinction of language diversity. It would make sense that language will evolve with wildlife.”11 Words, ideas, and story structure change, adapt, and evolve between languages. “Maybe if there was some sort of campaign that uses words like endling, it would have more impact,” Biyela suggested. “Endling carries a punch. We don’t have the word, but we need it.”

What would that word be? I asked. Biyela looked thoughtful. He started typing into the Zoom chat window and said, “There. Isilwane sokugcina kuhlobo. This is how I think endling would be in isiZulu.”12

He talked me through his translation, “‘Isigcino’—the root being ‘-gcino’—means ‘final’ or ‘end,’” Biyela explained. “In the context of the word endling being used in a sentence without modification, then ‘isigcino’ can be used in equivalence but if a person were to specify that a certain animal is ‘last of its species’ then I would say that it is ‘isilwane sokugcina kuhlobo,’ where ‘isilwane’ is animal and ‘-uhlobo’ is ‘species.’”13

And just like that, a new word was born. And with it, I’m sure, new storytelling possibilities.

“The word has been out for decades: We were born on a damaged planet careening toward environmental collapse,” anthropologist Vincent Ialenti points out. “Yet our intellects are poorly equipped to grasp the scale of the Earth’s ecological death spiral.”14

Philosophers, historians, activists, and conservations have long grappled with these “what if” questions in terms of extinction, broadly, and endlings, specifically. “In each instance, extinction seems to require us to ask what will this loss mean and for whom?” philosopher Thom Van Dooren writes. “What would be the costs of stemming it, and again, for whom? And so, ultimately, extinction asks us to consider what kind of relationships we want to cultivate in this place at this time.”15

Grief and mourning are common elements that run through how we tell stories of endlings, framed, in no small part, by a pressing need to make sense of the scale of species death that people living in the sixth mass extinction will, and have, witnessed. How we mourn, how we come to grips with watching the last known individual of a species die, requires language and a narrative framing that acknowledges its gravity. The sorts of stories and narratives that we’ve used to talk about endlings—folktales, fairy tales, and the like—are no strangers to being read as narratives of trauma and grief.

There’s a lot of despair in the world right now. I wrote Endlings during a global pandemic, as countries locked down over and over to try and stop the spread of the disease, watching global deaths from Covid-19 counted in the millions. Wildfires burn across the world. Glaciers melt. Social inequality is rampant; immigration policies draconian. As I typed up some of the project’s interview notes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its 2021 report that basically said, “We’re screwed.”

I spent a not insignificant amount of writing time wondering: What if? What if humankind had made better decisions in the centuries ramping up to our point here today? Decisions that didn’t leave us with over one million species currently threatened with extinction?16 That didn’t result in 150 new endlings dying every day? What if—in the unraveling exosystemic relationships, the breakdown of generations of lifeways, the new ways of grieving that extinction prompts—we had simply picked something else?17 What if—for all of the Benjamins, the Lonesome Georges, the Celias, the Turgis, the Qi Qis—whatever action we muster up isn’t enough?

And yet. The thread of hope, I found, came from isilwane sokugcina kuhlobo. It was like watching the inverse of extinction; it was watching language and storytelling speciate.

We are living in an Age of Endlings, but we might also be living at a point were endling storytelling (in English and non-English) could shape the way we think about extinction and the animal stories we curate and share. Perhaps recognizing and improving endling storytelling—maybe, just maybe— could offer something other than despair.

We owe it to these endlings to tell their stories in as many words and narratives as possible.