This is rather instructive. It shows us that a new language can
coalesce and develop unique aspects form several other sources which
pretty well describes the natural state of preliterate language
environment. It even happened recently as in our lifetimes.
We live today in a world in which the internet is standardizing a
short list of national languages as well as establishing English as
the most common second language and the primary language for internet
communication.
That a new language could still emerge is of course unexpected and
surprising.
New language
discovered in northern Australia
JUNE 20, 2013
Scientists have
discovered a new language in northern Australia which contains rare
grammatical innovations and a unique combination of elements from
other languages.
The language, now
known as Light Warlpiri, is spoken by approximately 300 people in a
remote desert community about 644 kilometres from Katherine, a town
located in Australia’s Northern Territory, said Carmel O’Shannessy,
a professor in the department of linguistics at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Light Warlpiri is
known as a “mixed language,” because it blends elements from
multiple languages: Traditional Warlpiri, which is spoken by about
6,000 people in indigenous communities scattered throughout the
Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory; Kriol, an English-based
Creole language spoken in various regions of Australia; and English.
“The striking thing
about Light Warlpiri is that most of the verbs come from English or
Kriol, but most of the other grammatical elements in the sentence
come from Warlpiri,” O’Shannessy told LiveScience.
In English, the order
of words in a sentence generally indicates the grammatical
relationship between the various entities. For example, in the
sentence “Mary saw Jim,” it is understood that Mary is the one
doing the seeing, because her name precedes the verb.
In the Warlpiri
language, however, words can be placed in any order, and grammatical
interpretations are based on suffixes that are attached to the nouns,
O’Shannessy explained.
“In Light Warlpiri,
you have one part of the language that mostly comes from English and
Kriol, but the other grammatical part, the suffixing, comes from
Warlpiri,” O’Shannessy said.
Another distinction of
the newfound language is a word form that refers to both the present
and past time, but not the future. For example, in English, “I’m”
refers to “I” in the present tense, but Light Warlpiri speakers
created a new form, such as “yu-m,” which means “you” in the
present and past time, but not the future.
“That structure
doesn’t exist in any of the languages that this new code came from,
which is one of the reasons we see this as a separate linguistic
system, even though it comes from other languages that already
exist,” she explained.
O’Shannessy
discovered Light Warlpiri when she began working in a school in the
Northern Territory where traditional Warlpiri was being taught to
children. She noticed that some of the students appeared to switch
between several languages in conversation.
O’Shannessy thinks
Light Warlpiri likely emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.
The study was
published in the journal Language.
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