Thursday, October 7, 2010

Finding (and Losing) a Whole New Language

A National Geographic expedition to into northeastern India has made a pretty amazing discovery; linguists have unearthed a whole new and unique language.  Sadly, it appears this newly-discovered tongue (called 'koro') is already on it's way out:

Only around 800 people are believed to speak the Tibeto-Burman language, and few of them are under the age of 20, according to the researchers who discovered Koro during an expedition as part of National Geographic's "Enduring Voices" project.The language, they said, has never been written down.
"We found something that was making its exit, was on the way out," said National Geographic fellow Gregory Anderson, one of the leaders of the expedition that discovered Koro.
"If we had waited 10 years to make the trip, we might not have come across close to the number of speakers we found," he said.



The Enduring Voices is fighting a losing battle, attempting to record and preserve as many of the 6910 known human languages as possible before they're lost to the ages.  According to the article, around half of them are already endangered.  Talk about a bittersweet job description.


4 comments:

  1. Elton - The language expertOctober 7, 2010 at 2:33 AM

    Aahukuukuku jajama eha-ugluja aha. Chianese suuckkss.

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  2. Sometimes you eat the Aahukuukuku, sometimes the Aahukuukuku eats you.

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  3. LOL!! Either way, this is amazing. Can you imagine? Losing your language? I mean, I know languages evolve and we don't speak the King's Englihs now, but this would be a really great job, Judd. I think anthropology could teach us all so much more.

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  4. It would be a pretty cool job...

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