IN THE SEARCH FOR 'LAST SPEAKERS,' A GREAT DISCOVERY
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Wednesday, October 6, 2010
In The Search For 'Last Speakers,' A Great Discovery
Three speakers of the newly identified language Koro gather at a
house in Kichang village in Arunachal Pradesh, India. K. David
Harrison discovered the language in 2008, which has a few hundred
speakers. "It has basically been completely unnoticed by outsiders
and by scientists," he says. October 5, 2010
By NPR STAFF
In 2008, K. David Harrison traveled to Arunachal Pradesh, India, a
northeast region so remote even Indians need permits to travel there
-- and he made an incredible discovery.
The Swarthmore College linguist and his colleague Greg Anderson were
searching for speakers of two little-known languages -- Aka and Miji.
And as they went door to door, they were surprised to find speakers
of a third, hidden language: Koro.
"It hadn't previously been noticed in the Indian census or in any
study of the languages of India," Harrison tells NPR's Mary Louise
Kelly. "It wasn't listed in any listing of the world's languages. It
had basically been completely unnoticed by outsiders and by
scientists." A Newly Discovered Language
While going to record little-known languages in Arunachal Pradesh,
India, linguist K. David Harrison discovered a language that hadn't
previously been documented. A few hundred people speak Koro near Bana
village. Here are some sound bites of the "hidden language" that
Harrison calls "an enigma" because it has managed to survive.
Harrison says it seems to be a tone language with short, melodic
syllables.
Credit: NPR
A few hundred people speak Koro, Harrison says, and those who speak
it didn't notice how distinct it was.
"They tended to think of it as merely a dialect of another local
language," Harrison says. "But when we sat down to make recordings,
we realized that they sounded as different from each other as English
and Japanese."
So Harrison took the first known set of recordings of the language.
He documents these and other dying languages -- and his attempts to
revitalize them -- in his new book,*The Last Speakers*.
There are more than 7,000 languages in the world, and nearly half of
them are in danger -- likely to die out within our lifetime. In fact,
one disappears about every two weeks. When languages die, they take
with them a vast amount of human knowledge, Harrison says, from how
to make medicines out of plants, how to survive in harsh
environments, and creation myths and personal histories. The
languages aren't written down -- they're transmitted orally.
"So it's very fragile, and [the knowledge base] is being forgotten as
these languages fade away," he says.
In researching the book, Harrison says he realized how important it
was to help some of the communities revitalize their languages.
[image: Koro speaker Sange Degio of the Kichang village in Arunachal
Pradesh, India.] Courtesy of Chris Rainier
Sange Degio of the Kichang village in Arunachal Pradesh, India, is
one of a few hundred speakers of Koro.
"People really do value their languages," he says. "And ... the
decision to give up one language or to abandon a language is not
usually a free decision. It's often coerced by politics, by market
forces, by the educational system in a country, by a larger, more
dominant group telling them that their language is backwards and
obsolete and worthless."
The key players in language revitalization are the 5- and 6-year-olds
in the communities, Harrison says.
"They're like little barometers of social prestige, and they
understand that if two languages are spoken in their environment, and
one of them is more highly valued, they will gravitate toward that
more highly valued language," he says. "So the key to saving a
language is to create prestige of the language in the eyes of the
very youngest speakers. The way you do that is to put it in a high-
tech medium -- we create, for example, talking dictionaries. People
can do creative things like producing hip-hop or poetry in the
language."
Koro is closely intermixed by marriage and household with Aka, which
has 1,200 speakers. Both are positively widespread compared with
Chulym -- a Siberian language that only eight people still speak.
Chulym is not a candidate for revitalization because so few people
speak it that "it's not likely new speakers will emerge."
Sometimes a hidden language, like Koro, survives on its own. But
Harrison doesn't know its secret to survival.
[image: thumbnail]
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100874724
arts & life
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1008
Saving Dying Languages In 'The Linguists'
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100874724
"Koro is really an enigma," he says. "There's no obvious reason why a
language spoken by just a few hundred people and completely
culturally assimilated to a larger, more dominant group should
persist at all."
The rate of language extinction, however, is greatly outpacing the
rate of new languages, Harrison says. "I would say this is going to
be one of the most consequential social trends of the next couple of
decades -- is people keeping and preserving and revitalizing some of
the world's smallest languages."
http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=130242203&m=130355546
End of forwarded message from S. Kalyanaraman
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
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and/or www.mantra.com/jai
Indeed a fascinating discovery.
It seems that missionaries discovered them before the linguists. See
or
End of forwarded message from Y. M.
hari....@indero.com
> syllables.
I heard it on a radio newscast and I agree with the above.
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o Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for the educational
Fánaí Gaelach na nGleannta
Jai Maharaj) wrote:
> Forwarded message from Y. M.
>
> Indeed a fascinating discovery.
>
> It seems that missionaries discovered them before the linguists.
Praise Lord! Hallelujah! So there has been a light in the darkness of
awful paganism!