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New language discovered in India

By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY

In the midst of a period of rapid language extinction, with one language estimated to die every two weeks, linguists have found a small ray of hope. They have discovered a language previously unknown to science in the far northeastern corner of India.

A team of linguists working with National Geographic's Enduring Voices project uncovered this hidden language, known as Koro, in the state of Arunachal Pradesh. A member of the Tibeto-Burman language family, it has only 800 to 1,200 speakers and is unwritten.

The team was led by Gregory Anderson, who directs the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College. Both are National Geographic fellows.

The area where the language was found is known as a language hotspot because of the large number of languages spoken in the region. However Koro is very distinct from other languages spoken nearby and the researchers hypothesize it may have originated from a group of people enslaved and brought to the area, though more research is needed.

While Koro belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family, which contains more than 400 languages, the researchers say that Koro is so different that they have not been able to identify any in the language family that are closely related to it.

Koro was discovered when the research team went to Arunachal Pradesh in 2008 to find out more about two poorly documented languages, Aka and Miji. To their surprise, they also began to hear a third, unknown language, Koro, which was not listed in any of the scientific literature or in Indian language surveys or censuses.

As soon as they began asking people to name basic linguistic building blocks such as body parts and numbers, "We new it instantly," says Anderson. "One language had a lot of consonant clusters at the beginning, Koro ha lots of vowels. We said, this language is a lot different, we knew it instantly."

Koro brings the number of known languages worldwide up to 6,909, says Harrison. He documents the discovery in a new book, The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages (National Geographic. $27.) A scientific paper on Koro will be published in December in the journal Indian Linguistics.

Unfortunately, like many languages today, Koro is endangered. Harrison and Anderson believe only 800 people in a few villages speak it, and even more troubling, few children are learning it as other nearby languages have higher prestige or are required in school. It could survive only a few more decades before disappearing entirely, they say.

The Enduring Voices project has set up a new YouTube channel with video of various endangered languages here.

Languages are important for many reasons, says Andrew Garrett, a professor of linguistics at the University of California Berkeley.

Not only do they contain the essence of a culture, they also help us understand how the human mind works. "There's so much that we don't know yet about language and so much of what we know is based on a set of small language, really the set of big languages out of Europe. Everything we can learn from the smaller languages around the world enriches what we know about the possibilities of human language."

Every time a language is lost, a complex and ancient constellation of stories, poems, myths and legends also dies, especially in smaller languages that are usual very badly documented, says Garrett.

"It's as if we suddenly lost Greek and all the literature associated with it."

By Elizabeth Weise

Physics: Nobel Prize discovery was fished from the trash
NASA concludes universe-mapping mission