Residents of a village in the north of the Malaysian Peninsula communicate with each other in a previously unknown language from the Austro-Asian language family, which has no analogues to the words "buy" and "sell", say Swedish scientists in an article published in the journal Linguistic Typology.
“This language is not spoken by the representatives of some unknown tribe of hunter-gatherers living in the deep jungle, as one might expect, but by the inhabitants of one of the Malay villages, which used to be often visited by anthropologists. They did not notice their main feature, which we, linguists, managed to do,”says Niclas Burenhult from Lund University (Sweden).
According to current estimates of linguists, today there are about six or seven thousand languages on Earth, spoken by peoples from all over the world. Only 6% of them are widely spoken - they are spoken by over a million people, and the 10 most spoken languages account for about 40% of the world's population.
The remaining 94% of languages, according to linguists, are threatened with extinction in the near future due to the spread of Western mass culture and globalization. Today, UNESCO and many other international organizations are trying to develop measures to save the heritage of these languages and those cultures to which they belong.
One of the first victims of this process may be the Jedek, the language discovered by Burenhult and his colleagues in the Malaysian village of Sungai Rual, located in the state of Kelantan in the north of the country. Three hundred of its inhabitants, as scientists note, belong to the number of hunter-gatherers "stuck" in the primitive communal system, and anthropologists have been observing their life for more than half a century.
Despite the great interest in Sungai Rual, as Burenhult notes, anthropologists did not notice that their friends did not speak one of the already known languages of the Aslian group, widespread among the hunter-gatherer tribes of Southeast Asia, but a completely new and unknown to science dialect …
About this, according to the Swedish linguist, scientists learned only five years ago, when his team conducted a kind of "census" of the languages of the Aslian group, studying all its speakers living in the north of the Malaysian Peninsula, in Malaysia and Thailand.
“When we started talking to the villagers in the Jahai language, we suddenly realized that most of the villagers speak a completely different dialect. They used words, phonemes and grammatical structures that were absent in the Jahai. Some of these words were similar to expressions from other Aslian languages, whose speakers live in very distant parts of the peninsula,”added Janne Yager, one of Burenhult's colleagues.
Promotional video:
Jedek, according to her, is interesting in that there are no expressions associated with buying and selling, private property, courts, crimes and other "products" of civilization. Its disappearance, Burenhult believes, will make humanity more monotonous and less culturally rich.