KORO: India’s Hidden Language

Although hard to believe, researchers are still able to discover new languages that only a few hundreds of people speak. Last year, Gregory Anderson, director and researcher for the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages unveiled a new language called Koro that belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family. Koro was discovered by the team lead by Anderson in a remote northeastern region of India in 2008.

Enrique Iglesias – sticking to his Spanish roots

Spanish superstar Enrique Iglesias has steadily become one of music world’s top-selling artists, and has gained a reputation not just for his extraordinary musical ability, but also for his consistent incorporation of the Spanish language into his lyrics.

Born in Madrid, Spain as the youngest child of well-known Latin singer Julio Iglesias, Enrique was essentially raised in the United States, and educated in English. However, unlike many young immigrants who often unconsciously replace one mother tongue language for another, Enrique maintained a strong link to his Spanish ancestry.

Using the language often within his early musical work, this decision paid off in more ways than one. His debut album, entitled ‘Enrique Iglesias’, performed exceptionally well, and record sales were astronomically high for an album recorded in a language other than English. This success has followed the singer throughout his career, and Enrique Iglesias is now one of the biggest sellers of Spanish language albums in history of music. He has also maintained a fiercely loyal Spanish fan-base that has allowed him to hold the record on Billboard’s ‘Hot Latin Tracks’ for producing the most number one singles (Spanish-language). In addition, he is the recipient of 11 Billboard Latin Music Awards, essentially positioning him as the king of Latin pop music.

South Africa: Dialects of identity

By: Samantha Cook

In a world where linguistic communities and cultures are part of a constant cycle of evolution, language is never a static concept but rather a constant revision of itself as it travels through different regions, societies and time periods.

As a result, the term ‘dialect’ has become vitally important in the description of the language variants that are a by-product of this evolutionary cycle. Despite their similar connotations, ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ are exceedingly different concepts. ‘Language’ is fundamentally a system of words, their behaviors and their collectively-understood meanings, and is often defined by national and cultural borders (e.g.: Spanish, Chinese and Japanese). ‘Dialect’ rather refers to a state of mutual intelligibility, whereby two speakers are able to understand each other, but are not necessarily adhering to the same language system and grammatical rules. Therefore, whilst understanding is not usually possible between speakers of different languages, it is entirely possible between speakers of the same language, but different dialects.

The Difference Between Language and Dialect: The Philippines’ Illustration

In linguistic perspective, there really is no clear-cut distinction between language and dialect. Most experts say the terms “dialect” and “language” are very much influenced politically and socially. Institutions decide on which language is declared national, while society based on regional affiliations also claims dialect variation as languages in their own right.

In the Philippine’s case, Filipino is the national language. However, a lot of people in different regions within the country also think that their “dialects” are different languages as well.

South Africa, the birthplace of modern human language

An interesting, albeit controversial Science magazine article by Quentin Atkinson, a researcher of the University of Auckland in New Zealand asserted that moderm human languages originated from Southern Africa. And by studying the phonemes (the smallest and barest sound component of languages) of 504 languages throughout the world, and applying statistical method in identifying patterns, Dr. Atkinson concluded that the farther humans move from South Africa, the lesser phonemes there are on the languages.

Dr. Atkinson's surmised, "This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages." Thus, it follows the same pattern as genetic diversity which implies language is at least 50,000 years old, relative to the migration of modern humans from Africa.

The New York Times further states, "The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa" and added, "that languages increases with the number of people who speak it. This gave him the idea that phoneme diversity would increase as a population grew, but would fall again when a small group split off and migrated away from the parent group". So as the modern humans move from Africa, language diversity follow suit.

This study of Dr. Atkinson's instigated another source of debate. Many linguists are doubtful, especially to what it insinuates - that human languages arose only once, though can't be proven because the evolution of languages is so fast, making it considerably difficult to retrace.

Whether or not the claims of Dr. Atkinson is correct, the possible benefit of mathematical methodology in understanding language evolution should not be undermined.