Deep ocean species discovered

As human languages are increasingly dying out, the discovery of a new one is striking. Nigel Williams reports. The UN's atlas of endangered languages lists around 230 that have become extinct during the past 60 years. And it is now widely agreed that around 3,000 languages worldwide are endangered and 200 are critically endangered with fewer than 10 speakers. Even in Europe, Karaim, in western Ukraine, has just six speakers. So the announcement of the discovery of a new language is especially significant. Researchers travelling in Arunchal Pradesh in northeast India, which requires a special permit to visit, discovered the language amongst a remote hill tribe. At first they thought it was a dialect of another local language but analysis showed that it was sufficiently distinct to be considered a new language. " We were finding something that was making its exit, " said Gregory Anderson of the Living Tongues Institute in Oregon, one of the three linguists who made the discovery. They found that few of the tribe members under the age of 20 spoke the language. If " we had waited 10 years to make the trip, we might not have come close to the number of speakers we found. " The language they discovered in the Koro region of the state belongs to the Tibetan and Burmese family of languages. This family comprises around 400 languages and around 150 Tibeto-Burman languages are found in India. The researchers discovered the Koro language while studying two poorly known languages — Aka and Miji — which are spoken in one small region of the state. The researchers think the newly discovered Koro language in this region may be endangered. Only about 800 elder speakers were found and the language is not written, Anderson says. Although the Koro speakers live in remote hillsides, it is unclear how the language came about amongst the surrounding 10,000 person Aka tribe. But the researchers insist that Koro is quite distinct from Aka, with a quite different inventory of sounds and a different grammar construction. " Koro could hardly sound more different from Aka, " says linguist K. David Harrison. " They sound as different as English and Japanese. " What has caused great curiosity is the insistence that there is no difference between the Koro and Aka speakers, the researchers note. The coexistence of separate languages between two integrated groups that don't acknowledge an …