Editor's Picks
(1-4 of 8)
Did You Know
Researchers Discover Totally Unique Language in the Himalayas
Linguists working in a remote area of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh discovered a language spoken by 800 people that is totally unlike any language that’s ever been cataloged. It’s called Koro.“Their language is quite distinct on every level—the sound, the words, the sentence structure,” said Gregory Anderson, director of the nonprofit Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, who directs the project’s research. Details of the language will be documented in an upcoming issue of the journal Indian Linguistics.
Languages like Koro “construe reality in very different ways,” Dr. Anderson said. “They uniquely code knowledge of the natural world in ways that cannot be translated into a major language.”
Moreover, it was masked by the unusual language diversity of the area, where so many languages are spoken that they seem to intermingle effortlessly in streams of thought. Indeed, the local Koro speakers themselves didn’t consider theirs a separate language, even though it is as distinct from those spoken by other villagers as English is from Russian, the researchers said.
This language has no written form, so researchers are working quickly to learn its grammar and vocabulary in order to preserve it against extinction.
