New language identified in remote Arunachal Pradesh

A team of three linguists, two from National Geographic and one from Ranchi University today claimed to have discovered a hitherto unknown language in remote Arunachal Pradesh, which is on the verge of extinction.

The language, known as Koro, belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family, a group of some 400 languages that includes Tibetan and Burmese, the linguists said, during a teleconference here.

Although some 150 Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken in India alone, the National Geographic expedition team has been unable to identify any language closely related to Koro, so distinct is it from the others in the family.

The expedition was part of National Geographic's Enduring Voices project, led by National Geographic Fellows Gregory Anderson and K David Harrison; who were assisted by Indian linguist Ganesh Murmu of the Ranchi University.

Before the expedition, the team had targeted the remote Arunachal Pradesh state in northeastern India as one of its "Language Hotspots" — a place on the world map that hosts a rich diversity of languages, many unwritten, that are little studied or documented.

"On a scientist's tally sheet, Koro adds just one entry to the list of 6,909 languages worldwide. But Koro's contribution is much greater than that tiny fraction would suggest," Harrison writes in The Last Speakers, newly published by National Geographic Books.

"Koro brings an entirely different perspective, history, mythology, technology and grammar to what was known before," Harrison said.

Noting that Koro is a highly endangered language, the team of Anderson and Harrison reported that only about 800 people are believed to speak it — few under age 20 — and the language has not been written down.

"We were finding something that was making its exit, was on its way out. And if we had waited 10 years to make the trip, we might not have come across close to the number of speakers we found," Anderson said

The Enduring Voices team began its search in Arunachal Pradesh in 2008 for two poorly known languages — Aka and Miji — known to be spoken in one small district.

The team, which included Murmu, climbed steep hillsides to reach speakers' villages, going door-to-door among the bamboo houses that sit on stilts; villagers eke out livings raising pigs and cultivating rice and barley.

As they listened to and recorded the vocabularies of these poorly known tongues, Harrison, Anderson and Murmu began to detect a surprise third language, one locally known as Koro.